Kate Chopin: Irony and the Inner Life

Kate Chopin was born Katherine O’Flaherty in St. Louis, Missouri, on February 8, 1850. Her father, Thomas O’Flaherty, was a businessman who had come to America from Galway, Ireland. Her mother, Eliza Faris, came from the city’s French community. Kate’s father died while she was still a girl, and she grew up in a house of three generations of widowed women: her mother, her grandmother and her great-grandmother, who taught her French, music and history. She was no relation to the composer Frédéric Chopin; the name came from her husband.

For half a century after her death, she was nearly forgotten. Then critics and readers rediscovered her, and that story is told below. Her old house in Cloutierville, later a museum and a National Historic Landmark, burned down on October 1, 2008.

In the 1890s Chopin was read as a local color writer, like Bret Harte in California. Britannica calls her “an interpreter of New Orleans culture” who wrote about “the Creole and Cajun people she had observed.” A few words help:

• Creole. In Louisiana the word first meant someone born in the colony, as opposed to someone who came from France or Spain. It is not a racial label: people of European, African and mixed ancestry have all called themselves Louisiana Creoles. Many spoke French, as the families in “Désirée’s Baby” do.
• Cajun. Cajuns descend from French-speaking Acadians who were forced out of eastern Canada in the 1700s and settled in Louisiana. Chopin’s book title A Night in Acadie points to them.
• Natchitoches Parish. In Louisiana a parish is what other states call a county. Natchitoches and the villages and rivers around it turn up again and again in the stories of Bayou Folk.

Chopin’s reviewers praised her dialect and scenery, and the Wikipedia article on her says her literary qualities were “largely overlooked.” She herself admired the French writer Guy de Maupassant. Of his stories she wrote, “Here was life, not fiction.” He had, she said, “entered into himself and looked out upon life through his own being and with his own eyes.” That is what she tried to do. Notice that “The Story of an Hour” never names its town at all. The place that matters is a room inside one woman’s mind.

Summary. “Knowing that Mrs. Mallard was afflicted with a heart trouble, great care was taken to break to her as gently as possible the news of her husband’s death.” Her sister Josephine tells her “in broken sentences; veiled hints that revealed in half concealing.” Her husband’s friend Richards was at the newspaper office when word came of a “railroad disaster,” with Brently Mallard’s name at the top of the list of the dead. He checked it “by a second telegram” before coming.

Mrs. Mallard weeps “with sudden, wild abandonment” in her sister’s arms. Then she goes up to her room alone. “There stood, facing the open window, a comfortable, roomy armchair.” She sinks into it. Outside she sees “the tops of trees that were all aquiver with the new spring life.” “The delicious breath of rain was in the air.” A peddler is calling his wares, someone is singing, and “countless sparrows were twittering in the eaves.” There are “patches of blue sky showing here and there through the clouds.”

Something is “coming to her,” and she waits for it, “fearfully.” She tries to “beat it back with her will,” and fails. A word escapes her lips: “free, free, free!” She knows she will weep again when she sees his body, and “the face that had never looked save with love upon her.” But she sees ahead “a long procession of years to come that would belong to her absolutely.” “There would be no one to live for her during those coming years; she would live for herself.” “And yet she had loved him—sometimes. Often she had not.” “Free! Body and soul free!” she whispers.

Josephine kneels at the closed door, begging through the keyhole: “Louise, open the door!” But Louise is “drinking in a very elixir of life through that open window.” She dreams of “Spring days, and summer days, and all sorts of days that would be her own.” “It was only yesterday she had thought with a shudder that life might be long.”

At last she opens the door and comes down the stairs with her sister, carrying herself “unwittingly like a goddess of Victory.” Then someone opens the front door with a latchkey. It is Brently Mallard, “a little travel-stained, composedly carrying his grip-sack and umbrella.” He had been far from the accident and did not know there had been one. Josephine screams; Richards moves to block his wife’s view of him. “But Richards was too late.” “When the doctors came they said she had died of heart disease—of the joy that kills.”

Summary. Years ago, Monsieur Valmondé found a toddler “lying asleep in the shadow of the big stone pillar” at the gate of his plantation. No one knew where she came from. Madame Valmondé, who had no children, decided that Désirée had been “sent to her by a beneficent Providence.” Désirée grew up “beautiful and gentle, affectionate and sincere,—the idol of Valmondé.”

Eighteen years later, Armand Aubigny, the master of a nearby plantation, sees her by the same pillar and falls in love “as if struck by a pistol shot.” Monsieur Valmondé reminds him of “the girl’s obscure origin.” Armand “did not care.” “What did it matter about a name when he could give her one of the oldest and proudest in Louisiana?” They marry.

Armand’s plantation is called L’Abri, French for “the shelter.” It is a gloomy place. Its roof comes down “steep and black like a cowl,” and its oaks shadow it “like a pall.” Armand is a harsh master. When Madame Valmondé visits her daughter and new grandson, she stares at the baby and cries, “This is not the baby!” Désirée laughs; she thinks her mother means how big he has grown. She says Armand has been gentler since the baby was born and has not punished any of the enslaved workers. “Oh, mamma, I’m so happy; it frightens me.”

When the baby is about three months old, something changes. There is “an air of mystery” among the enslaved people, neighbors make strange visits, and Armand turns cold to his wife and cruel to the people he enslaves. One afternoon Désirée looks from her baby to an enslaved boy fanning him, and back again, and she understands what others have been whispering. She begs Armand to tell her what it means. He answers, “that the child is not white; it means that you are not white.” She protests that her skin is fair: “Look at my hand; whiter than yours, Armand.”

She writes to her mother: “My mother, they tell me I am not white.” The reply is short and full of love: “Come home to Valmondé; back to your mother who loves you. Come with your child.” Désirée asks Armand if he wants her to go. “Yes, I want you to go.” She takes her baby and walks away, not down the road to Valmondé but across a field, in a thin white dress and slippers. “She disappeared among the reeds and willows that grew thick along the banks of the deep, sluggish bayou; and she did not come back again.”

Weeks later Armand has a great bonfire built in his yard. Onto it go a “graceful cradle of willow,” the baby’s clothes, Désirée’s silk gowns, and finally “a tiny bundle of letters” she wrote to him before they married. In the drawer he finds part of “an old letter from his mother to his father.” He reads it. His mother thanks God that “our dear Armand will never know that his mother, who adores him, belongs to the race that is cursed with the brand of slavery.”

“Désirée’s Baby” is a story about slavery and race, written by a white author in 1892 about Louisiana before the Civil War. It can be painful to read and discuss. These notes may help.

• The world of the story. Slavery was legal, and Armand owns the people who work his fields and his house. Under the law, a child born to an enslaved mother was enslaved, whoever the father was. A person with any known African ancestry could be treated as Black. The story’s whole crisis rests on that rule.
• The words. The narrator uses the racial terms of Chopin’s day. One is “quadroon,” which meant a person with one Black grandparent. Labels like this were sometimes written into law. The narrator also uses an outdated word for Black people. In our summary we say “enslaved people” instead.
• The people at the edges. Zandrine, the nurse; La Blanche and her children; Négrillon; the workers picking cotton in the October fields. The story names them but never lets us into their thoughts, and Armand’s moods fall hardest on them. Ask what the story shows about their lives and what it leaves unsaid.
• What the irony exposes. Armand believes that race is something you can see and that it decides a person’s worth. The ending shows him wrong on both counts: the man who prided himself on his “oldest and proudest” name had African ancestry all along, and no one could tell. The story asks readers to see that the color line was made by people, and that it caused terrible cruelty.
• When Chopin wrote it. Slavery had ended almost thirty years before, but in the 1890s Louisiana was passing laws to separate Black and white citizens, and its 1898 constitution took the vote away from most Black voters. Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), the Supreme Court case that upheld segregation, began with a challenge by New Orleans Creole activists. Chopin’s first readers were living through these questions.

In class, speak about the characters and the system, not about classmates. It is fine to say a passage is hard to read. Quote the story’s words only when you need them as evidence.

In April 1899 the Chicago firm Herbert S. Stone & Company published Chopin’s second novel, The Awakening. Its working title was A Solitary Soul. Edna Pontellier, a wife and mother from New Orleans, spends a summer on Grand Isle on the Gulf coast. She learns to swim, falls in love with a younger man, paints, and moves into a small house of her own. In the end she swims out alone into the Gulf and does not return.

Many reviewers were shocked. Wikipedia’s article on the novel quotes some of them:

• The St. Louis Republic called it “poison” and “too strong a drink for moral babes.”
• The Nation called Chopin “one more clever writer gone wrong.”
• The Dial called it a “poignant spiritual tragedy” but “not altogether wholesome in its tendencies.”
• The Congregationalist called it “a brilliant piece of writing” and added, “We cannot commend it.”
• The young Willa Cather, reviewing it in Pittsburgh, compared it to Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary.

The biographer Emily Toth found that many women in St. Louis praised the book even while male critics attacked it. Chopin answered the critics with a joke: “I never dreamt of Mrs. Pontellier making such a mess of things and working out her own damnation as she did.” Her next book of stories, A Vocation and a Voice, was cancelled by the publisher for reasons that are still unclear; it did not appear as a book until 1991.

You may read that The Awakening was banned. Chopin’s biographer Emily Toth looked for evidence of a ban in St. Louis and found none; library records that marked copies “condemned” meant worn-out copies. In 1902 the public library in Evanston, Illinois, did take it off its open shelves. The safe statement is that it was widely condemned, kept out of some libraries, and then fell out of print for decades.

After her death Chopin was largely forgotten, though a few stories, especially “Désirée’s Baby,” stayed in print in anthologies. Sources date the revival differently. Britannica says the novel was “rediscovered in the 1950s,” and KateChopin.org says that by the 1950s some scholars saw its worth; the French scholar Cyrille Arnavon translated it in 1952. In 1962 the critic Edmund Wilson wrote about her in Patriotic Gore. Wider fame came after 1969, when the Norwegian scholar Per Seyersted published The Complete Works of Kate Chopin and a biography of her. In 1972 the novelist Linda Wolfe praised The Awakening in The New York Times, and a mass-market paperback soon followed. Today it is widely taught as a classic of American fiction.

• Kate Chopin, “The Story of an Hour,” text from Vogue, December 6, 1894, at Wikisource (en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Story_of_an_Hour).
• Kate Chopin, “Désirée’s Baby,” in The Awakening, and Selected Short Stories, Project Gutenberg eBook #160 (gutenberg.org/ebooks/160), checked against Bayou Folk, Project Gutenberg eBook #46650 (gutenberg.org/ebooks/46650).
• Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Kate Chopin” (life dates, the novel “rediscovered in the 1950s,” “an interpreter of New Orleans culture,” Creole and Cajun subjects, At Fault, the local-colour movement, the anthologized “Désirée’s Baby”).
• KateChopin.org (the Kate Chopin International Society’s site), “Kate Chopin biography” (birth on February 8, 1850, her parents, the 1870 marriage, six children, the 1879 move to Cloutierville, Oscar’s death in 1882, the move back to St. Louis, Dr. Kolbenheyer, the 1889 Post-Dispatch story, Bayou Folk, the 1902 Evanston library, A Vocation and a Voice cancelled for unknown reasons and published in 1991, her death on August 22, 1904, Arnavon, and Seyersted’s 1969 biography and Complete Works) and “The Awakening” (Emily Toth’s search for a St. Louis ban, the Evanston library in 1902, the 1952 French translation).
• Library of America, Story of the Week, “Fedora” (2017) (Toth’s findings on the ban: library copies marked “condemned” had been removed for wear).
• Emily Toth, Unveiling Kate Chopin (University Press of Mississippi, 1999), and Per Seyersted, Kate Chopin: A Critical Biography (Louisiana State University Press, 1969), the two main biographies, as summarized on KateChopin.org.
• Wikipedia, “Kate Chopin” (birth, parents and childhood, Sacred Heart, marriage on June 8, 1870, six children, the 1879 move to Cloutierville, the $42,000 debt, the return to St. Louis and Dr. Kolbenheyer, the Post-Dispatch and “A Point at Issue!,” the magazines and Bayou Folk, Maupassant, Chopin’s reply to her critics, her death and burial, the rediscovery by Wilson, Seyersted and Wolfe, the 2008 fire), “The Story of an Hour” (written April 19, 1894; Vogue, December 6, 1894, as “The Dream of an Hour”), “Désirée’s Baby” (Vogue, January 14, 1893, as “The Father of Désirée’s Baby”), “The Awakening” (publisher and date, working title, the 1899 reviews, Willa Cather, Emily Toth, the cancelled book), “Louisiana Creole people” (the meaning of Creole, the Separate Car Act and Plessy v. Ferguson), “Disfranchisement after the Reconstruction era” (Louisiana’s 1898 constitution; Black voters on the state’s rolls fell from 130,334 in 1896 to 5,320 by 1900) and “Quadroon” (the meaning of the term and its use in law).
• Summaries are our own paraphrases. Every quotation from the stories was checked against the Wikisource and Project Gutenberg texts above. Quotations from 1899 reviews and from Chopin’s letters and essays are as quoted in the Wikipedia articles above.
• Art: the open window and letters in the drawer illustrations and the preview image are original artwork made for Jugami.