The Awakening and Selected Short Fiction (Barnes & Noble Classics) - Kate Chopin [8]
There are also instances in which she writes with sensitivity about racial conflict. Her most well-known story, “Désirée’s Baby,” deals unblinkingly with the problem of miscegenation. Désirée, a woman of unknown parentage, gives birth to a dark-skinned child. After her husband’s cruelty drives her to commit suicide, the story ends with the revelation that he is the source of the baby’s black blood, a secret he knowingly concealed from his wife. Its conclusion, which implies that miscegenation is a dirty secret at the heart of the most elite Southern families, underscores the tragic consequences of insistence on racial purity.
However, the unexpected revelation at the close of “Désirée’s Baby” turns it into the story of a white woman’s abuse by a black man, making it less racially progressive than it may seem on first reading. If its position on race remains unresolved, its concern with a woman’s victimization is indisputable. Indeed, “Désirée’s Baby” represents Chopin’s most pessimistic view of marriage as an arrangement that often begins to the mutual satisfaction of both parties but later dissolves into conflict and unhappiness. Although she is aware that marriage can be constraining for both husbands and wives, she returns repeatedly to the particular frustrations of married women, who have far less freedom to escape into work and travel than their spouses. As Edna frets and paces around her home in New Orleans, Léonce retreats to his club and disappears on business trips to New York. But it is rare for Chopin to depict a husband as unforgivably cruel as Armand Aubigny, whose abuse and hypocrisy drives Désirée to suicide.
More commonly, husbands are mildly boring and insensitive, flaws that become increasingly intolerable when their wives encounter more desirable romantic prospects. In both “A Respectable Woman” and “The Storm,” functional marriages are temporarily disrupted by sexual desire. The end of “The Storm” sees order restored without harm to any of the parties involved, whereas “A Respectable Woman” concludes with the awakening of a wife’s desire for another man. In “The Story of an Hour,” a happily married woman with a weak heart is devastated by the news of her husband’s death. In a cruel twist of fate, just as she recognizes the potential of her newfound freedom, he walks in the door, having been nowhere near the accident reported to have killed him. The shock of his sudden reappearance causes her to collapse and die of cardiac arrest. Laden with irony, the story’s final line—“When the doctors came they said she had died of heart disease—of joy that kills” (p. 173)—pairs extreme happiness with fatal affliction.
If Chopin could represent marriage as both lethal and joyful, a more lengthy exploration of her ambivalence is found in “Athénaïse,” the story of an unhappy wife who flees her well-meaning husband, Cazeau. After he tracks her down, their homeward journey takes them past a spot that reminds him of a slave who had escaped his father’s plantation when he was a boy. This unsettling memory implies that for women, marriage is tantamount to slavery. But when Athénaïse runs away again and Cazeau declines to pursue her, it is clear that he sees