244 Reconstructing, Reimagining: 1865–1900body was never seen again.” It is a perfect image for the dark, subterranean history
of the South: the repressions of knowledge and feeling that contorted, corrupted,
and eventually undermined an entire society – and here drives one young girl into
a sense of abjection and then death.
The fiction of Chopin explores the racial and sexual codes of late nineteenth-
century Louisiana with even greater subtlety. Chopin moved to New Orleans after
her marriage. Following the death of her husband in 1882, she moved back to
St. Louis with her six children. Seven years later, she began writing and, within ten
years after that, had published twenty poems, 95 short stories, two novels, one play,
and eight essays. Most of her stories are set in Louisiana, and cover all its social
classes: aristocratic Creoles, middle- and lower-class Acadians, “Americans” like
Chopin herself, mulattos and blacks. Her first two collections, Bayou Folk (1894) and
A Night in Acadie (1897), established her reputation as a writer of local color. That
label, however, conceals Chopin’s interest, here and throughout her career, in sexual
politics and in particular the politics of marriage. Her first two published stories, for
instance, “Wiser than a God” (1889) and “A Point at Issue” (1889), concentrate on
what would prove to be her dominating theme: the conflict between social demand
and personal need, the social requirement that a woman should center her life on her
husband and a woman’s necessary obedience to her own compulsions, the impulse
to express and develop her individuality. “Désirée’s Baby” (1892) brings class and
race into the equation. Désirée is of “obscure origin,” socially “nameless.” She marries
a man of the patrician class, with a name that is among “the oldest and proudest in
Louisiana,” but the marriage is effectively at an end when Désirée gives birth to a
child that is “not white.” Désirée disappears with her baby and a bonfire is made of
the cradle, and her letters, with the husband presiding. But his snobbish presumption
that it is Désirée who has brought the strangeness and the social stigma of mixed
blood into the line is shown to be false. It is his own mother, he eventually learns,
who “belongs to the race that is cursed with the brand of slavery.” The story plays
with the theme, and in this case the false presumption, of the tragic mulatta in
a more ironic, subversive fashion than does “The Little Convent Girl.” The
melodramatic twist at the end depends upon the reader sharing the snobbish belief
that it is the “good,” old family that is “pure,” and having his prejudices then neatly
subverted – along with those of the husband. As Chopin developed, so did this
subversive streak. “A Respectable Woman” (1894) slyly explores the attraction the
married woman of the title feels for a friend of her husband. “A Pair of Silk Stockings”
(1896) describes in detail how a woman takes time out from the sterile routines of
marriage and domesticity. Buying and putting on a pair of silk stockings, she embarks
on a small adventure, a day of indulgence by herself. By the end of the day, and the
story, “it was like a dream ended,” the reader is told. But, as the woman is transported
home, the desire, the longing for release expressed in both day and story has not been
extinguished: she is seized with “a poignant wish, a powerful longing that the cable
car would never stop anywhere, but go on and on with her forever.” Most daring of
all, for its time, is “The Storm” (1898), which uses the upheavals of a stormy day as
an occasion and a metaphor for illicit sexual passion. A man and woman, married toGGray_c03.indd 244ray_c 03 .indd 244 8 8/1/2011 7:54:19 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 19 AM