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Failing Fictions: The Conflicting and Shifting Social Emphases of Kate Chopin's "Local Color" Stories
Southern Quarterly, Winter 2004 by Holtman, Janet
In the short story "A Very Fine Fiddle" readers are introduced to a situation that appears repeatedly in Bayou Folk: a young Cajun female character exerts agency in opposition to a lower-class male character in an attempt to make herself and her poverty-stricken family more comfortable and socially respectable. But the agency is problematic, and the results of her attempt are mixed. Like Lolotte, the protagonist of "A Rude Awakening," the main character Fifine must pick up the slack for an easygoing laggard of a Cajun father, who cannot provide for his children. And, like Lolotte, her struggle is difficult, if brief. Brown claims that such heroines' rebellion does not "evoke inter-class tensions and conflicts within the text and in the reader as does the defiance of Edna Pontellier" (120). However, I would argue that Chopin's presentation of these endeavors does, at times, evoke such tensions, though their significance is, perhaps, not obvious because of its mixed nature. By this, I mean that gender struggles, clearly present in the texts, are complicated by more immediate class and race issues, which, far from being meaningless or sterile, actually address issues of social force at least as directly, though perhaps not as clearly, as does The Awakening and demonstrate Chopin's tense and problematic relationship to late nineteenth-century discourses of class and race. The somewhat negative portrayal of poor white characters as, at times, lazy and distrustful is evidence of their influence in spite of the fact that Chopin exhibits a good deal of empathy, particularly with the female characters.5 Regardless of the embedded negative discourses, then, the empathy is present, and its presence exerts a complicated and complicating force on the characters and their actions.
In "A Very Fine Fiddle" the protagonist, Finne, is a lower-class Cajun girl who is described as the "lynx-eyed" and "shabby" daughter of a poor white, but who is also portrayed as righteously indignant about her position in the social body and likewise determined to do something about it. The story takes place at the point at which Fifine recognizes the potential for bettering her family's situation. Interestingly, the opportunity to come to this realization is presented to her through the very symbol of her father's "poor white" identity, the fiddle upon which he plays to drown out his "conscience" and the cries of his hungry children (Bayou Folk 53). The fiddle, he tells his daughter when she threatens to smash it, is a very old one, given to him by an Italian who claimed that it was "one part my life -w'at goin' live w'en I be dead" (53). Nevertheless, Fifine, seeing an opportunity to eliminate the hated instrument and to make some money at the same time, steals away with the violin to the nearby plantation house, where she takes up the position of hawker on the steps of the veranda. Her alien presence there is noticed, at first with humor, then with genuine interest: "It was very funny to have a shabby little girl sitting there wanting to sell a fiddle and the child was soon surrounded. The lustreless instrument was brought forth and examined, first with amusement, but soon very seriously . . ." (53). The men at the plantation carry the fiddle into the house, and when they return, they purchase it from Fifine, exchanging for it a fiddle "twice as beautiful as the one she had brought, and a roll of money besides" (54). The old Italian violin's value is never specified, but judging from the reaction of three of the men at the plantation gathering, all of whom are identified humorously by their odd hairstyles as musicians-even maestros-it might be a Stradivarius. In any event, the men are clearly in possession of cultural capital that allows them to identify a valuable master violin and to wrest it easily from the hands of the lower-class family into whose possession it has fallen. When Fifine returns home with the new violin, her father plays it once and says, "It's jis like you say, Fifine. . . . It's one fine fiddle; an' like you say, it shine' like satin. But some way or udder, 'tain de same. Yair, Fifine, take it-put it 'side. I b'lieve, me, I ain' goin' play de fiddle no mo'" (54).
