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By Root 475 0

Chopin looked to Sarah Orne Jewett and Mary Wilkins Freeman. She has frequently been grouped with these women as a writer of local color fiction, a genre unjustly dismissed by several generations of critics. More recently, scholars have seen her use of local color techniques as a strategy to gain a foothold in the literary marketplace and to stake a claim in contemporary debates about gender, race, and region. From this perspective, her short story “A Gentleman of Bayou Têche,” in which an artist from the city attempts to exploit a humble fisherman for his “local color,” reads like an allegory for the regional writer’s confrontation with the literary establishment.

Reviewers of Chopin’s first collection, Bayou Folk (1894), failed to notice such instances of understated social commentary. While generally positive, contemporary responses hailed her depiction of charming local details, rather than her treatment of social issues. Reviewers found a more complicated outlook and maturity of authorial voice in her second collection, A Night in Acadie (1897). An essay in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch praising Chopin’s artistry and psychological insight urged readers to think beyond the associations with local color, to recognize “gifts ... that go deeper than mere patois and local description.” A second review demurred, describing Chopin as a specialist in the “childlike southern people who are the subject of her brief romances” and expressing regret that some of the stories were “marred by one or two slight and unnecessary coarseness [sic].”

Despite considerable appreciation by her contemporaries, Chopin would have remained neglected by literary history if it were not for the recovery of The Awakening in the 1960s. Its renewed popularity also brought attention to the whole corpus of her work, which includes numerous poems, essays, and short stories, as well as her first novel, At Fault. These texts illuminate many of the concerns of The Awakening but are also of considerable interest in their own right. Read in its entirety, Chopin’s fiction introduces a broad swath of personalities, from impoverished blacks and Acadians of the Bayou to plantation elites and urban intellectuals. Whereas some stories turn seemingly trivial events—the shopping spree of an abstemious middle-aged woman, a country girl’s visit to the circus—into dramatic interior conflicts, others deal with more overtly controversial issues such as miscegenation, venereal disease, murder, and extramarital sex. The relatively circumscribed geographical parameters of Chopin’s fiction extend from lively, cosmopolitan New Orleans to the insular, rural byways of nineteenth-century Louisiana. Unlike the minutely detailed, inclusive catalogues of realist fiction, her preference is for the sketch, which conveys an impression rather than a sharply delineated picture. Frequently, Chopin writes as an insider whose intimacy with her subjects is conveyed through the use of local dialect and allusions. As a result, whereas the human dramas are readily accessible, contemporary readers may struggle to gain a precise understanding of character and locale.

Chopin’s first story, “Emancipation: A Life Fable,” is an exception to this rule since it is set in no particular time or place. It is significant largely because it anticipates Edna Pontellier’s metamorphosis in The Awakening. A male creature is raised in a cage where his physical needs are satisfied by an invisible provider. When the cage is left open one day, he escapes and learns that freedom is far better than comfort. In later stories, the issue of awakening more often centers on female desire, which is sometimes at odds with marriage and social obligations. Chopin’s female characters often seem motivated by the same creaturely drives that stirred the animal protagonist of “Emancipation.” For married women, husbands are like the invisible master whose care made the beast passive and complacent. Often wives find sexual interest or satisfaction in illicit affairs, which are closely associated with the freedom to choose the objects