Complete Works of Kate Chopin

by Kate Chopin

  From: Yale Literary Magazine, April 1894. Page 365

  Bayou Folk

  Southern dialect stories are usually hard to understand, and if, as in some recent stories of this kind, the local “atmosphere” be wanting, they are generally uninteresting. Kate Chopin has been, fortunate in avoiding obscurity, and in preserving to a remarkable degree the perfume of the Southern night, the quiet, distinct noises of the forests, and the lazy, indolent life led by the negroes and creoles. The scene of most of the sketches, some of which have appeared before in magazines, are laid “in and out of old Natchitoches,” and in that portion of quaint New Orleans which lies about Canal Street. The first story in the volume,* which is the longest and also the best, tells of a “no-account creole” who gives up the girl he loves that she may marry the man she loves. Of course, all the originality in a story of this kind lies in the telling, and it is here that the authoress is so successful. The scene where the “no-account creole,” about to murder his rival, changes his mind, muttering: “He thought a creole knew how to love. Does he reckon he’s goin’ to learn a creole how to love?”, is very fine, and the character of Placide, the “no-account creole,” is throughout very touchingly developed. In Sabine is also excellent, though it is hardly more than a sketch, and it reminds one strongly of Bret Harte. All the stories are entertaining, and the majority are more than ordinarily charming in their simplicity. Some of the very short sketches are wonderfully touching, the best, perhaps, being A Very Fine Fiddle. There seems to be in all the stories a certain indefinable something beneath the surface, and this, together with the strangeness of the scene to most of us, renders the collection of stories a remarkably fascinating one.

  From: Their Day in Court, Percival Pollard, Neale Publishing Company, 1909, Pages 40-45

  Another lady who proved to us that dear Thackeray’s scruples no longer worried her sex was Kate Chopin. The book I have in mind was called “The Awakening.” Like many others that may be named in these pages of mine, it is doubtless utterly forgotten; but it would be illogical for me to proclaim that we had a deal to thank the ladies for, if I had not the documents at hand to prove it.

  Again this seemed a subject for the physician, not the novelist. So skilfully and so hardily does the book reveal the growth of animalism in a woman, that we feel as if we were attending a medical lecture. In the old days, — when men, mere men such as Balzac or Flaubert or Gautier, attempted this sort of dissection, — we were wont to sigh, and think what brutes they must be to suppose women made of this poor clay. Surely it was only the males who harbored thoughts fit only for the smoking-room; surely — but, Pouff! Kate Chopin dispelled those dreams; even had they really been possible with Amelie Rives, and “What Dreams May Come,” already in circulation.

  “The Awakening” asked us to believe that a young woman who had been several years married, and had borne children, had never, in all that time, been properly “awake.” It would be an arresting question for students of sleep-walking; but one must not venture down that bypath now. Her name was Edna Pontellier. She was married to a man who had Creole blood in him; yet the marrying, and the having children, and all the rest of it, had left her still slumbrous, still as innocent of her physical self, as the young girl who graduates in the early summer would have us believe she is. She was almost at the age that Balzac held so dangerous — almost she was the Woman of Thirty — yet she had not properly tasted the apple of knowledge. She had to wait until she met a young man who was not her husband, was destined to tarry until she was under the influence of a Southern moonlight and the whispers of the Gulf and many other passionate things, before there began in her the first faint flushings of desire. So, at any rate, Kate Chopin asked us to believe.

  The cynic was forced to observe that simply because a young woman showed interest in a man who was not her husband, especially at a fashionable watering-place, in a month when the blood was hottest, there was no need to argue the aforesaid fair female had lain coldly dormant all her life. There are women in the world quite as versatile as the butterfly, and a sprouting of the physical today need not mean that yesterday was all spiritual.

  However, taking Kate Chopin’s word for it that Edna had been asleep, her awakening was a most champagne-like performance. After she met Robert Lebrun the awakening stirred in her, to use a rough simile, after the manner of ferment in new wine. Robert would, I fancy, at any Northern summer resort have been sure of a lynching; for, after a trifling encounter with him, Edna became utterly unmanageable. She neglected her house; she tried to paint — always a bad sign, that, when women want to paint, or act, or sing, or write! — and the while she painted “there was “a subtle current of desire passing through her body, weakening her hold upon the brushes and making her eyes burn.”

  Does that not explain to you certain pictures you have seen? Now you know how the artist came to paint them just like that.

  All this, mind you, with Robert merely a reminiscence. If the mere memory of him made her weak, what must the touch of him have done? Fancy shrinks at so volcanic a scene. Ah, these sudden awakenings of women, of women who prefer the dead husband to the quick, of women who accept the croupier’s caresses while waiting for hubby to come up for the week-end, and of women who have been in a trance, though married! Especially the awakenings of women like Edna!

  We were asked to believe that Edna was devoid of coquetry; that she did not know the cheap delights of promiscuous conquests; though sometimes on the street glances from strange eyes lingered in her memory, disturbing her. Well, then those are the women to look out for — those women so easily disturbed by the unfamiliar eye. Those women do not seem to care, once they are awake, so much for the individual as for what he represents. Consider Edna. It was Robert who awoke her. But, when he went away, it was another who continued the arousal. Do you think Edna cared whether it was Robert or Arobin? Not a bit. Arobin’s kiss upon her hand acted on her like a narcotic, causing her to sleep “a languorous sleep, interwoven with vanishing dreams.” You see, she was something of a quick-change sleep-artist: first she slept; a look at Robert awakened her; Arobin’s kiss sent her off into dreamland again; a versatile somnambulist, this. Yet she must have been embarrassing; you could never have known just when you had her in a trance or out of it.

  How wonderful, how magical those Creole kisses of Arobin’s must have been, if one of them, upon the hand, could send Edna to sleep! What might another sort of kiss have done? One shivers thinking of it; one has uncanny visions of a beautiful young woman all ablaze with passion as with a robe of fire. Arobin, however, had no such fears. He continued gaily to awake Edna — or to send her to sleep; our author was never clear which was which! — and it was not long before he was allowed to talk to her in a way that pleased her, “appealing to the animalism that stirred impatiently within her.” One wonders what he said! It was not long before a kiss was permitted Arobin. “She clasped his head, holding his lips to hers. It was the first kiss of her life to which her nature had really responded. It was a flaming torch that kindled desire.”

  Ah, these married women, who have never, by some strange chance, had the flaming torch applied, how they do flash out when the right moment comes! This heroine, after that first flaming torch, went to her finish with lightning speed. She took a walk with Arobin, and paused, mentally, to notice “the black line of his leg moving in and out so close to her against the yellow shimmer of her gown.” She let the young man sit down beside her, let him caress her, and they did not “say good-night until she had become supple to his gentle seductive entreaties.”

  To think of Kate Chopin, who once contented herself with mild yarns about genteel Creole life — pages almost clean enough to put into the Sunday school library, abreast of Geo. W. Cable’s stories — blowing us a hot blast like that! Well, San Francisco, and Paris, and London, and New York had furnished Women Who Did; why not New Orleans?

  “The black line of his leg moving in and out. . . .” Why, even that Japo-Ge
rman apostle of plaquet-prose, Sadakichi Hartmann, did not surpass this when he wrote in his “Lady of the Yellow Jonquils “: “She drew her leg, that was nearest to me, with a weavy graceful motion to her body. . . .”

  It may seem indelicate, in view of where we left Edna, to return to her at once; we must let some little time elapse. Imagine, then, that time elapsed, and Robert returned. He did not know that Arobin had been taking a hand in Edna’s awakening. Robert had gone away, it seems, because he scrupled to love Edna, she being married. But Edna had no scruples left; she hastened to intimate to Robert that she loved him, that her husband meant nothing to her. Never, by any chance, did she mention Arobin. But, dear me, Arobin, to a woman like that, had been merely an incident; he merely happened to hold the torch. Now, what in the world do you suppose that Robert did? Went away — pouff! — like that! Went away, saying he loved Edna too well to — well, to partake of the fire the other youth had lit. Think of it! Edna finally awake — completely, fiercely awake — and the man she had waked up for goes away!

  Of course, she went and drowned herself. She realised that you can only put out fire with water, if all other chemical engines go away. She realised that the awakening was too great; that she was too aflame; that it was now merely Man, not Robert or Arobin, that she desired. So she took an infinite dip in the passionate Gulf.

  Ah, what a hiss, what a fiery splash, there must have been in those warm waters of the South! But — what a pity that poor Pontellier, Edna’s husband, never knew that his wife was in a trance all their wedded days, and that he was away at the moment of her awakening! For, other men failing, there are, after all, some things that a husband is useful for, in spite of books like “The Awakening,” and that other story of a disillusioned female polygamist, “Hermia Suydam.” About the latter story I shall say nothing, since I prefer, later in my book, to consider its author, Gertrude Atherton, in her period of riper judgment and finer art. “Hermia Suydam” was an early indiscretion; it had not even as excuse such finished art as Edgar Saltus put into “Tristram Varick” and “ Mr. Incoul “; it may have attracted attention, have aroused discussion; but as a bit of workmanship Mrs. Atherton must often, in later years, have wished that she had never written it. The most you can say for it is that it was a first — no, second — offense.

  There was no such excuse for Kate Chopin. She was already distinguished for charming contes of Creole life. “The Awakening” was a deliberate case of pandering to what seemed the taste of that moment.

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