Failing Fictions: The Conflicting and Shifting Social Emphases of Kate Chopin's "Local Color" Stories

Holtman, Janet

IN "UNLINKING RACE AND GENDER: The Awakening as a Southern Novel," Barbara Ewell points out the importance to Chopin criticism of an understanding of Southern ideology and its particular system of hierarchies: "Chopin's proposed interrogation of gender roles implicates a complex web of southern identity, one whose designs on women could not easily-if at all-be detached from notions of race and class" (31). Joining Ewell with similar observations is Michele Birnbaum, who also takes issue with past critical efforts that have privileged the sovereignty of white middle-class female selfhood without questioning how such a self came to be constructed in opposition to racial, class, and cultural Others (302-03). While Ewell and Birnbaum both show an interest in determining how Southern ideology takes part in the formation of middle-class white female identity, and in how this operation necessarily involves placing such identity in opposition to that of blacks and lower-class whites, both authors, like the critics with whose work they take issue, focus their critical gaze on Chopin's novel The Awakening, in which race and class issues are present only on the furthest horizon.

This is not to say that such critical operations are not of great importance, nor is it to say that because race and class are not often overtly present in the text that they do not maintain a crucial formative function; as Toni Morrison points out: "Certain absences are so stressed, so ornate, so planned, they call attention to themselves, arrest us with intentionality and purpose . . . " (qtd. in Birnbaum 316). Birnbaum's argument demonstrates well that notions of race are of great importance to The Awakening. But it does seem that if one wishes to gain insights into the ways in which the interwoven Southern discourses of race and class provoked and influenced Chopin's fiction, one might do well to examine more closely her "local color"1 short stories in Bayou Folk and A Night in Acadie, in which lower-class white Acadian characters along with black characters, drawn with varying degrees of complexity and detail, take center stage. This essay will focus on the more numerous and foregrounded Cajun characters and their relationships to other social groups, but a similar study focusing more on the less frequently appearing black characters could be an important avenue for future study.

Before examining the stories, however, it seems necessary to take Barbara Ewell's admonition seriously and note the traditional place of the Cajuns in the Louisiana social structure. Michele Birnbaum states:

Within the codified hierarchies of race and class in post-Reconstruction Louisiana, Acadians were considered "lesser" whites. Their lower class status and rural lifestyle set them apart economically, ethnically, and linguistically from Creole society; in Chopin's fiction, they are often represented as both primitive and passionate. (311)

Such a description will sound familiar to anyone accustomed to researching Southern class structures. "Primitive" or "lesser" whites, often referred to as "poor whites," or, more derogatorily, as "poor white trash" in both the antebellum and postbellum South, occupied a contradictory and frequently misunderstood social position, one that was often figured in opposition to both blacks and upper-class whites.2 While the Cajuns were a separate and distinct group in Louisiana, and not simply to be conflated with other groups of "poor whites," especially as their class status was more variable, the notion of the "poor white," its significance and its general social valuation, is still a useful one to keep in mind when considering the Southern social body and Chopin's short fiction. It is with such a marginalized white identity in mind, and arguing along the lines of ideology critique, that critic Duane Carr has sketched out what he believes is a fairly simplistic and conventional portrayal of Cajuns in Chopin's work, one that takes part in a continuation of the discourse of "poor whites": "Chopin seems to look upon this group of disadvantaged whites rather condescendingly as simple folk . . ." (53). However, such a judgment fails to account fully for the complexity of Chopin's depictions of Acadians, a complexity that reveals more than one discursive strain at work.

In Chopin's short fiction, Acadians appear often as a sort of penultimate white class, with only the poorest of their own group sharing with disreputable outsiders, such as the "so-called 'Texan'" (Bayou Folk 45) of In Sabine, the very lowest echelon of class. They are both separate from and connected with the standard presentations of "poor white trash," often appearing in danger of slipping from the realm of working-class respectability or sympathetic poverty into "white trash" degradation, which almost always involves the standard negative traits of unapologetic indolence or criminality and, sometimes, a nearly equal footing with blacks. Of course, they may also appear as potentially capable of rising socially, though Chopin almost never presents such a rise as easily attainable or without certain consequences. And so, this site in Chopin's "local color" fiction, a node of contradictory social forces where a rise in social standing is often complicated by a loss and where essential qualities and social rank do not always reflect one another with perfect agreement, seems both an interesting and useful point to take up a critical study.

However, one more preliminary interrogation must be made before proceeding, and that is an examination of the tendency of many critics to refer to the stories of Bayou Folk and A Night in Acadie somewhat dismissively as "local color," a definitional misstep with which critics like Marjorie Pryse and Judith Fetterly would no doubt take issue. Pryse defines regional writing as that which "features an empathic approach to regional characters that enfranchises their stories and cultural perceptions," and she distinguishes it from local color, "which represents regional life and regional characters as objects to be viewed from the perspective of the non-regional, often urban Eastern reader, and frequently offered for that reader's entertainment" (48). Carl Wade, who conflates the terms "local color" and "regional," agrees with past scholars who see regional writing as limited and bound by "special circumstances" (92). Unfortunately, Wade fails to give account of the fact that the "special circumstances" these texts are supposedly unable to "transcend" are the localized social forces, along with broader discourses, of race and class. Citing James Justus, Wade makes clear his notions regarding just what characteristics limit regional fiction and just why it is that The Awakeningis not hindered by such attributes:

James H. Justus argues that Chopin's protagonist in The Awakening transcends the special circumstances of race, religion, and custom which American local colorists so rigorously delineated in the latter half of the nineteenth century (108), even though The Awakeningis distinguished by the qualities of craftsmanship that made the local stories so memorable: an economically evoked sense of place and a mastery of language (including dialect forms) which render firmly and precisely both character and setting, among other achievements. (Wade 92)

Of course, contrary to what Justus and Wade imply, that there can ever be a "transcendence" of race is a highly problematic assumption. And Birnbaum has established well that The Awakening, through its fetishization of whiteness and simultaneous reliance upon ideologies of color, is certainly not able to accomplish such an ascent. Nor, for that matter, can one assume a transcendence of class; the simple exclusion of dialect speakers from the annals of literature hardly accomplishes this task any more effectively than the exclusion of black characters "transcends" race. Even the most rudimentary definitions of ideology do not allow for such a wholesale dismissal of both the material conditions and the discourses that shape identities. And such a critical position, relying as it does on bourgeois aestheticism and rooted as it is in white middle-class normativity, cannot hope to maintain that such a seemingly apolitical move is not, in fact, profoundly political.

So what kind of power is at work in the labeling of writing by women writers like Mary Wilkins Freeman, Mary Austin, and Kate Chopin, as "local color?" According to Judith Fetterly, it is repressive, hegemonic. It involves the very set of forces that set up the traditional canon and enforced processes of literary valuation that centered on the experience of white middle-class males (879-81). However, even critics like Pamela Glenn Menke who, going along with Fetterly and Pryse, are willing to claim for The Awakening participation in protofeminist women's regional fiction are often willing to discount the importance of Chopin's "local color" fiction (usually her early novel At Fault and most of her short stories), because they see them as unable or unwilling to subvert gender norms specifically (Menke 10-11) or completely (Brown 120). This is true in spite of the fact that critics like Pearl Brown have argued that similar gender-based themes are apparent in the short stories and the novel3 (119). Thus emerges an apparent contradiction in current thought about Chopin's regionalist fiction: that the stories might be complex, empathic, and political and yet still be dismissed primarily because of their problematic treatment of gender issues.

And what is it that makes the depiction of gender struggle so problematic in these stories? I would argue that it is the complication posed by an overt, simultaneous, and complex entanglement with class and race issues. Feminist critics like Fetterly and Pryse have made great strides in proving that there is, in regionalism, an important, and previously ignored, form of women's realist fiction that often treats of rurality and poverty, but it would seem that they have not been completely able to address the fact that such fiction might begin to speak, at times, of issues of class rather than, alongside, or in conflict with those of gender. But just as it is difficult to separate the workings of gender from those of class, it is likewise difficult to isolate class from race, in Southern literature particularly. And Fetterly's model of the opposition of male repressive power and female subversion makes it difficult to explain how regional women's writing relies, at times, on popular discourses of class and race as much as it sets itself against them. So what can Chopin's work tell us about this interwoven mesh of discursive threads? And how might one describe Chopin's fiction as both resistant to and complicit with certain discourses of race and class superiority? As these questions indicate, I do not claim that Chopin's stories fit neatly into the paradigm of subversion established by Fetterly and Pryse, but it does seem that they offer something more interesting than the quaint exactitude and patronizing tourist fascination of traditionally defined "local color" fiction.

John A. Staunton has offered support for such a reading, arguing that Chopin's short fiction constitutes an ethical regionalist engagement with local realities, which, if it sometimes lapses into humorously quaint depictions, nevertheless attempts to maintain a resistance to simplified or stereotyped representations that would "permit a simple refashioning into our pet ideologies" (231). While Staunton's argument regarding Chopin's sustained attempt to engage responsibly with local realities is largely compelling, it unfortunately also relies upon an implicitly subject-centered notion of authorial intent that allows him to make claims perhaps too broad for Chopin's social awareness, for her "sophisticated and indeed implicitly ethical knowledge of the dangers inherent in claiming to offer an authentic or enduring relation of another person or community" (204). Staunton's evaluation of Chopin's ethical knowledge and intent comes, perhaps surprisingly, just after he acknowledges her well-known warning that "social problems, social environments, local color and the rest of it are not of themselves motives to insure the survival of a writer who employs them" (qtd. in Staunton 203). This statement both conflates "local color" with socially interested writing and, simultaneously, if implicitly, separates social issues from the aesthetic and formal. Thus, it appears simply to reenact a nineteenth-century bourgeois valuation of artistic merit, one that, for perhaps conspicuous sociopolitical reasons, was interested in obscuring the connections between art and power.

Chopin reveals the influence of such social discourses, and their humanist transcendental underpinnings, when she expresses that "true art" should capture "human existence in its subtle, complex, true meaning, stripped of the veil with which ethical and conventional standards have draped it" (qtd. in Staunton 203). But, as Staunton points out, Chopin's observations regarding local color fiction may be read more generously against the backdrop of her own empathic regionalist fiction as a concern with conventional local color's incapacity to render the authentic experience of a community, an ethical perspective that would involve a highly developed awareness of the entanglement of the social and the artistic. Unfortunately, Staunton himself manifests some of the problems with this generous interpretation through his fairly sanguine valuation of Chopin's ability to extricate her work from the ideological or discursive webs of her time4 and also through his somewhat optimistic assertions regarding the social efficacy of the formal strategies of Chopin's regional realism in depicting the "truth" of the local, particularly through narrative voice. Therefore, while Staunton's essay offers an important adjustment to Chopin criticism by applying a version of Fetterly and Pryse's ethical definition of regionalism to Chopin's short fiction, his work nevertheless leaves room for a study that examines her stories as manifestations of social discourses within which Chopin herself was unavoidably immersed. Such a study may open up a space for discussion of the ways in which both positive and negative forces of the late nineteenth-century Southern social body present themselves in Chopin's regional fiction.

Turning now to the fiction itself, I should acknowledge that A Night in Acadie, the latter of Chopin's short fiction collections, contains several stories, such as "Athenaise"and "A Night in Acadie," that have received some serious critical attention. This is because, generally, this collection is seen as proof of Chopin's progress in perfection of her art, with the earlier Bayou Folk regarded as inferior. Not coincidentally, perhaps, A Night in Acadie's Cajuns seem to be generally more well off economically and socially; class hardships are less visible, and they are less frequently depicted as "poor whites." This essay will discuss several of the stories from the earlier BayouFolk and then move on to A Night in Acadie, tracing the ways in which, as critics like Pearl Brown have claimed, these stories anticipate the themes that appear in The Awakening without achieving the thematic clarity of the novel. Along the way, this study will highlight some of the reasons why Chopin moved away from regional writing about the lives of the rural poor and toward writing her famous statement on middle-class female identity.

Certainly, women's resistance is, as Brown has claimed, a common theme in the short stories of both collections, which often feature a young female protagonist actively rebelling against an oppressive domestic situation. But the efficacy or significance of such rebellion is, if interesting, far from clear-cut. Brown claims that the reason for this is the submersion of the narrative of rebellion "within the same class or caste" (120). In other words, Chopin narrowly confines her female protagonists of lower class to a struggle within that class, and, thus, their struggle has no repercussions outside of their own social sphere. She claims that this is one way in which the heroines of the stories fall short of the heroine of The Awakening, who "introduces a disturbing element into the context of a highly ordered world . . ." (120). Brown posits a sort of "trickle-down" theory of subversion that allows Edna Pontellier to effect transformative tensions throughout the social body, the waves of disturbance moving down through the social order from the top. It is true that Chopin situates the struggles of her heroines within their own social class, but it is doubtful that such disturbance initiates force that only works in one direction. And while it is likely that Chopin's artistic vision is taxed much more heavily by the possibility of social force exerted from the bottom levels of society, it is also true that such tensions do exist in the short fiction, though most readers have, rightly, seen the "rebellion against conventions [as] tentative or ambivalent or incomplete" (Brown 120).

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).

Duane Carr reads the father's refusal to continue playing the new violin as a belated manifestation of shame at his previous neglect: "her father plays the instrument, decides 'it's one fine fiddle' but apparently now ashamed of his neglect, asks Fifine to put it away, vowing that he will never play it again" (54). But this is a somewhat dismissive (mis) reading of the passage, which seems to allow for far more discernment on the part of the father as well as far more sympathy on the part of both narrator and reader than such a reading would indicate. The new fiddle may be shiny, but "'tain de same," not because the father has suddenly developed a "conscience" because of the intervention of his daughter, but because the violin she has brought home is inferior (here it is important to note the significance of his playing the instrument before he puts it aside). Anyone who has seen, for instance, a Stradivarius under glass at a museum knows that any violin from a local music store is likely to be more visually appealing, colorful and shiny, but the battered and "lustreless" master violin, when played, will prove a vastly superior instrument. This, of course, creates the poignancy and irony of the child's selling her father's "fiddle" to the maestros at the plantation house, and it teaches the young readers6 of Chopin's story a valuable lesson about appearances and worth.

Chopin allows for the father's resigned awareness, not altogether developed perhaps, but present nonetheless, that he has been dispossessed of something valuable. And she further allows for this awareness to be passed, perhaps somewhat pathetically, to the well-meaning daughter, who must realize that, in order to make her family more comfortable and to exert her own agency, she has sold not just a violin, but a priceless part of her father's identity. Thus, Chopin presents to her youthful audience a simple Cajun man who has a degree of complexity as expressed by his musical ability and appreciation that may allow middle-class juvenile readers to empathize with his position. This is not to say that this character is not also, as Carr claims in his study of Southern stereotype, "innocent and natural, in need of guidance and sympathy" (53), but he is a more complex character than Carr is willing to credit. It is the complexity of the father's character, and its accompanying complication of the daughter's action, which clearly reveals class issues in conflict with gender issues: the magnitude of the father's loss at the hands of his cultural "superiors" at the plantation house problematizes the daughter's act of self-assertion, making it one of the "ambivalent" or "incomplete" acts of female rebellion that previous critics have noted.

There are, of course, stories intended for an adult readership in Bayou Folk in which the theme of female independence is complicated by class and race issues. In some of these tales, a female character's awareness of the possibility of social rise and/or fall leads her to take action. Her action may be marked and limited by her place in the social body, but it usually does involve some sort of inter-class conflict. This conflict may not be presented in such a way that the poor white male character is as sympathetically rendered as in "A Very Fine Fiddle," but in such cases, the female character usually gains a great deal in the way of both empathy and effectivity. In the story "In Sabine," a Creole man finds a former acquaintance, a once beautiful and vibrant Cajun woman of the middle class, married to a brutal, alcoholic "white trash"7 husband of the most stereotypically negative variety named "Bud." This undesirable is introduced to the reader with the note that, in addition to his liking for "Tike's Magnolia' and other brands" (of whiskey), he has certain "inborn propensities capable of wrecking unaided any ordinary existence" (45). Apparently, these "inborn propensities" are meant to explain why, among other things, this white man works a crop on shares with his black neighbor, Uncle Mortimer, whose rude cabin is "the counterpart" of his own (50). Such a racialized and negative depiction of the "white trash" male in this story may not offer the reader much opportunity to understand or sympathize with the realities of life as a sharecropper, but it does throw the positive and complex portrayal of the Cajun woman into relief. She is 'Tite Reine, "little queen," a former belle of the 'Cadian ball, whose love for this deceptive man has caused her fall into the lowest white class.

Clearly, Chopin is primarily interested in developing gender issues in this story, but the class and race issues that exist alongside are also abundantly clear. And the added presence of the genteel, but sharp-eyed, Creole traveler, Gregoire, seems meant to provide the catalyst by which 'Tite Reine may put into play her hopes and plans for escape from her domestic/lower-class prison. Chopin makes clear that 'Tite Reine, though she has wished to escape before, could not do so because she could not ride her husband's wild and vicious Texas pony. The Creole's "fine sleek horse" is the means by which she makes her escape, and Gregoire's theft of the husband's mustang while he lies in a drunken stupor accomplishes the coup de grace. Thus, the lever that allows the escape is the intervention of a higher-class male character. To some degree, then, there is an unfortunate, but clearly useful, simplification of class issues here that enables the effective agency of the female character.

Readers are presented with a simple contrast between the two male characters of different classes, who do, in fact, set the stage for the action. Gregoire is as sympathetic and gallant as Bud is brutish and cruel: "Gregoire loved women . . . the tones of their voices and the things they said" (48). In contrast, Bud goes around yelling things like, "Whur's my wife!" (51). But Chopin does not simply exchange one male controller for a better. 'Tite Reine does not run away with the elite white man but instead escapes back to her own parents, her own class. As Carr points out, "It is important that [Gregoire] does not take her with him but sends her back to her Acadian home" (55). Perhaps this is true, but it is also interesting that, in highlighting what he (rightly) sees as static class-governed behavior, Carr attributes agency to the male character, who "sends" 'Tite Reine home, rather than to 'Tite Reine herself, who uses the available opportunity of Gregoire's visit (and gentle horse) to make an escape for which she has been hoping for a long time. Clearly, it is the commingling of class and gender issues that causes the complication and incompletion of their work in terms of a counter-discourse to gendered norms and, particularly, to dominant discourses of class.

It is also interesting that Carr does not, as does Anna Shannon Elfenbein, discuss the importance of the role of Uncle Mortimer, the black character, in the story's presentation of the interactions of various types of social forces: "In 'In Sabine' (1894) . . . Chopin produced a remarkably unconventional picture of race relations by telling the story of a white woman's escape from her brutal husband with the collusion of a black man"8 (Elfenbein 118). Elfenbein's observation has merit. Not only do we find that the black sharecropper Uncle Mortimer chops wood so that 'Tite Reine will not have to do so, we also find that his axe has, on at least one occasion, been put to use actively to defend 'Tite Reine from her abusive husband (49). Also, Uncle Mortimer does not inform the snoring Bud right away that his wife has escaped, and he seems to take pleasure later in informing Bud of the fact that she has gone, and so has his only means of following her. Uncle Mortimer's gallantry is at least equal to Gregoire's, though his place in the social body is technically lower than Bud's, only because of his race. Chopin's sympathetic portrayal of the strong black male character in this story highlights tensions between poor whites and blacks, and also points to a degree of perceived injustice in the social order that would rank a brutal "white trash" man above a kindly black man.

But it should be noted here that it is not merely that this injustice is highlighted; rather, Uncle Mortimer is the very key to understanding the character of "Bud." It is through his presentation alongside Uncle Mortimer that readers are able to recognize him as the "white trash" character that he is. Chopin, then, taps into a standard Southern presentation of the lowest white class as both connected to and in competition with blacks. Bud's characterization is admittedly troubling in its negative simplicity-especially given the hint of biological determinism-but the range of power issues present in the story makes clear that Chopin's presentation of him as such was not solely based on glorification of middle or upper-class white male characters.

Of course, it must be acknowledged that there are stories in Bayou Folk that tend more simply to present upper-class whites as superior, the dignified arbiters of good behavior. In "A Rude Awakening," Mr. Duplan, the local plantation owner, acts as a sort of bourgeois savior to the lower-class white family of the indolent Sylveste, whose daughter Lolotte has become lost after attempting to better her family's situation by taking on her father's neglected task of driving Mr. Duplan's mules. After her accident with the wagon and mules, Mr. Duplan brings Lolotte home from the hospital where he has found her, cares for Sylveste's ailing son, and agrees to provide the chastened and regretful Sylveste with work, but not without a lecture regarding his future comportment as a head-of-household:

"And now, Sylveste," said Mr. Duplan, as he rose and started to walk the floor, with hands in his pockets, "listen to me. It will be a long time before Lolotte is strong again. Aunt Minty is going to look after things for you till the child is fully recovered. But what I want to say is this: I shall trust these children into your hands once more, and I want you never to forget again that you are their father-do you hear?-that you are a man!"

Old Sylveste stood with his hand in Lolotte's, who rubbed it lovingly against her cheek.

"By gracious! M'sieur Duplan," he answered, "w'en God want to he'p me, I 'm goen try my bes'!" (78) Sylveste, who had been "a type of indolent content and repose" before the loss of his daughter, receives this condescending admonition regarding "manliness" from his employer gratefully at the end of a story that apparently reinforces every known Southern social stereotype (75). The poor white family is poor because the father is lazy, the black characters steal poultry and lean "lazily" against doorjambs, and the upper-class whites are wise benefactors.

But, in spite of its being riddled through with common nineteenth-century Southern conceptualizations of class and race, and even gender, the story nevertheless manages to present a few counter-discursive strains, which may be read as part of an empathie regionalist impulse like that which Staunton describes. After all, the black characters are kind neighbors and strong allies, and the poor white father, unlike Bud, is appealing in his love for his family, if he is not exactly a complex character. But the most important counter-discourse here is undoubtedly the agency allowed the female characters and the importance accorded to any act of nurturing, regardless of its being contrary to social norms. Aunt Minty, the black female character in the story, appears as a sort of stock figure, but her theft of the chicken from the plantation to feed Sylveste's hungry children is the first act of a series in which the poverty-stricken children are gradually valued and nurtured. Likewise, Lolotte's act of self-assertion in attempting to take on her father's job may not have achieved the results she intended, but it is the catalyst by which she and her family become less racialized, more "like w'ite folks," in a new configuration that brings all of the social groups together in a cooperative arrangement for the good of the children (77). A social rise is accomplished, then, for the poor white characters in this story, but it is one which is only presented with reference to both the superior position of the upper-class white characters and the static lower social place of the black characters, whose position is reinforced at the end of the story in order for the de-racialization of the "white trash" Cajun family to become apparent. Unfortunately, then, Aunt Minty's exclamation that Lolotte looks "jis' like w'ite folks" at the plantation house simultaneously highlights Lolotte's rise and Aunt Minty's static position. In some of the Bayou Folk stories, then, reciprocal complications of gender, class, and race hobble the fiction's ability to provide effective or potent counter-discourses, though both the emphasis on female agency and women's values, along with the element of empathy, clearly remain.

Such observations are, of course, in no way meant to excuse or minimize the negative elements in portrayals of any social group. They merely serve to point out that, given the fact that the identities of authors arc constructed by the same social forces that appear in conflict in their fiction,10 Chopin's more or less successful, but still obvious, grappling with the construction of the social body in her short fiction should be given the same kind of serious critical attention as The Awakening. The movement from one to the other should be examined with an eye to what may have prompted her shift in focus, and in what ways this shift to a more successful fiction is itself problematic. This seems particularly important when it would seem that the dismissal of the short fiction (as "local color") in the past has occurred primarily because it deals more directly than The Awakening with certain types of social categories or forces: race and class.

Chopin's move away from the lives of the lower echelon of society begins to take place in A Night in Acadie. This collection still contains many Cajun characters, but their lives less frequently impinge upon the very lowest class of whites. These stories are filled with moderately successful 'Cadian farmers, like Cazeau of "Athenaise" or Telesphore of "A Night in Acadie," and relatively genteel 'Cadian women who are reminiscent of 'Tite Reine. At the same time, issues of gender seem to be emphasized more and more effectively (Athenaise is often read as a sort of precursor to The Awakening with its story of a woman's desertion of her husband). Of course, class issues are still present. In "A Night in Acadie," the reader is taken to one of many of Chopin's 'Cadian balls, where she watches the unfolding of the romantic intrigue among three characters, Telesphore, Zaida, and her lover Andre Pascal, who is presented as a lazy drunkard who gets the female protagonist to agree to marriage under false pretence. Zaida leads Telesphore away from the ball to a rendezvous with Andre, of whom the narrator says, "It was easy to imagine that, when sober, he might betray by some subtle grace of speech or manner, evidences of gentle blood" (188). Thus, Andre is a lazy, drunken scoundrel but a well-bred one (as revealed by his sobriety), and this class status is no doubt the means by which he has managed successfully to deceive the female protagonist. When Zaida discovers that he has been drinking, of course, she is no longer interested, and Telesphore must fight to protect her. Such a situation is reminiscent of many of the stories in both collections in which a 'Cadian girl falls romantically for a man from a higher social class, to ill effect. She tends to end up marrying a man from her own caste, which Chopin portrays as perhaps unfortunate but necessary. Such is the outcome of "A Night in Acadie," as Zaida ends up with Telesphore. We also see this in Bayou Folk in "At the 'Cadian Ball" and, as Elfenbein points out, in Chopin's unpublished piece "A Horse Story" (119). Nevertheless, based on the pattern we see in "In Sabine" one might expect the routed cad in this story to be another Bud and the hero to be a Creole.

But, in spite of the fact that Andre is no Bud, there is still a class-based pattern to be seen in the use of the connotations of drunkenness vs. sobriety: sobriety, the natural state, and not drunkenness, might betray Andre's "gentle blood." It would seem that Chopin's association of drunkenness and sobriety with social class valuations, then, remains fairly constant: drunkenness reveals inborn propensities in the poor white, while sobriety reveals more positive ones in the gentleman. Of course, the 'Cadian, Telesphore, acts every bit as gallantly as Gregoire in the earlier story (though he must stoop to brawling), and the man characterized as having "gentle blood" acts in nearly the same manner as his "white trash" counterpart by deceiving the 'Cadian belle into agreeing to a marriage that may or may not be legitimate. However, I would argue that the association of negative traits is easier for Chopin to accomplish in the case of the poor white male in the earlier story, whose connection with negative "inborn propensities" constitutes a glaring reliance upon late nineteenth-century discourses of class.

Along the lines of Duane Carr's earlier point regarding class stasis, the belle in "A Night in Acadie" could have avoided this ensnarement if she had stayed within her own class and married a respectable 'Cadian farmer like Cazeau of "Athenaise" in the first place. This would seem to point to a strain in Chopin's fiction that indicates that 'Cadian girls' prospects for fulfillment are closely tied to their ability to obtain respectable relationships within their own narrowly-defined social class. There is, admittedly, such a strain of thought in the stories, though there is also a strain of disapproval of the system that would so closely restrain women's choices. Certainly, in "The Storm," Chopin's unpublished sequel to "At the 'Cadian Ball," we see her revisiting the situation of Calixta, the sympathetically portrayed 'Cadian belle, who loses her Creole lover to a Creole woman. In the later story, Calixta is able successfully to consummate an adulterous relationship with the Creole man who had earlier deserted her. Here, Chopin's 'Cadian heroine displays an ability (albeit a limited one) to undermine class norms and simultaneously assert her sexuality: "Calixta and her Creole lover, Alcee, both married to other people, act on their illicit passion and consummate their love. Thus, the sequel acts out the rebellion forestalled in the earlier story" (Brown 130). Of course, some previous critics, like Brown, have noted that Calixta's rebellious behavior is perhaps only possible because of her "mixed blood," which allows an expression of sexuality deemed outside the bounds of white norms (130).

But, interestingly, concomitant with Calixta's sexual awakening, so similar to that of Edna Pontellier's, is a "whitening" of the character in the sequel that portrays it. Calixta, described emphatically in "At the 'Cadian Ball" as having "Spanish" blood which make her an ethnic outsider in her community, is repeatedly described in "The Storm" in terms of whiteness. She has a "white neck" and "white throat and whiter breasts" in addition to passion "like a white flame" housed in a body "as white as the couch she lay upon" (Complete Novels 928-29). Chopin allows the 'Cadian woman a successful act of subversion, but only along with a simultaneous stressing of her whiteness, a racial status that was not so clearly hers in the earlier story, where her Spanish blood and her racialized social equality with the lower-class "brown, good-natured Bobinot" is stressed (Bayou Folk 142). Chopin's work, then, both early and late, simultaneously reproduced, half-evoked, and set itself at odds with the various strains of social discourse of her day, but in ways that shifted with time. She apparently struggled to articulate themes of female self-assertion concurrently with themes of class and race conflict, and may be seen, in the later collection of stories, to be moving away from the difficulties of a lower-class fiction.

The pattern does seem to manifest itself fairly clearly, as Chopin moves away from overtly class-oriented fiction and toward more thematically gender-centered fiction, characterized by The Awakening. By placing her novel's heroine in a comfortable upper middle-class social bracket, Chopin was able to remove some of the impediments faced by her Cajun protagonists, freeing her character to explore more fully the questions raised by gender and sexuality. The clashing social forces of race and class that seemed to forestall, complicate, or minimize the agency of female characters in the early fiction are relegated to a less visible role in The Awakening, allowing Chopin to pursue her clarified exploration of (white) female selfhood. This is not altogether different from the sort of movement that Pearl Brown posits, although her assertion that Edna Pontellier's middle-class status allows her to effect, more than her lower-class counterparts, reactions of disturbance in contemporary readers because of her "defiance of the very conventions connected with various subcultures and subclasses" (132) seems unduly biased in favor of the political efficacy of bourgeois fiction. And it also allows the repetition of a dismissive move in terms of Chopin's short fiction. Keeping in mind these effects, one might ask "why would a piece of fiction focused on the life of a middle-class character necessarily suffuse the socius with more subversive force than one dealing with a lower-class character?" Brown says:

The stories are frequently more daring in the treatment of theme and more critical of cultural attitudes about women, but the cultural insularity of the characters and the uses Chopin makes of stereotypes and of narrative strategies forestalled for the two story collections the outraged reaction the novel endured. (132)

As critics like John A. Staunton have intimated, Chopin's depictions seldom rely solely on stereotypes, though male characters seem at greater risk of such portrayals. Fetterly and Pryse might take issue with Brown's statement about "cultural insularity," given their detailed and compelling examinations of the nature and role of women's regional fiction. They might also be able to offer explanations as to why society has been more able to control, categorize, and subdue both the interest in, and the effects of, fiction that could so easily be dismissed primarily by white male middle-class critics as "local color." But Pryse's definition of empathie writing does seem to be a bit stretched when applied to Chopin's portrayal of lower-class characters.

The influence of racist and classed discourses, which critics like Brown and Carr have examined in terms of stereotyping in Chopin's short stories, must be recognized; but I would argue that they should be considered in terms of the problematic treatment of competing social forces present in the stories and that they should be read with full acknowledgment of the complexity that does exist as well as the frequently high degree of empathy expressed toward female lower-class characters. Also, rather than continuing merely to celebrate Chopin's turn away from lower-class and racialized Others and toward a white middle-class fiction, perhaps it might be time to recognize the more regrettable dimensions of the fact that Chopin apparently had to do so in order to focus and complete her crystallized statement about white middle-class female identity. It may be that, finally, Chopin's inability to separate her characterizations of lower-class characters from negative discourses, and the stereotyped images embedded in them, halted her pursuit of a significant lower-class fiction. Nevertheless, in acknowledging that something has been lost as well as gained in Chopin's movement from less distinctly realized fictions that engage lower-class characters to the clear, fully developed story of Edna Pontellier, we share the concerns of critics like Ellen Peel, who, in her study of the fairly successful multi-themed short story "Desiree's Baby," expresses the goal of doing "justice" to Chopin's stories that "lie at the nexus of concerns of sex, race, and class" (57).

NOTES

1 References to Chopin's short stones as "local color" are myriad, including those in various mainstream encyclopedias, literary encyclopedias, journals and online articles. It will be necessary to return to this characterization when I discuss Judith Fetterly and Marjorie Pryse's (now well-known) distinction between "local color" and regional writing.

2 For a fuller definition and historical account of this subject position, see Bolton's Poor Whites of the Antebellum South. See also Wray's dissertation, "Not Quite White: Poor Rural Whites in the Southern United States," a particularly useful text for understanding racialization of poor whites.

3 Brown's argument is based partly on work by Joyce Duer and Helen Taylor.

4 While he clearly assumes the privileging of marginalized voices in regionalist fiction, Staunton does also acknowledge in a footnote that, in frequently privileging white women's voices, Chopin "reinscribes other hierarchies of race and class" (233).

5 Fetterly and Pryse also see empathy with Cajun male characters, whom, they claim, Chopin presents as "nurturing and maternal" ("Kate Chopin" 409).

6 In his introduction to the Penguin collection, Bernard Kosloski claims that this is one of the stories intended for juvenile readers in which Chopin "dwells on the way children cope with the harsh economic conditions so common in her world" (Kate Chopin xxiii).

7 I use the term "white trash" advisedly, in spite of an awareness of its strongly negative associations, to refer specifically to those characters situated in the most denigrated white social position.

8 Elfenbein's reading of Uncle Mortimer goes somewhat against Fetterly and Pryse's statement that black male characters appear but are "insignificant in Chopin's fiction" (409).

10 Here I am drawing upon, of course, not only those Marxist theoretical discourses that assert the socially constructed nature of identity through the workings of ideology, but also certain more extreme post-structuralist notions of subjectivity and its formation through the workings of complexes of discourses and practices, best articulated, perhaps, in the work of Michel Foucault. While this essay only partially relies upon a conception of post-structuralist subjectivity, it seems necessary to acknowledge the ways in which a fuller application of such theories could prove useful to an understanding of the workings of social force through Southern literary discourse.

WORKS CITED

Birnbaum, Michele. "'Alien Hands': Kate Chopin and the Colonization of Race." American Literature 66.2 (1994): 301-23.

Bolton, Charles C. Poor Whites of the Antebellum South: Tenants and Laborers in Central North Carolina and Northeast Mississippi. Durham: Duke UP, 1994.

Brown Pearl L. "Kate Chopin's Fiction: Order and Disorder in a Stratified Society." University of Mississippi Studies in English 9 (1991): 119-34.

Carr, Duane. A Qiiestion of Class: The Redneck Stereotype in Southern Fiction. Bowling Green: Bowling Green State U Popular P, 1996.

Chopin, Kate. Bayou Folk and A Night in Acadie. Ed. Bernard Koloski. New York: Penguin, 1999.

_____. Kate Chopin: The Complete Novels and Stories. Ed. Sandra M. Gilbert. New York: Library of America, 2002.

Elfenbein, Anna Shannon. Women on the Color Line: Evolving Stereotypes and the Writings of George Washington Cable, Grace King, Kate Chopin. Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 1989.

Ewell, Barbara. "Unlinking Race and Gender: The Awakenings a Southern Novel." Southern Quarterly 37.3-4 (1999): 30-37.

Fetterly, Judith. '"Not in the Least American': Nineteenth-century Literary Regionalism." College English 56.8 (1994): 877-95.

Menke, Pamela Glenn. "The Catalyst of Color and Women's Regional Writing: Al Fault, Pembroke and The Awakening." Southern Quarterly 37.3-4 (1999): 9-20.

Peel, Ellen. "Semiotic Subversion in 'Desiree's Baby.'" Louisiana Women Writers. Ed. Dorothy Brown and Barbara Ewell. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1992.

Pryse, Marjorie. "Reading Regionalism: The 'Difference' It Makes." Regionalism Reconsidered: New Approaches to the Field. Ed. David Jordan. New York: Garland, 1994.

Staunton, John A. "Kate Chopin's One Story': Casting a Shadowy Glance on the Ethics of Regionalism." Studies in American Fiction 28.2 (2000): 203-34.

Wade, Carl. "Conformity, Resistance, and the Search for Selfhood in Kate Chopin's The Awakening." The Southern Quarterly 37.2 (1999).

Wray, Matt. "Not Quite White: Poor Rural Whites in the Southern United States." Diss. U California Berkeley, 2000.

JANET HOLTMAN is a doctoral candidate in the English Department at Pennsylvania State University. Recently, her work has appeared in the journal Postmodern Culture. She is currently finishing her dissertation, an interdisciplinary project titled "'White Trash' Discourses: American Literature, History, Social Science and Poor White Subjectivity."

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