Bayou Folk and a Night in Acadie
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Near the close of A Night in Acadie, Gouvernail perceives the longing of his friend’s wife as they sit together in the darkness. Chopin’s wonderful last sentences of “A Respectable Woman” do not specify just what Mrs. Baroda has in mind to do now, but Gouvernail has opened for her possibilities she had not been aware of before.
Chopin is always aware of the importance of children in her communities. About half the stories in Bayou Folk were first published in or submitted to children’s magazines or have subject matter and themes similar to those that were. “A Very Fine Fiddle” is a children’s story, as are “Beyond the Bayou,” “Old Aunt Peggy,” “A Rude Awakening,” “The Bênitous’ Slave,” “A Turkey Hunt,” “Love on the Bon-Dieu,” “Loka,” “Boulôt and Boulotte,” “For Marse Chouchoute,” and “A Wizard from Gettysburg.” Almost a third of the stories in A Night in Acadie are children’s stories: “After the Winter,” “Polydore,” “A Matter of Prejudice,” “The Lilies,” “Mamouche,” and “Ripe Figs.” Other stories in the collections might be suitable for young readers. And some of those first published in children’s magazines—“Beyond the Bayou,” “A Matter of Prejudice,” or “Ripe Figs,” for example—might be thought of as stories for adults.
It was common in the nineteenth century for authors to write for both children and adults. Mark Twain did, as did Louisa May Alcott, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Sarah Orne Jewett. And it was common for magazines like Youth’s Companion or Harper’s Young People—both of which published Chopin’s work—to attract high-quality fiction and for editors of adult magazines to monitor the children’s magazines for talent. Some beginning authors wrote children’s stories to polish their craft and to impress such editors, then turned away from the genre when they had established themselves. But Kate Chopin continued to write for children throughout her career.
Mindful of her readership, she thought carefully about what to include in her works. “The question of how much or how little knowledge of life should be withheld from the youthful mind,” she writes,
is a subject about which there exists a diversity of opinion with the conservative element no doubt, greatly in preponderance. As a rule the youthful, untrained nature is left to gather wisdom as it comes along in a thousand-and-one ways and in whatever form it may present itself to the intelligent, the susceptible, the observant. In this respect experience is perhaps an abler instructor than direct enlightenment from man or woman; for it works by suggestion. There are many phases and features of life which cannot, or rather should not be expounded, demonstrated, presented to the youthful imagination as cold facts, for it is safe to assert they are not going to be accepted as such. It is moreover robbing youth of its privilege to gather wisdom as the bee gathers honey.
Chopin writes to inform, to entertain her children’s audience, not to offer moral guidance, but, like others writing for children at the time, she chooses her subjects with care. She likes stories about girls becoming adults (“Loka,” “A Rude Awakening”) and about adults seeking companionship (“After the Winter,” “Polydore,” “A Matter of Prejudice,” “The Lilies,” “Mamouche”), and she often dwells on the way children cope with the harsh economic conditions so common in her world (“For Marse Chouchoute,” “A Very Fine Fiddle,” “Boulôt and Boulotte,” “A Wizard from Gettysburg”).
Her concern over balance in her adult stories spills naturally into her works for children. A search for balance has been a fundamental element in many classic British and American children’s stories—balance between what children are free to do and what they are not, what they wish for and what they can have, their wanting to be home and wanting to run away, their feeling alienated or feeling wanted. All those motifs are present in Chopin’s children’s stories.
From the time of her childhood in St. Louis, Kate Chopin had the ability to see beyond what those in her immediate community were seeing, to see with detachment and irony, with an understanding that truth looks different from within different cultures, that it shapes and reshapes itself and is not subject to easy generalization. In Bayou Folk and A Night in Acadie she writes both as a member of the communities she depicts and as an observer. Although she generally accepts the values of her communities, she positions herself so that she can comment on those values. She is anything but dogmatic. She seeks to show “true life and true art,” as she calls it, “human existence in its subtle, complex, true meaning, stripped of the veil with which ethical and conventional standards have draped it.” She has a gentle, knowing gaze—insightful, compassionate, and accepting.
Many stories in Bayou Folk and A Night in Acadie place people of one culture alongside those of another (The Awakening too has an intercultural emphasis; Edna Pontellier is a Kentucky Presbyterian married to a New Orleans Creole). They illuminate the cultural contexts of human yearnings. They explore how people are shaped by life in a heterogeneous, complex, often unjust society.
Chopin understands, as her contemporary Henry James understands, that a person lives in a community, but the community also lives in the person. Like James and other realists, she is aware of the giant biological, psychological, and economic forces shaping people’s lives, but her characters are usually free to seek the better existence they yearn for, although what they want is deeply influenced by those with whom they live. Her communities have troubling problems, but individuals—women, men, and children, white people and people of color—cross social boundaries, appropriate others’ values, reach with intelligence and confidence for richer, more fulfilling, better balanced lives.
Kate Chopin integrates culture, regional character, race, the power of sex, and the concerns of women into her collections of stories, sensing what Walt Whitman had felt forty years earlier—that cultural differences and racial differences nourish a community, that women as well as men nourish it, that sex nourishes it. She weaves together sex, race, culture, and gender in her stories, celebrating them all, making Bayou Folk and A Night in Acadie feel at times exotic, like Louisiana plantations and ’Cadian balls, and at times familiar, like the multiethnic, multiracial, multilingual, gender-sensitive, and sexually charged America we know today.
BERNARD KOLOSKI
Mansfield, Pennsylvania
May 1998
SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
THE WORKS OF KATE CHOPIN
Seyersted, Per, ed. The Complete Works of Kate Chopin. 2 vols. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1969.
Seyersted, Per, and Emily Toth, eds. A Kate Chopin Miscellany. Natchitoches, LA: Northwestern State University Press, 1979.
Toth, Emily, Per Seyersted, and Marilyn Bonnell, eds. Kate Chopin’s Private Papers. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998.
BIOGRAPHIES
Rankin, Daniel. Kate Chopin and Her Creole Stories. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1932.
Seyersted, Per. Kate Chopin: A Critical Biography. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1969.
Toth, Emily. Kate Chopin. New York: William Morrow, 1990.
CRITICISM
Arms, George. “Kate Chopin’s The Awakening in the Perspective of her Literary Career.” In Essays on American Literature in Honor of Jay B. Hubbell, Clarence Gohdes, ed. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1967. 215–28.
Arner, Robert D. “Kate Chopin.” Special issue of Louisiana Studies 14(1975): 11–139.
Bardot, Jean. “French Creole Portraits: The Chopin Family from Natchitoches Parish.” In Perspectives on Kate Chopin: Proceedings from the Kate Chopin International Conference. April 6, 7, 8, 1989. Natchitoches, LA: Northwestern State University Press, 1992. 25–36.
Birnbaum, Michele A. “ ‘Alien Hands’: Kate Chopin and the Colonization of Race.” American Literature 66 (1994): 301–23.
Bloom, Harold, ed. Kate Chopin. New York: Chelsea, 1987.
Bonner, Thomas, Jr. “Christianity and Catholicism in the Fiction of Kate Chopin.” The Southern Quarterly: A Journal of the Arts in the South 20 (1982): 118–25.
____. “Kate Chopin: Tradition and the Moment.” In Southern Literature in Transition: Heritage and Promise, Philip and William Osborne Castille, eds. Memphis: Memphis State University Press, 1983. 141–49.
Boren, Lynda S., and Sara deSaussure Davis, eds. Kate Chopin Reconsidered: Beyond the Bayou. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992.
Dyer, Joyce. “Gouvernail, Kate Chopin’s Sensitive Bachelor.” Southern Literary Journal 14 (1981): 46–55.
____. “Kate Chopin’s Sleeping Bruties.” Markham Review 10 (1980): 10–15.
____, and Robert Emmett Monroe. “Texas and Texans in the Fiction of Kate Chopin.” Western American Literature 20 (1985): 3–15.
Elfenbein, Anna Shannon. Women on the Color Line: Evolving Stereotypes and the Writings of George Washington Cable, Grace King, and Kate Chopin. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1989.
Ellis, Nancy S. “Insistent Refrains and Self-Discovery: Accompanied Awakenings in Three Stories by Kate Chopin.” In Kate Chopin Reconsidered: Beyond the Bayou. Lynda S. Boren and Sara deSaussure Davis, eds. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992. 216–29.
Ewell, Barbara C. Kate Chopin. New York: Ungar, 1986.
Fluck, Winfried. “Tentative Transgressions: Kate Chopin’s Fiction as a Mode of Symbolic Action.” Studies in American Fiction 10 (1982): 151–71.
Fusco, Richard. Maupassant and the American Short Story: The Influence of Form at the Turn of the Century. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994.
Gardiner, Elaine. “ ‘Ripe Figs’: Kate Chopin in Miniature.” Modern Fiction Studies 28 (1982): 379–82.
Gaudet, Marcia. “Kate Chopin and the Lore of Cane River’s Creoles of Color.” Xavier Review 6 (1986): 45–52.
Goodwyn, Janet. “ ‘Dah you is, settin’ down, lookin’ jis’ like w’ite folks!’: Ethnicity Enacted in Kate Chopin’s Short Fiction.” The Yearbook of English Studies 24 (1994): 1–11.
Gunning, Sandra. “Kate Chopin’s Local Color Fiction and the Politics of White Supremacy.” Arizona Quarterly 51 (1995): 61–86.
Howell, Elmo. “Kate Chopin and the Creole Country.” Louisiana History. 20 (1979): 209–19.
Jones, Anne Goodwyn. Tomorrow Is Another Day: The Woman Writer in the South, 1859–1936. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1981.
Koloski, Bernard. “The Anthologized Chopin: Kate Chopin’s Stories in Yesterday’s and Today’s Anthologies.” Louisiana Literature 11 (1994): 18–30.
____. Kate Chopin: A Study of the Short Fiction. New York: Twayne, 1996.
____. “The Swinburne Lines in The Awakening.” American Literature 45 (1974): 608–10.
Lattin, Patricia Hopkins. “Childbirth and Motherhood in The Awakening and in ‘Athénaïse.’ ” In Approaches to Teaching Chopin’s The Awakening, Bernard Koloski, ed. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1988. 40–46.
____. “Kate Chopin’s Repeating Characters.” Mississippi Quarterly 33 (1980): 19–37.
____. “The Search for Self in Kate Chopin’s Fiction: Simple Versus Complex Vision.” Southern Studies 21 (1982): 222–35.
Leary, Lewis. “Kate Chopin, Liberationist?” Southern Literary Journal 3 (1970): 138–44.
Lohafer, Susan. Coming to Terms with the Short Story. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1983.
McMahan, Elizabeth. “ ‘Nature’s Decoy’: Kate Chopin’s Presentation of Women and Marriage in Her Short Fiction.” Turn-of-the-Century Women 2 (1985): 32–35.
Newman, Judie. “Kate Chopin: Short Fiction and the Art of Subversion.” In The Nineteenth-Century American Short Story, A. Robert Lee, ed. New York: Vision, 1985. 150–63.
Papke, Mary E. “Chopin’s Stories of Awakening.” In Approaches to Teaching Chopin’s The Awakening, Bernard Koloski, ed. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1988. 73–79.
____. Verging on the Abyss: The Social Fiction of Kate Chopin and Edith Wharton. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1990.
Peel, Ellen. “Semiotic Subversion in ‘Désirée’s Baby.’ ” American Literature 62 (1990): 223–37.
Petry, Alice Hall. Critical Essays on Kate Chopin. New York: G. K. Hall, 1996.
Potter, Richard H. “Negroes in the Fiction of Kate Chopin.” Louisiana History 12 (1971): 41–58.
Ringe, Donald A. “Cane River World: Kate Chopin’s At Fault and Related Stories.” Studies in American Fiction 3 (1975): 157–66.
Rogers, Nancy E. “Echoes of George Sand in Kate Chopin.” Revue de Littérature Comparée 1 (1983): 25–42.
Shurbutt, Sylvia Bailey. “The Cane River Characters and Revisionist Myth-making in the Work of Kate Chopin.” The Southern Literary Journal 25 (1993): 14–23.
Skaggs, Peggy. Kate Chopin. Boston: Twayne, 1985.
____. “ ‘The Man-Instinct of Possession’: A Persistent Theme in Kate Chopin’s Stories.” Louisiana Studies 14 (1975): 177–85.
Steiling, David. “Multi-cultural Aesthetic in Kate Chopin’s ‘A Gentleman of Bayou Teche.’ ” The Mississippi Quarterly 47 (1994): 197–200.
Stein, Allen F. After the Vows Were Spoken: Marriage in American Literary Realism. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1984.
Taylor, Helen. Gender, Race, and Region in the Writings of Grace King, Ruth McEnery Stuart, and Kate Chopin. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989.
Toth, Emily. “Kate Chopin and Literary Convention: ‘Désirée’s Baby.’ ” Southern Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal of the South 20 (1981): 201–08.
Wood, Ann Douglas. “The Literature of Improverishment: The Woman Local Colorists in America 1865–1914.” Women’s Studies 1 (1972): 3–45.
Wymard, Eleanor B. “Kate Chopin: Her Existential Imagination.” Southern Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal of the South 19 (1980): 373–84.
A NOTE ON THE TEXT
The stories reprinted here are arranged in the order they appear in Bayou Folk, published in 1894 by Houghton Mifflin Company of Boston, and A Night in Acadie, published in 1897 by Way and Williams of Chicago. The texts of the stories are taken from Per Seyersted’s definitive The Complete Works of Kate Chopin, published in two volumes by Louisiana State University Press in 1969. Information about editions of Bayou Folk and A Night in Acadie and about the stories—composition dates, magazine publication dates, earlier titles, differences in wording between manuscript, periodical, and book versions—can be found at the end of the second volume of The Complete Works.
BAYOU FOLK
A No-Account Creole
I
ONE agreeable afternoon in late autumn two young men stood together on Canal Street, closing a conversation that had evidently begun within the club-house which they had just quitted.
“There’s big money in it, Offdean,” said the elder of the two. “I would n’t have you touch it if there was n’t. Why, they tell me Patchly’s pulled a hundred thousand out of the concern a’ready.”
“That may be,” replied Offdean, who had been politely attentive to the words addressed to him, but whose face bore a look indicating that he was closed to conviction. He leaned back upon the clumsy stick which he carried, and continued: “It’s all true, I dare say, Fitch; but a decision of that sort would mean more to me than you’d believe if I were to tell you. The beggarly twenty-five thousand’s all I have, and I want to sleep with it under my pillow a couple of months at least before I drop it into a slot.”
“You’ll drop it into Harding & Offdean’s mill to grind out the pitiful two and a half per cent commission racket; that’s what you ’ll do in the end, old fellow—see if you don’t.”
“Perhaps I shall; but it’s more than likely I shan’t. We’ll talk about it when I get back. You know I’m off to north Louisiana in the morning”—
“No! What the deuce”—
“Oh, business of the firm.”
“Write me from Shreveport, then; or wherever it is.”
&
nbsp; “Not so far as that. But don’t expect to hear from me till you see me. I can’t say when that will be.”
Then they shook hands and parted. The rather portly Fitch boarded a Prytania Street car, and Mr. Wallace Offdean hurried to the bank in order to replenish his portemonnaie, which had been materially lightened at the club through the medium of unpropitious jack-pots and bobtail flushes.
He was a sure-footed fellow, this young Offdean, despite an occasional fall in slippery places. What he wanted, now that he had reached his twenty-sixth year and his inheritance, was to get his feet well planted on solid ground, and to keep his head cool and clear.
With his early youth he had had certain shadowy intentions of shaping his life on intellectual lines. That is, he wanted to; and he meant to use his faculties intelligently, which means more than is at once apparent. Above all, he would keep clear of the maelstroms of sordid work and senseless pleasure in which the average American business man may be said alternately to exist, and which reduce him, naturally, to a rather ragged condition of soul.
Offdean had done, in a temperate way, the usual things which young men do who happen to belong to good society, and are possessed of moderate means and healthy instincts. He had gone to college, had traveled a little at home and abroad, had frequented society and the clubs, and had worked in his uncle’s commission-house; in all of which employments he had expended much time and a modicum of energy.