Kate Chopin and the City: The New Orleans Stories 3031443004, 9783031443008

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AMERICAN LITERATURE READINGS IN THE 21ST CENTURY

Kate Chopin and the City The New Orleans Stories Heather Ostman

American Literature Readings in the 21st Century Series Editor

Linda Wagner-Martin University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, NC, USA

American Literature Readings in the Twenty-First Century publishes works by contemporary authors that help shape critical opinion regarding American literature of the eighteenth, nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-­ first centuries. The books treat fiction, poetry, memoir, drama and criticism itself—ranging from William Dow’s Narrating Class in American Fiction and Amy Strong’s Race and Identity in Hemingway’s Fiction, to Maisha L. Wester’s African American Gothic and Guy Davidson’s Queer Commodities: Contemporary U. S. Fiction, Consumer Culture, and Lesbian Subcultures. Beginning in 2004, the series is now well established and continues to welcome new book proposals. Manuscripts run between 80,000 and 90,000 words, while the Pivot format accommodates shorter books of 25,000 to 50,000 words. This series also accepts essay collections; among our bestsellers have been collections on David Foster Wallace, Norman Mailer, Contemporary U.S. Latina/o Literary Criticism, Kurt Vonnegut, Kate Chopin, Carson McCullers, George Saunders, and Arthur Miller (written by members of the Miller Society). All texts are designed to create valuable interactions globally as well as within English-speaking countries. Editorial Board: Professor Derek Maus, SUNY Potsdam, USA Professor Thomas Fahy, Long Island University, USA Professor Deborah E. McDowell, University of Virginia and Director of the Carter G. Woodson Institute, USA Professor Laura Rattray, University of Glasgow, UK

Heather Ostman

Kate Chopin and the City The New Orleans Stories

Heather Ostman English Department Westchester Community College Valhalla, NY, USA

ISSN 2634-579X     ISSN 2634-5803 (electronic) American Literature Readings in the 21st Century ISBN 978-3-031-44299-5    ISBN 978-3-031-44300-8 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-44300-8 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Paper in this product is recyclable.

To Leif Spafford

Preface

I started reading Kate Chopin in my first year of college, when an American literature professor introduced our class to The Awakening, amid a study of women writers including Willa Cather, Zora Neale Hurston, Edith Wharton, Toni Morrison, Louise Erdrich, and Marilynne Robinson—in other words, the heavy hitters of American women’s writing of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. I was eighteen years old and almost nothing had happened to me, and yet Edna Pontellier’s struggle for autonomy, her seeking to know her “position in the universe” resonated with me like no story had before. I saw her loneliness, her melting rigidity, and—desperate for a boyfriend myself—I understood her unrequited desire for the tragedian, the young cavalry officer, and Robert. I was newly independent too, away from home, testing out adulthood—Edna’s first successful swim out to the sea during her vacation at Grand Isle also resonated. Her increasing autonomy spoke to me. Decades later, and quite autonomous myself, it still speaks to me. Over the years, I have read The Awakening countless times—certainly more than any other novel. I’ve given papers and published articles and books on Chopin’s fiction, even cofounded the Kate Chopin International Society. During all of these years, I had read Chopin’s protagonist as a kind of projection, a hologram, in a sense; she seemed ethereal to me, not quite of this Earth—an idea shaped into motion, rendered by the author. To me, Edna’s story read more like an allegory: she was a mirror held up to reflect on my own development as a woman, as an adult, as well as that of multitudes of women in the United States and around the world. vii

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It was only until I began to reread the stories and then The Awakening with a focus on the city of New Orleans that Edna Pontellier came to life for me. When I heard the streetcars, saw the boats on the bayou, and felt the excitement at the horse races, Edna became real; her struggle to know “her position in the universe” connected on a wholly different level. The city had brought her fully to life in 3D. The revelation of New Orleans should not have surprised me. Kate Chopin herself had loved the city. She’d spent less than a decade in New Orleans: from 1870, when she had first gotten married to Oscar Chopin, until 1879, when the couple moved their growing family to Cloutierville, a little French village located in the northwestern area of Louisiana, in Natchitoches Parish. Chopin had grown up in St. Louis, and she had known other cities: St. Louis, Paris, and even New York. She and Oscar had spent their honeymoon traveling the cities of Europe until the Franco-­ Prussian War broke out and ended their trip abruptly. She’d clearly had an appreciation for urban spaces. And yet New Orleans still stood out; a unique city, it appears in at least sixteen of her stories, including her classic novel, The Awakening (1899). Chopin’s commonplace book confessions tell us how much she admired New Orleans when she first visited: New Orleans I liked immensely; it is so clean—so white and green. Although in April we had profusions of flowers—strawberries and even blackberries. One evening I passed in N.O. which I shall never forget—it was so delightful and so novel. Mamie and myself were invited to dine and spend the evening with a Mrs. Bader—a German lady [… ]. [who] lived in a dear little house near Esplanade St., a house with an immensity of garden. (Private Papers 85)

As Helen Taylor has pointed out, Chopin’s impression of New Orleans is not congruent with its reality, suggesting to me, at least, that Chopin understood the complex vibrancy of city life, given her lifelong experiences in an urban setting. She could see the value within the dirtiness and danger that lived beside the faster pace and culture of the city. Taylor notes that “The industrial city was defined as hazardous, diseased, even infernal, a place where lily-white women would not wish to venture.” And still Chopin loved cities; she loved this city with an appreciation that stemmed from her youth in St. Louis. She is certainly not alone:

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… women, like men, have always been excited and stimulated by the city— for all its danger and dirtiness. Throughout nineteenth and twentieth-­ century women’s writing, we find accounts of women enjoying the spectacle and excesses of the city, even when they feel somewhat excluded. By the end of the nineteenth century, writes like Theodore Dreiser and Edith Wharton were making these encounters central to their fiction, and in 1914 feminist Charlotte Perkins Gilman wrote a witty story in which her protagonist fantasizes about being literally in her husband’s shoes, walking out to work, catching a bus, and engaging in the bustling intercourse of that urban daily life from which she, as a homemaker, is excluded. (Taylor)

But like Dreiser’s Carrie in Sister Carrie, for better or for worse, Chopin’s characters come to the city and expand the possibilities in multiple areas of their lives, such as art, education, emotions, and especially independence. The city enables both Carrie and nearly all of Chopin’s city women characters to know themselves as autonomous beings, capable of making their own choices, regardless of the consequences. Chopin tells us that “The voice of the sea speaks to the soul. The touch of the sea is sensuous, enfolding the body in its soft, close embrace” (CW 893). Its call beckons Edna until the end of The Awakening: “The voice of the sea is seductive, never ceasing, whispering, clamoring, murmuring, inviting the soul to wander in abysses of solitude” (CW 999). The sea at Grand Isle offers a beginning and an end to Edna, and in between the city of New Orleans offers its streets to her to similarly “wander in abysses of solitude.” New Orleans, where the majority of the novel is set, offers the space for her growing awareness of herself and enables her to live, whereas the sea offers her flashes of death when she first learns to swim and literal death at the end of the novel, when New Orleans can offer her nothing more than what it already has. After decades of studying Chopin’s works, this examination of her city stories finally made me realize that her stories had altered the course of my studies and consequently the trajectory of my academic career. I could not have known at eighteen years old that I would spend the rest of my working life pouring over Chopin’s texts. But studying her New Orleans stories cinched it for me. A city person myself, I have come to understand Chopin’s literary vision in a new light, and as a result, I have come to understand Edna Pontellier’s “awakening” in a new way—divergent from my earlier presumptions of feminism and more recently of religion and mysticism within Chopin’s work. The joy she felt in her initial contact with

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New Orleans emerges in each detail of the New Orleans streets in her stories: the range of diverse inhabitants, the streetcars, the food, the opera, the specter of the Civil War, and the magnificent Mississippi River that snakes around the city in its southern embrace. Perhaps the Chopins’ European wedding trip opened Kate Chopin to the world—something not so hard to do, as she was heavily influenced by her French-speaking great-grandmother—but New Orleans kept the door open. A gateway for new immigrants and for generations of slave descendants, the city offered Chopin a glimpse into the vibrancy and complexity—the joy and the sorrow—of humanity. Music, culture, food, architecture, and industry have all developed unique contours of style and legacies in the city, distinguishing it as the Queen of the Mississippi, a regal city among the southern urban centers. She offers her readers an opportunity to know the city, to know its people. Do you want to know the essence of humanity? Do you want to see the possibilities of this life? Go to the city, she tells us. Chopin’s fine attention to human joy, love, despair, and frailty emerge in the stories and in the twenty-two chapters of The Awakening that she set in New Orleans. Chopin has long been heralded by feminist literary scholars who rescued her work from obscurity in the 1960s and 1970s. As Emily Toth mentions in the 1999 PBS documentary, Kate Chopin: a Re-Awakening, she wondered as a college student: “How did Kate Chopin know all of that?” However, a close reading of the author’s city stories offers a broader, richer view of her perspective. It wasn’t only women’s experiences she understood; she was paying attention to the whole thing and New Orleans offered an imaginative literary playground to explore, reveal, and expand the limits of women’s experiences—and thus men’s as well. City life is not for everyone. I know. There are times lately that I find myself preferring the quiet and greener life of upstate New York or the suburban trees that surround the college where I teach over the noise and concrete of New York City, where I have always felt anchored. But for me, and if I may, like Chopin, and certainly like Edna, the voice of the city will always be “seductive, never ceasing, whispering, clamoring, murmuring, inviting the soul to wander in abysses of solitude” and a walk through Chopin’s stories is likewise an invitation to wander in contemplation and wonder at the joys and despairs of living this life. New York, NY 20 April 2023

Heather Ostman

Acknowledgments

This book is a culmination of knowledge, conversations, and support from multiple people. But I would first like to heartily thank my department chair at SUNY Westchester Community College, Dr. Elise Martucci, for her unwavering support of this project and frankly everything I do. I am so very lucky to have a colleague like her, who from the first time we met over twenty years ago offered me friendship and encouragement, as well as her critical insights and guidance. I also would like to thank the Advisory Board of the Kate Chopin International Society, who fielded my questions as I developed my ideas for this book. I am particularly indebted to the guidance and scholarship of Barbara Ewell, Emily Toth, Tom Bonner, Kathleen Nigro, and, as always, Bernie Koloski, who is also the lead editor of the society’s magnificent website, www.katechopin.org. Last, I am very grateful to have the love and support of my family, in particular my mother, Grace Wood, and the support and assistance of a few parents in my community, without whom managing the delicate balance of family, work, writing, and a zillion afterschool activities would not be possible: a hearty thanks to Jennifer Hardy, Kim Moffit, and KT and Eric Ryan.

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Contents

1 Introduction:  Kate Chopin and the City—The New Orleans Stories  1 The New and Improved French City   3 Slavery and New Orleans   8 New Immigrants and New Technologies  10 The Literary City  15 Kate Chopin and New Orleans  17 2 The  French-American City: The Two Worlds of Chopin Fiction 25 “A Matter of Prejudice”  28 “The Return of Alcibiade”  39 “Cavanelle”  44 3 Mobility  and Autonomy: Chopin’s Women Characters Around Town 57 “Charlie”  58 “Athenaïse”  68 “A Respectable Woman”  79 4 City  Business: Commerce and the Short Fiction 83 “A Pair of Silk Stockings”  85 “A Sentimental Soul”  90 “A No-Account Creole”  94 xiii

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Contents

“In and Out of Old Natchitoches”  99 “Doctor Chevalier’s Lie” 105 5 Bayou  St. John Stories109 Bayou St. John 110 “A Lady of St. John” 114 “La Belle Zoraïde” 119 “Nég Creol” 123 6 “Her  position in the universe”: The Awakening’s Edna Pontellier and New Orleans131 Grand Isle 134 Timelessness 139 Edna Pontellier in New Orleans 141 Alone in the City 147 Robert 152 Return to Grand Isle 153 Space 156 Works Cited159 Index169

About the Author

Heather  Ostman  is Professor of English, director of the Humanities Institute, and Humanities Curriculum Chair at SUNY Westchester Community College, Valhalla, New York, USA. She is the author/editor of multiple books, including The New View from Cane River: Critical Essays on Kate Chopin’s At Fault (2022), Kate Chopin and Catholicism (2020), Kate Chopin in Context: New Approaches (2015), and Kate Chopin in the Twenty-First Century: New Critical Essays (2008), among others. She is the co-founder and president of the Kate Chopin International Society (www.katechopin.org).

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Kate Chopin and the  City—The New Orleans Stories

New Orleans is a city governed by its own sense of direction. Unlike other cities—other places on Earth, really—the cardinal directions are rarely used. Residents do not direct newcomers to travel north, south, east, or west. Instead, urban travelers are pointed upriver or uptown, downriver or downtown, toward the lake (as in Lake Pontchartrain) or toward the river (as in the Mississippi). Its streets reflect not the geometric grid and order found in other major American cities, but the geography of the natural landscape that predated its urban transformation. The physical cityscape speaks to its close ties to the land that lies beneath. Its contrast and proximity to plantations, swamps, forests, and waterways are as central to its identity as its architecture and streets. New Orleans is also a city shaped by the histories of people from around the world. The Crescent City, as it is known, is overlaid with the blood, sweat, and tears of generations—as well as the idiosyncrasies and creativity of multitudes. Since the nineteenth century, New Orleans has inspired writers of all varieties to narrate its tales of love, loss, violence, grief, disappointment, and joy. Writers from the United States and abroad, such as Walt Whitman, Sherwood Anderson, Zora Neale Hurson, Tennessee Williams, Alexis de Tocqueville, Oscar Wilde, Lafcadio Hearn, and others found their distinctive muses in the city. In addition to a vast array of

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 H. Ostman, Kate Chopin and the City, American Literature Readings in the 21st Century, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-44300-8_1

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authors, countless artists and musicians, ranging from Edgar Degas to Louis Armstrong, have found the Crescent City fertile for creative expression. American writer Kate O’Flaherty Chopin (1850–1904) also found inspiration in the city. A native of St. Louis, she lived in New Orleans only from 1870 to 1879—long enough to inspire multiple stories set among its unique architecture and city streets. Chopin is best known for her landmark novel The Awakening (1899), a text that sparked a generation of readers and scholars to redraw the parameters of the American literary canon to include Chopin’s work—years after The Awakening had disappeared into obscurity. Rediscovered by readers in the 1960s, The Awakening challenged nineteenth-century gender roles, as its protagonist Edna Pontellier tried to assert the autonomy and purpose of her own life. Edna’s “awakening” begins at a summer resort, Grand Isle, but the profound changes that free her from an existence she compares to sleepwalking, take root, becoming irreversible, in the city of New Orleans. Chopin adored New Orleans, and given her regard for the city, it is probably not surprising that Edna Pontellier begins to shed the constraints of social gender roles during her time there. But many of Chopin’s more one hundred short stories also take place in rural Louisiana, in Natchitoches Parish on the Cane River. As many scholars have noted, the author has not been widely recognized as a city writer. In fact, she has been predominantly known as a “local color” writer, the author of a genre that celebrated the “quaint” rural stories of the American South, with characters whose habits and dialects reflect the region in ways that appealed to northern readers and publishers and presented an acceptable version of the post-­ Civil War American South. Yet, many of her most significant and innovative stories—in addition to The Awakening—have been set in New Orleans or in relationship to the city. Chopin’s depictions of New Orleans present readers an opportunity to see the unique class and racial stratifications that characterized the city in particular, and Louisiana and the American South more generally. Stories such as “Athenaïse,” “Charlie,” “La Belle Zoraïde,” “A Matter of Prejudice,” and others, show New Orleans to be a city of contrasts as well as ambiguity. Its former designation as the slave-trading capital of the South cast a long shadow on the racial inequities that divided citizens within a complex caste system in the post-Civil War era. Amid the contrasts, Chopin’s New Orleans characters experience deep losses, echoing— and in some stories set in the antebellum period, anticipating—the

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confederate losses. Other characters, especially several female characters, find new independence; they are early sketches of the New Woman who would emerge at the turn of the twentieth century. Importantly, Chopin’s depictions of New Orleans offer a context for viewing the advent of modernity. In the years following the Civil War, nineteenth-century America saw massive shifts in immigration, nationalism, science, and religion. Many leaders of long-standing institutions, including schools and churches, found themselves rethinking the roles of these institutions in society, as the United States continued its expansion westward. The American South was soon left to its own governance in the late nineteenth century, and it developed the Jim Crow laws that characterized the region’s fierce hold on white supremacy and economic domination, as northerners looked away and focused on “national” concerns. Among these tectonic shifts, Chopin wrote, setting many of her stories during this period of great transition. Kate Chopin and the City: The New Orleans Stories studies the ways the city appears in her fiction, where the distinctions between city and rural life draw sharp contrasts, even as their characters face ambiguity and uncertainty—harbingers of the modern world that began to dawn at the end of the nineteenth century. The city of New Orleans offers a focused lens for viewing the complexity of Chopin’s characters; it invites readers to peer at Chopin’s depictions of human lives in their vulnerability and triumph, as their stories unfold amid the city’s own history of loss, renewal, redemption, resistance, and metamorphosis.

The New and Improved French City Shaped by the Mississippi River, New Orleans is both old and new, religious and heretical, virtuous and immoral. In the past, it has been a place where at times women and people of color experienced freedoms denied to their counterparts in other areas of the United States, and at other times, they experienced restrictions and violence in greater capacities. New Orleans is America’s “European” city—it is as French, and even as Spanish—as much as it is very peculiarly American. Kate Chopin lived in the city during her early married years, long enough to not only establish her family but to later produce at least sixteen compelling stories about characters who lived amid its streets and shores. Chopin’s New Orleans looked different in many ways from the city founded in 1718 by the French, and the one that was quietly acquired by

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Spain in 1762, when King Louis XV recognized the city would not provide the figurative gold mine the French had initially anticipated. Spain eventually gave New Orleans and the surrounding territory back to the French, but Napoleon sold it soon after to the United States in 1803 via the Louisiana Purchase. Therefore, the area was held by the Spanish as long as the French and has ever since 1803 belonged to the United States—and yet, it is still considered to be a French city. Unlike Detroit and St. Louis, which were also colonial cities of France, New Orleans has retained its French identity. Its French character is indicative of the city’s worldliness: Diane Guenin-Lelle claims that the city’s French identity stems more directly from the settlement of French Canadians, in particular the French Canadian Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienvielle, who established the city and was its champion. The French Canadians were a driving force in the city’s identity, as much as immigrants from the Caribbean, especially Haiti, Central America, in particular Mexico, and South America were (3–5). Regardless of where they originated from, people from a multitude of nations descended upon the southern city on the Gulf; it became a market hub for all kinds of goods, a heartbeat of trade. Shaped by the Mississippi River, the city of New Orleans was conceived as a strategic bastion for trade. First established to facilitate France’s tobacco dependence and shift operations away from England, New Orleans’s location was more “afterthought than design,” as its location at the mouth of the Mississippi River proved to be both strategic and accidental (Powell 60). Its ambitious architects envisioned a French urban center that sought to redefine French class hierarchies and reject the errors of the old social order. Feudal labor and venal practices that formed the structure of France’s old social order would not exist in New Orleans. The architects could not divorce themselves entirely from the notion of social hierarchy, though, and the intentional checkerboard grid that we find in the French Quarter, also called Vieux Carré, had sought to bring order to the classes and allegiance to the French King, Louis XIV (Powell 60–1). And yet the layout of New Orleans, in its checkerboard formation, is actually more reflective of Spain’s colonial operations than it is of French urban planning. Spain used checkboard models for its expansion: “Wherever conquistadors went, towns quickly followed, each with a central plaza flanked by the seats of religious and secular power and centered within a fixed grid” (Powell 63). This was a favored urban organization because of its relative accessibility and advantage, and it stems from Roman military practices. Still, the city’s architects—Louis Pierre LeBlond de La

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Tour, his student Charles Franquet de Chaville, and Adrien de Prauger— had designed in the end defied its initially imagined order, as the French Quarter developed with sixty-six blocks that we see today—far beyond the forty-four they planned (Dejean, Powell 65–66). New Orleans’s street configuration resulted from several forces upon the city’s development. The orderliness of its early settlers branched into an urban landscape shaped by three primary influences: the adjacent bodies of water, the divided parcels of farming land of the eighteenth century, and later the city’s explosive population growth, which lasted through the nineteenth century. Urban historian Scott Bernhard observes: As the order of streets and avenues in New Orleans produced nearly as many contorted and irregular urban blocks as it did regular ones, but as the building stock of the city adapted to the irregularities of the system, valuable landmarks and important urban spaces emerged that helped to lend a revelatory clarity to the more conventional and regular areas of urban growth. (5)

New Orleans is called the “Crescent City” because of how its shape conformed to the sediment brought by the Mississippi River at its edges. Before the human-made levees were made, the river deposited mounds of sediment that rose above the banks, creating higher levels of land. This curve, naturally developed from the river, was where New Orleans’s French Quarter was established. From there, plantations were established along the river, extending from the French Quarter and following the richest land that came from these sediment deposits (Bernhard 5–6). The plantations were shaped like pie slices, extending from the river to the swamp areas, past the arable farmland. These properties were measured in French units of the arpent (roughly 192 feet/58.5  meters). Plantations up from the French Quarter usually measured from three to twenty-three arpents across. The way these lots were parceled placed the plantation house up on the high ground and as close to the river as possible, with work buildings and slave/servant quarters built on the low ground at the back end of the pie slices (Bernhard 6–9). The geographic development and property delineations reflected the racial caste system in the city. In other words, the higher the elevation in New Orleans, historically speaking, the whiter and wealthier its inhabitants: “Whiteness would be assumed as a prerequisite for occupying that physical and metaphorical higher ground. In New Orleans, of course, due to the different codes and laws associated with different slave regimes and to the large number of free

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people of color immigrating to the city, such distinctions could not always be taken for granted” (Wilson 7). Therefore, as New Orleans developed, its landscape was imagined by its white inhabitants to reflect a moral hierarchy. Whereas physically lower, swamp areas of the city were home to people of color and non-Europeans; houses of prostitution and degradation were located “back of town”: The nearer one drew to the areas of town least reclaimed from the surrounding swamps, the stronger the association with license, criminality, and, not coincidentally, non-whiteness. In New Orleans in particular, the combination of cultures, religious practices, and the traditions of hoodoo and voodoo cast the surrounding swamps as picturesque settings for all manner of occult practices. (Wilson 8)

This perception permeated the stories that New Orleans authors produced, especially before the twentieth century, when the trope of the swamp signaled the “antithesis of the urban project, and of civilization, either existing beyond its dominion or representing its degradation and decay” (Wilson 11–12). Eventually when the city’s urban needs outpaced the agrarian needs, the orderly grid of its streets spread over the angles of the pie-shaped plantations, producing “blocks” with triangle and trapezoid forms, as well as dead end streets. To this day, people can determine their direction by looking at the shape of the street they are on, and “one’s sense of direction is linked to the very same geological features that generated the order and pattern of the landscape originally” (Bernhard 12). Direction may be determined by geology and landscape, but for some “New Orleans is a stubborn problem; a site of continuous conflict with nature; a space, it seems, imperfectly claimed from the swamps and ever on the verge of returning to them” (Wilson 1). The landscape of New Orleans is continuously succumbing to its watery nature; in the past, it provided clever secret hideaways for pirates—reflecting, in another way, its predilection for disorder and chaos: Like a palimpsest of ancient writing on parchment in which traces of writing once erased emerge ghost-like from the cellular structure of the lambskin, so the agrarian orders of New Orleans’s territory rise up at the interstitial seams in the superimposed street patterns of the contemporary city. Time and cir-

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cumstance, benign neglect and historical drift have picked away at the edges and gaps between the discrete geometric logics of plantation and platted city, creating a fascinating array of unique instances—fertile ground for exploiting the possibilities of meaningful anomaly. (Bernhard 13)

Later, during the Civil War, Union soldiers would remark on the presence of water everywhere in and around the city. For instance, Charles Musser of the Twenty-Nineth Iowa noted the expanse of Lake Pontchartrain and the desolation of the space around it: “The country between the Lake and the City of New Orleans is nothing but one great Cyprus [sic] swamp, and nine-tenths of the land is under water.” He continued: “The people live in water, work in water, and are a kind of water animal” (qtd. in Scott 56). Still, earlier, and eager to populate its satellite in the “new” world, France sought to accelerate its settlement by forcing its own people to live there. Undesirables—unprotected and underprivileged—were sent to New Orleans. Forced marriages and criminals populated the early city. By some estimations, about 25 percent of the men who colonized New Orleans hailed as prisoners, smugglers, and military shirkers. Early settlers complained about the new arrivals, and Louisiana became a less desirable place to migrate to. In addition to forcing certain types of French citizens, slaves from Africa were also forced to come to Louisiana and New Orleans. In 1707, nearby Bienville established a slave market with traders from Cuba (Powell 69–70). France abandoned its stakes in the colony after a 1791 slave rebellion in Saint Domingue that drove out the French. This prompted Napoleon Bonaparte in 1803 to offer the Louisiana colony to the US. By the opening of the nineteenth century, native Creoles, the French-speaking Catholics whose families came from different French- and Spanish-­ speaking areas and whose family racial make-ups were varied, commingled and lived across New Orleans together, slaves living closely to slaveowners. By 1809, more than 9000 Saint Domingue refugees came to the city, increasing its population to twice its size. As a long-term result, and not to underestimate the extreme human cost and practice of cruelty that underwrote the waves of new immigrants, New Orleans’ French-speaking and Afro-Caribbean culture expanded, and the constellation of ethnic and linguistic residential patterns became further established (Campanella 704–5).

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Slavery and New Orleans The establishment of human slavery was a primary driver of the New Orleans economy. There were a couple aspects of the Louisiana slave trade that distinguished it from other slave trade hubs in the country. Like many things in the state, these distinctions stemmed from the physical landscape. Certainly, the shapes of the plantations were an influence, as they were sliced into wedge shapes, ranging from two to eight arpents in width along the river’s edge and stretching up to forty arpents into backswamp area. However, in New Orleans, plantations extended city life and later would become the foundations for its suburbs. But the other notable distinction of the New Orleans slave trade was that its growth and expansion outpaced the slave market in the English colonies north of it. There, slavery began comparatively slower, as it developed through the threshold of the West Indies. By contrast, the Louisiana slave trade exploded, beginning with Native American slaves and then followed by Africans, but nearly overnight it developed an established market. As soon as slaves came off of ships, they were often forced into labor, constructing the city. Many were skilled in farming, crafts, and boating, and they brought their competencies to the area and essentially saved the people there from washing away and from starvation. As historian Lawrence Powell notes: “France may have founded Louisiana as we know it, but it was slaves from Senegal and Congo who laid the foundation” (73–4). Slaves built the levees to prevent the city from succumbing to flooding—an essential element of city planning that to this day protects New Orleans against the catastrophic damage caused by hurricanes. Thus, through imperialism, colonialism, and human slavery, French, Spanish, and multiple African influences shaped the early years of New Orleans. The watery nature of the city reflected the mixing and disappearance of multiple cultures and peoples over the years: “Adding another layer of complexity and contradiction is the fact that New Orleans swamps cannot and could never, at least since the beginning of the colonial era, fit the easy, reductive binary between civilization and untamed nature that informed much swamp discourse” (Wilson 3). So it should not be a surprise that the next generation, descendants of the settlers, developed their own distinctive, collective identity—specifically Creole, further distinguishing the inhabitants from their European origins and influences. Chaos and depravity characterized the city, turning from the French’s original motives for establishing New Orleans. So there was little pushback

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in Paris when the French decided to give Louisiana to Spain at the end of the Seven Years War. As a result, there was much “unresolved debate over whether Vieux Carré [the French Quarter] should be characterized as French or Spanish. The truth is, it is both—and yet neither, because it is a blend of various building traditions, European as well as African, each adapting in its own way, often through cultural borrowings, to the construction challenges thrown up by a sultry, semiaquatic environment” (Powell 203). New Orleans’ massive cultural fusion fed and was fed by the wealth amassed through its markets and the trade enabled by its ports. By the 1820s, the city had become a wealthy and powerful hub, and by the 1830s, with the rise of the steamboat and then the railroad, the city had undergone exponential development. By 1840, a decade before Kate Chopin was born, while the rest of the nation had plunged into depression following the Panic of 1837, New Orleans enjoyed its status as the third-largest city, very close to the second-largest city of Baltimore, according to the United States census (Sublette 286). Parallel to the development of the city—and for a while, the United States—was the continued expansion of the slave trade. New technology sped up the transition in agricultural production, shifting from the colonial era’s inland production of tobacco and indigo to plantation production of cotton and sugarcane—which directly impacted the New Orleans economy. These agricultural shifts consequently affected the slave trade: in the 1830s, the US slave trade had increased by 84 percent. Prices on slaves grew by nearly 30 percent between the years 1830 and 1833, and then prices increased twofold by the year 1836. Located at a key port, the New Orleans slave market was central to the rise in prices and to the US market itself. The slave trade in the city was predicated on cruelty and violence, and it was out in the open. Whereas in places like Richmond, Virginia, traders kept the market largely out of sight, New Orleans kept an open market in public space. There, 135,000 human beings were sold within the years 1804–1862 (Schermerhorn 29–31): New Orleans was a cosmopolitan crossroads of Atlantic cultures, dynamic and creative. And the theatrics of the slave market were an expression of that creativity, an ongoing tragedy in which the enslavers’ dreams and aspirations were paid for in the actual blood, rape, toil, grief, terror, anguish, and trauma of African-descended people. And like the city’s theaters, the slave market’s venues ranged from the modest to the magnificent. (Schermerhorn 37)

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The slave trade sought to deprive people of their humanity to present the idea of “commodity” in order to meet the market demand for enslaved labor; such was the demand that the population of African Americans shifted from the Upper South to the Deep South and delta area, causing families to be split, separating husbands and wives, parents and children. Slave traders sought adult slaves in their prime years—young and very old people were not preferred: “That intergenerational theft was remorseless, taking one generation from another over several decades and scattering African-descended members of families across the American South, many of them by way of New Orleans” (Schermerhorn 35–6). “New Orleans” became synonymous with the slave trade; one out of every five slaves who were sold in the South was sold in the city’s slave market, making New Orleans a key player in the nation’s slave trade and hence in its political and economic arena.

New Immigrants and New Technologies The 1830s saw an increase in Anglo-Americans looking for economic advancement in the Mississippi Valley, and they brought the English language as well as a distinctly American (read: new) style to trade and culture to New Orleans. These new settlers sought the upper areas of the city or areas near Faubourg Saint Marie, which is the Central Business District now. By this time, there were more English last names than French in those areas, which became known as “St. Mary” or “the American Quarter.” With the establishment of English speakers, the distinctions between an Anglo upper-city and a Creole lower-city became more pronounced and altered the cultural map of New Orleans to this day (Campanella 705). The development of the Anglo settlement further distinguished the slave trade in New Orleans from other areas in the US and brought a unique cultural geography to the city, where slaves often lived very closely to the enslavers, even in adjacent spaces. While similar patterns appeared eventually in cities such as Charleston, Washington, DC, and Baltimore, this racial intermingling and proximity also produced a significant population of free people of color who outnumbered the number of slaves in the Creole part of New Orleans. This pattern was the opposite, however, on the Anglo side of the city, where there were more slaves than free people of color. As a result, multi-tiered racial caste systems arose on both sides of the city, with the Creole lower city drawing more southern Europeans and

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people from the Caribbean and Latin America who came to New Orleans. And from 1837 to the Civil War, the city saw more immigrants than any city in the South; by comparison, New York City was the only other urban center that brought more immigrants than New Orleans at the time (Campanella 706). Between the 1820s and 1850s, large portion of the immigrant population were from Ireland and Germany. These were mostly labor-class people who sought homes at the semirural border of the city, where they worked manual labor jobs on the waterfront and on public infrastructure projects on the canals, sewers, and railroads. From these immigrant populations grew social and religious organizations that brought more Irish and German settlers, further enriching the cultural geography of the area: Throughout the periphery, Irish and German immigrants settled, forming a galaxy-like pattern of greater and lesser concentrations, with no intense clusters and no complete absences. Ethnic intermixing prevailed markedly over segregation. Because of that the location of the legendary Irish Channel—a famous neighborhood of working-class immigrants sprawled nebulously along the uptown riverfront—remains a hotly debated subject locally, and why no particular neighborhood claims a German sense of historical place. It is difficult to pin down the exact location of a dispersed phenomenon. (Campanella 707)

The multiethnic quality of the city’s population was unlike anything seen before by the Union soldiers who accompanied Maj. Gen. Benjamin F. Butler, as he took control of New Orleans on May 1, 1862, following the decimation of the southern navy fleet. Under Butler’s renown iron fist, New Orleans residents bristled and expressed overt and covert resistance, but these expressions were usually short-lived due to Butler’s lack of tolerance for anti-Union sentiment and to the sheer exhaustion and hunger of city dwellers. The soldiers’ impressions of the city reflect the epitome of their experiences of the South as a kind of “foreign country” and as “a strange and exotic locale whose slave-based economy made it the antithesis of the North” (Mitchell qtd. in Scott 46). New Orleans, in particular, presented a totally new kind of space for the Union soldiers, many of whom had never observed so many ethnic and linguistic differences in one place, not to mention the Catholic churches and especially both Black slaves and freedmen living in close proximity (Scott 46). Soldiers simply had never seen such mixing of ethnicities and races. Additionally, during

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the Civil War and while Butler established control over the city, the impoverished residents made deep impressions on the soldiers: the war had taken its toll: The desolation of New Orleans was also evident in the residents themselves, many of whom lacked daily provisions. Several Union were taken aback by the poverty and hunger they encountered. Pvt. Luther Fairbanks of the Thirty-First Massachusetts informed his sister that some people were in such “a starving condition” that they “pick up the pieces of crackers that are thrown into the street.” Soldiers delivering foodstuffs during the early weeks of occupation were sometimes overwhelmed by the throng. (Scott 49)

Even affluent residents who did not have enough food and at times would send their slaves to purchase crackers in order to survive. Within this decimated context, Butler sought to “redeem” the city and “to drive the spirit of rebellion from the ‘conquered city,’ regardless of how its inhabitants felt about the matter” (Scott 50). While many white New Orleans men were forced into obedience, the city’s white women were sometimes more vocal in their expressions of resistance. The Union soldiers were often left alone by the residents, but some protested the hostile treatment they received from the city’s women. Finally, on May 15, 1862, after a New Orleans woman spit into the faces of two northern soldiers, Butler decreed General Orders no. 28, which ordered “that any woman whose words, actions, or attitudes demeaned a U.S. soldier would ‘be treated as a woman of the town ply her avocation’ ” (Scott 51). Butler’s order angered New Orleans inhabitants and caught the attention of many across the country, which forced him to defend his order and its language. Regardless of the outrage, the decree put an end to New Orleans’s women’s insults directed toward Union soldiers. Between this decree, the insistence that residence take a pledge of loyalty to the Union, and other measures, Butler earned a harsh reputation but was eventually replaced by another, less firm general, who inadvertently enabled New Orleans residents’ resistance to flare up against the northern occupation. But before and after the Civil War, the waves of people that moved to New Orleans enriched its social and cultural life, which had a direct effect on its arts as well as its complex racial hierarchy. By 1860, Black residents numbered 25,423, with 14,484 of the residents living as slaves, but following the Civil War, the number increased to 50,456 by 1870 due to the

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number of freedmen who came to New Orleans. They were poor and often bore the brunt of racial harassment; they moved to the riskier parts of the city. Eventually, Black working-class people would move to areas along the river, which enabled them to walk to affluent areas for work (Campanella 708). The more financially stable Creoles of color still lived in the lower part of New Orleans; they were in better positions than freedmen who had populated the city, but still worse off than white Creoles. And Creole conceptions of a racial “gradient” among Black and white people became more distinctive and reflective of the nation’s binary conception of race (Campanella 708). Years before, during the Spanish occupation and prior to the hardening binary that emerged, New Orleans had developed a unique racial caste system. Charleston, South Carolina, was the only city in the United States that resembled something like the tripartite system New Orleans residents maintained. Elsewhere in the South, race was assigned by bloodlines and relied on the “one-drop rule” that placed an individual in the category of the Black parent(s), regardless of the presence of a white parent or mixed-­ race parents. What had emerged in New Orleans was a three-tiered caste system, which by the early nineteenth century had begun to displace the binaries of the colonial system that strictly separated white from Black. Instead, a three-part system developed and was influenced by the laws and oversight of the Spanish: A mixed-race population was forever spilling into the interstitial spaces, and obliging the Spanish bureaucrats charged with keeping track of it all—the census takers and notaries on the one hand, and thousands of parish priests on the other, all keeping racially distinct baptismal and marriage records—to devise, on the fly, cognitive labels for new people. Because classification is at the crux of any social hierarchy based on the distribution of differential rights and privileges, colonial priests and bureaucrats came up with a new pecking order: the Sistema de castas or “system of castes.” (Powell 294)

Race did not necessarily get assigned at birth and stay that way through the course of a lifetime, however. In New Orleans, racial identification could be altered at different rites where documentation would be produced: baptism or marriage, for instance, and it could be changed by who told the priest or the notary at the ceremony. One effect of the caste system was to divide enslaved people from freedmen in the city, although the separation was not hard and fast. Powell describes it as “more like a

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drifting apart, a distancing. The two populations continued to commingle in a port city where physical and social mobility was as normal as mid-­ afternoon summer downpours” (303). Waves of people coming to New Orleans also reshaped its demographics as industrialization changed how and where people worked. The working poor moved from the borders of the city to its inner spaces, after the affluent started to abandon them, beginning in the 1830s and continuing after the Civil War. The wealthy left behind large homes that would become tenements for the incoming immigrant populations. Streetcars hastened the departure of the wealthy, and areas along Uptown and Esplanade Avenue became more fashionable suburban spaces (Campanella 708). Market areas drew Russian and Polish Orthodox Jewish, Sicilian, Irish, and Chinese immigrants. Campanella indicates that in the late nineteenth century, immigrant settlements formed concentric circles around the inner area of the city. He explains that the “immigrant belt” provided a more tolerable and affordable space to live in, but not without many of the annoyances of urban living, such as overcrowding, noisiness, and criminal activity. The immigrant belt stretched from the lower French Quarter and Faubourg Marigny (known as Little Saxony) to Faubourg Tremé, the Third Ward (known as Chinatown), Dryades Street, and the Irish Channel at the edge of the river (708–9). In addition, the music that emerged from New Orleans over the centuries reflected its unique character, drawing from the synthesis of multiple cultures and ethnicities, and developing its own rich musical traditions. Prior to the Civil War, African slaves would return after mass to the Plaza d’Armas, a public market space where people went to see and be seen. White people called this place the Place du Cirque (“Circus Park”), but Black people referred to it as “Congo Circus,” “Congo Plain,” or “Congo Square” (Powell 271). Here, people danced the African ring dances, which were slow-moving dances of women moving to the beats on homemade instruments. This kind of dancing would worry white people in the northern states when slavery was still permitted there, because white people feared revolt. Whereas in the southern areas, including the Caribbean, this kind of dancing did not worry white people, and New Orleans permitted the dancing in Congo Square and in many different places throughout the city. The city’s ruling class could never fully extinguish the creativity of its slaves, and only during moments of crisis would it manage to crack down with more control. Development of New Orleans’s musical tradition has been a unique contribution to the cultural history of the United

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States, and the dancing and music at Congo Square played no small part in this development; as Powell has noted, “There was something singular in the sheer intensity of the African American cultural creation happening there” (273–4). Later, New Orleans’s Black communities developed jazz music and have been central to its history and legacy. Antebellum and postbellum history demonstrates that uptown English-speaking Black residents and downtown French-speaking Black residents had grown closer together, although there is some disagreement about the reasons why, as some scholars attribute this union to post-Civil War Jim Crow laws. However, jazz scholar Jerah Johnson argues that these laws, enacted in the 1890s and into the twentieth century, had little bearing on the cultural developments among Anglo and French African residents of New Orleans and the development of jazz. On the contrary, Johnson explains: Indeed, when Jim Crow finally took hold of New Orleans and drew a rigid segregation line through the population, the city’s long tradition of easy interaction of peoples was seriously altered. And New Orleans jazz, far from prospering in the newly segregated society, almost died. Full segregation took hold in New Orleans not in the 1890s, but only around the time of World War I. During the two decades between 1900 and 1920—and after the state adopted a new constitution in 1898 that struck from the voter rolls ninety-five percent of blacks and twenty-three percent of poor whites— along series of Jim Crow laws and local ordinances were enacted. (249)

The segregation of public spaces forced musicians to abandon the city, driving big names such as King Oliver, Jelly Roll Morton, and Louis Armstrong to the northern cities of Chicago and New York, as well as Sidney Bechet across the ocean to France. Following the departure of jazz’s major leaders from New Orleans to more liberal cities, New Orleans jazz began to diminish (Johnson 250).

The Literary City Writers throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries faired differently, and they continued to be inspired and to produce notable texts, many of which have made their way into the American canon. When Walt Whitman left New York City in 1848, prior to his ascent as one of the most prominent American poets, he took a job at the New Orleans Crescent

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and the three months he spent in the city would forever be “transformative,” as they “gave him a sense of the vastness of the country that he would draw on for the rest of his life” (Folsom 43–4). His 1848 stay had been Whitman’s first venture away from Long Island and New York, but the city had similar effects throughout the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, producing renown Black Creole authors such as Washington Cable and white Creole authors such as Alfred Mercier, Charles Gayarré, Adrien Rouquette, and Grace King (who was not born Creole). Cable’s first two books, published in 1879 and 1880, are considered to be among his most important, a collection of stories, Old Creole Days, and a novel, The Grandissimes, respectively (Pugh 69). King and these other writers originally published their work in French, producing a wide range of texts: fiction, historical work, drama, poetic verse, political brochures, operas, religious sermons, speeches, and newspaper contributions (Fertel 72). Eventually, these authors and others had to abandon writing in French, as the end of the nineteenth century saw English begin to predominate. Other writers such as Lafcadio Hearn found New Orleans and were transformed by the city. Hearn, for example, came to the city in 1878 as a journalist, reported nothing he was on location to report on, and wound up writing travel essays based on the city. New Orleans transformed Hearn from reporter to novelist, and he wrote his first novel, Chita: A Memory of Last Island, about a narrative he had heard while on vacation on Grand Isle. Hearn found continual inspiration to write and to create in his adopted environs: From his first days there, Hearn embraced New Orleans and all Louisiana as a beautiful but expiring culture. He was the first to do so, and he thereby inspired a literary school that gave rise in turn to a tourist industry. When he eventually realized that modernity was taking deep roots in the city, he fled first to the countryside and then to some of the most backward islands of the Caribbean. (Starr 96)

In addition to his novel Chita: A Memory of Last Island, he wrote multiple texts, including a cookbook, a Creole book of proverbs, ghost narratives, and more. Lafcadio Hearn, like George Washington Cable, were some of the authors and artists who contributed to a developing circle of creatives and their connections who critiqued and celebrated the work of its members. Parallel to this burgeoning group of mostly male writers and artists was a

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group of women writers developing on their own, as writing provided an acceptable form of income for middle- or upper-class women. During the postbellum period, New Orleans had reeled from hunger and poverty resulting from the war, as well as Reconstruction efforts and the depression during the 1870s. By the next decade, the city began to recover and many women writers began to find a creative home in New Orleans and enjoyed subsequent success, including Mary Ashley Townsend, Eliza Jane Nicholson, Mollie E. Moore Davis, Julia K. Wetherill Baker, Cecilia Viets Jamison, Ruth McEnery Stuart, Elizabeth Bisland, Grace King, Martha Smallwood (whose alias was Catherine Cole), and Elizabeth Meriwether Gilmer (whose alias was Dorothy Dix). Scholar Patricia Brady attributes their success to multiple causes, among them the nationwide popularity of local color fiction, in addition to the perception of exoticism: Southern themes were immensely fashionable during the late nineteenth century. Losing the war, the South for many years won the literary battles. The lifestyle of a highly romanticized, mythologized South appeared as exotic to national audiences as that of Fiji, and Southern genre fiction was the natural medium for most of these women. A ready market was there for dialect pieces—both black and poor white—and plantation and Creole stories. (148–9)

Kate Chopin and New Orleans When Kate Chopin began writing, she found a receptive market for local color fiction. Set mostly in rural Louisiana or New Orleans, her stories were drawn from her memory of living in the South. Chopin had first visited the city in the midst of its decline; in the spring of 1869, the spring oblivious to human suffering, Chopin appeared to have seen and experienced New Orleans through a romanticized lens of the changing seasons. She fell in love with the city: she took in her surroundings and described in her diary “a dear little house near Esplanade St. a house with an immensity of garden” (Miscellany 64). She appreciated New Orleans, unaware that she would set her most famous work, The Awakening, on the very same Esplanade Street, nearly three decades after her first visit. Of the city, Chopin wrote charmingly of its cleanliness and natural profusion of flowers and fruit (Toth, “Kate Chopin’s New Orleans Years”). Later in At Fault, she would describe the landscape of the city: “The air was filled with the spring and all its promises. Full with the sound of it, the smell of it, the

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deliciousness of it. Such sweet air; soft and strong, like the touch of a brave woman’s hand” (CW 869). Chopin’s early, favorable response to New Orleans echoes through the stories and sketches she set in the city—sixteen including her 1899 novel, The Awakening; however, the years she spent as a resident of New Orleans are not well recorded. Chopin scholar Emily Toth notes that no documents from schools or churches, not a letter or a diary, exists. Her life, Toth indicates, was “mysterious” as she “led a quiet private life,” although, as early Chopin scholar Daniel Rankin has written, she seemed to like to have fun, and “she liked to do imitations of animals and birds and peoples, and [her husband] Oscar used to egg her on” (Toth, “Kate Chopin’s New Orleans Years”). She and Oscar did not live in the French Quarter, but they spent four years living at 443 Magazine Street, followed by a move to a home at the corner of Pitt Street and Constantinople Street, and then to 209 Louisiana Avenue, which is the only house they lived in that still exists (Toth, “Kate Chopin’s New Orleans Years”). She lived in New Orleans as a young mother between the years 1870 and 1879, before she and her husband moved their family to Natchitoches Parish. When her husband died in 1883, leaving her a widow at thirty-two, she eventually moved herself and their six children back to her home city of St. Louis, Missouri. In St. Louis, Chopin then began her writing career, but she set most of her stories in New Orleans or Natchitoches Parish. Like her well-known protagonist, Edna Pontellier, Chopin enjoyed walking alone in New Orleans. Its residents and culture appealed to her sense of wonder, and walking gave her opportunities for peoplewatching among the rich diversity of the city. She was fascinated by New Orleans customs and people: the proud and beautiful Creoles of color, the gris gris and voodoo. New Orleans was the home of Marie Laveau, the Voodoo Queen, famous for her magical powers, her love powders and her snake rituals. By 1873 when the Daily Picayune described her monster serpent, named Zombi, seventy-nine-year-old Marie Laveau was said to be the best-known of three hundred Voodoos in New Orleans, among whom were, “strange to relate, at least eight or ten white women who partake as the others in the hellish orgies. (Toth, “Kate Chopin’s New Orleans Years”)

The colorful lives of New Orleans residents, such as Marie Laveau and others, fed Chopin’s curiosity and interest in human lives. Walking provided her with endless opportunities to observe, as well as exercise

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freedom. She walked also with Oscar, first while they were on their European honeymoon, where she even walked alone sometimes in Zurich. She knew that walking by herself distinguished her from other women abroad in cities, as well as at home in the United States; in her private diary, Chopin says, “I wonder what people thought of me—a young woman strolling about alone” (Miscellany 81). Whatever they wondered did not interfere with her constitutional habit, as she moved around New Orleans as a newly married woman, either with Oscar or on her own, discovering different areas of the city. Scholar Helen Taylor points out that Chopin was sensitive to common perceptions of what people thought about women walking alone for good reason: “It is worth remembering that the blurring of definition between the respectable woman and the prostitute on the street applied more to young women. The sexuality of mature middle-­class, especially married, women was less visible; they were therefore allowed some access to public space, something Chopin’s work and private writings clearly celebrate.” Chopin Scholar Barbara Ewell also points out that the author saw the significance of New Orleans in terms of its being an “alternate space.” Its value, Ewell argues, derived from its ability to provide perspectives: “Even walking around, an exercise in which women did not usually indulge, offered opportunities to see something different, to recognize other possibilities” (“Placing the City”). Surely drawn from her own experience, Chopin endowed Edna Pontellier with a similar drive to move about the city on foot and unencumbered by convention. Returning to the city from the summer at Grand Isle, Edna’s life expands in New Orleans, and “[o]ne could suggest that Edna’s progress within the city is signalled through her several walks. Emotionally if not physically alone, unattached and relatively anonymous … , Edna explores the meaning of femininity within an urban context that foregrounds its sexualized character” (Taylor). While Taylor’s claim applies to The Awakening, we could extend this point—the exploration of femininity within an urban context—to multiple Chopin stories, which is, of course, the occasion of this project. The city, in other words, offered Chopin an opportunity to “see” womanhood distinctly within a context that afforded women greater freedoms than they experienced in more rural or vacation settings. Ewell has written about how the author leveraged the idea of New Orleans as a place in her work. Chopin used the city in many of the popular, appealing ways—well beyond the ways the local color subgenre drew from southern landscapes and southern lives—but she also used the city as a lens to view and a way to describe experiences, especially of women

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(Ewell, “Placing the City”). Ewell makes an excellent point, which easily extends to say that New Orleans offered Chopin a landscape and a language to speak to the fine, unmoving, external limits of women’s autonomy—their physical freedom, their abilities to make their own decisions, and their capacity to know and dream their own dreams. Ewell grounds her claim in the idea that “Place in this sense describes where and ultimately who we are: the perspective and point of view from which we see our environment, our physical as well as our psychological and cultural realities [, but every] perspective, every point of view, offers only a partial vision of reality, and only by risking that partiality can we even begin to assess the illusions of wholeness” (Ewell, “Placing the City”). How do Chopin’s characters know themselves—how do we, as readers, know them?—they arrive, they leave, they grieve, they regret, and they love in the city of New Orleans. The city offered Chopin the grace of perspective; its lens enabled her to allow her women characters to see who they are beyond the sole reference of the self. Kate Chopin and the City: The New Orleans Stories focuses on sixteen stories, including Chopin’s 1899 novel The Awakening, exploring the contours of the city as it appears in these stories and tracing the journeys many of her characters make within and outside the city. They travel by foot, streetcar, or carriage, their journeys metaphors for the trajectories of their lives, expressions for the perspective Chopin offers on humanity itself. While many of Chopin’s stories include French elements typically found in Louisiana in the late nineteenth century, following this introduction, Chap. 2, “The French-American City: the Two Worlds of Chopin’s Fiction,” will focus on those elements as they appear in three specific stories, “A Matter of Prejudice,” “The Return of Alcibiade,” and “Cavanelle.” These stories foreground the preeminence of French culture and language in New Orleans, a characteristic of the city that not only distinguished it from other American cities, but that also distinguished specific areas of the city—notably the French and American Quarters—and delineated what was “old” from what was new at the end of the nineteenth century. In these three stories, characters grapple with the tectonic shift in culture and prosperity that followed the Civil War, as they live at the edge of the encroaching new age of modernity. Some reconcile themselves to the new world, and some cannot, but all find themselves amid the divides of French and American culture, as New Orleans sought to assert itself in the postwar economy.

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The third chapter, “Mobility and Autonomy: Chopin’s Women Characters around Town,” follows as it traces several women characters’ journeys from the country—the plantation, particularly—to the city of New Orleans. Many of Chopin’s characters, women and men, travel to and from the city, many choosing to stay there and many electing to return to the plantation. This chapter extends the exploration of women’s urban mobility to the examination of selected women characters who come of age—mentally, emotionally, and/or physically—within the city, after they leave home in the outlying rural areas. In these stories, Chopin presents several young women who begin as independent-minded, almost to the point of sheer rebellion in certain instances. This chapter examines the stories, “Charlie” (1900), “Athénaïse” (1896), and “A Respectable Woman” (1894), as their protagonists, each of whom has men who love her, travel to New Orleans, where they learn to exert their agency and to make their own choices about their lives. While in several of the stories, notably “Charlie,” discussed in Chap. 3, depict women characters whose agency is expressed through consumerism as much as it is through travel and choice, Chap. 4, “City Business: Commerce and the Short Fiction,” shines a bright light on the multiple Chopin stories that feature the commerce of New Orleans as a central, vibrant element of city life. This chapter will highlight stories such as “A Pair of Silk Stockings,” “A Sentimental Soul,” “No-Account Creole,” and “Dr. Chevalier’s Lie,” among others, as commodities such as stockings, food, newspapers, and sex shape the lives of the characters. In these stories, money ebbs and flows like the nearby Mississippi River, both powerful forces upon the human lives within the city boundaries, as well as the city itself. Chapter 5 narrows the focus to Chopin’s Bayou St. John stories, featuring “A Lady of Bayou St. John” and its later, predated partner story, “La Belle Zoraïde,” as well as “Nég Creole.” Set at various times, spanning before, during, and after the Civil War, these stories take place in Bayou St. John, an area central to the thriving commercial and cultural life of New Orleans. While the stories are set at different times, in fact “A Lady of Bayou St. John” was published slightly earlier than “La Belle Zoraïde” but actually takes place in reversed chronological order, these three stories, read together, speak to a particularly timeless quality of New Orleans. Chopin leverages the narratives in these stories to demonstrate the very specific ways the past is ever present in the city, as the characters articulate

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the longing for autonomy—and in “A Lady of Bayou St. John,” Madame Deslisle’s achievement of it. “La Belle Zoraïde” features the story of an enslaved Black mother who loses her mind and her complacency after her newborn baby is taken from her in a vicious effort to reduce Zoraïde’s self-will. This story in particular is one of the few that depicts the suffering Chopin perceived among slaves, and it particularly focuses on the rending of biological and emotional ties, even as it also serves as a harsh metaphor for women’s general lack of independence. Finally, Chap. 6, “  ‘Her Position in the Universe’: The Awakening’s Edna Pontellier and New Orleans,” examines all of the elements of travel, consumerism, and autonomy that appear in earlier stories within the context of Chopin’s 1899 masterpiece, The Awakening. While several allusions to New Orleans appear in her first and only other published novel, At Fault (1890), these are minimal and offer contrasts to the plantation as well as St. Louis in the novel. Whereas in The Awakening, Chopin devotes twenty-two—a majority—of the chapters to protagonist Edna Pontellier’s experiences in New Orleans. In this novel, the primary elements expressed in earlier chapters foreground Edna’s interior transformation, from a dullish married woman to an alive, interested woman seeking autonomy and freedom from the constraints of her family life. In the course of the novel, as she tests out her freedom on the streets of New Orleans, she ironically begins to lose interest and connection to linear time, as the city thrusts her into profound knowledge of herself, her life, and the illusion of time. The Awakening, like the stories discussed in the other chapters here, illuminates the centrality of the city of New Orleans: it is the only city where Edna, Charlie, Athenaïse, Zoraïde, and others could live out their stories; it is the only city that Chopin could use to articulate the very specific trajectory of her characters. Even as she appreciated cities and had visited several very large cities, Chopin continued to return to New Orleans as a key, imaginative location for her characters. Kate Chopin and the City: The New Orleans Stories is indebted to earlier research by multiple established scholars. While there are a handful of articles written about Chopin and New Orleans, there is no other booklength study about this topic. However, three notable articles have had a profound influence on the direction of this study. Barbara Ewell’s “Placing the City: Kate Chopin’s Fiction and New Orleans,” which appeared in Southern Studies in 1997, Tom Bonner’s “New Orleans and Its Writers:

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Burdens of Place,” which was published in The Mississippi Quarterly in 2010, and Helen Taylor’s “Walking through New Orleans: Kate Chopin and the Female Flâneur,” which was published in Southern Quarterly in 1999, address Chopin’s work within the context of New Orleans. Over the past two 200, many writers have set their narratives in New Orleans, and certainly there are journal articles and books devoted to their study. Most recently, T.R.  Johnson’s edited volume, New Orleans: A Literary History (2019), presents essays on a multitude of authors, including an essay on Chopin by Emily Toth. Toth’s essay, “Kate Chopin, Edna Pontellier, and the Predicament of the Intellectual Woman in New Orleans,” offers a focused discussion on the biographical parallels between Chopin and her famous protagonist. Amid this rich context, Kate Chopin and the City: The New Orleans Stories takes its place as an in-depth study of Chopin’s depictions of and references to New Orleans, which celebrate the vibrancy of this unique American city, but also illustrate the complex, interdependent relationships defined within its coded system of racial, gendered, and class designations. These stories feature canny depictions of the complexity of human struggles for freedom as well as love in this nineteenth-century southern city. While Chopin has been highly regarded as a local color writer and especially as a feminist literary icon, Kate Chopin and the City shows how the author’s New Orleans stories also point to her sophistication as an author who perceived the shifting literary landscape—and the dramatically changing worlds itself.

CHAPTER 2

The French-American City: The Two Worlds of Chopin Fiction

New Orleans is well known as the “Queen of the Mississippi,” but it is also known as the most European city of America. Much of that is due to its multiplicity of cultures stemming from European origins—and particularly dating from its early settlers’ origins from Spain and then France. Although the influx of immigrants over the centuries competed for space and linguistic and cultural influence, French culture found a home in the city. There is no way to overestimate the influence French culture and language had on Kate Chopin. Given her own French family ties, it is not surprising that this French influence appears in much of Kate Chopin’s short stories and even in her two published novels, At Fault and The Awakening. Her father, Thomas O’Flaherty, an Irish immigrant, new to St. Louis, married Eliza Faris, a native St. Louisian whose lineage drew from France. Chopin’s maternal grandmother, who took on the responsibility of her French education, tutored Chopin until it was time for her to enter school at the St. Louis Academy of the Sacred Heart in 1855. One of the most influential people in Chopin’s life was her maternal great-grandmother, Madame Victoire Verdon Charleville. Chopin grew up bilingual, speaking French and English at home. Later in her life, she would earn money by translating contemporary authors’ works, such as the fiction of Guy de Maupassant—whose stories would also have a heavy influence on shaping her aesthetic sensibilities. But Madame Charleville

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 H. Ostman, Kate Chopin and the City, American Literature Readings in the 21st Century, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-44300-8_2

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would influence her great-granddaughter in ways that might resemble children of immigrant parents today: Chopin would become able to see in multiple ways, through the lenses of American eyes and of French eyes, a blended perspective that offered her unique depth and insight into the human soul. The New Orleans that Chopin knew in the 1870s was decidedly French, leaving an impression upon her that permeated so many of her stories. This chapter begins with a discussion of New Orleans as imagined by Kate Chopin: a French city full of paradox. On the one hand, the cityscape provides structure and familiarity to her characters’ lives; on the other hand, it provides a glimpse into an America that teetered on the precipice of modernity, the edge of massive change. For Chopin, the stories that reflect New Orleans, reflect a city that is French, married to the past, but edging toward a new and different future. In this regard, the city is in essence an expression of timelessness, a notion that speaks to Chopin’s vision and understanding of the city’s depth and complexities. Unlike her local color fiction, which focuses on the life outside of the city, the country elements of plantations and small-town living, the city fiction—and particularly the short fiction—offers readers an insight into Chopin’s vision of the encroachment of modernity. This is a phenomenon she articulates at times through the contrast between French and American culture in New Orleans. Notably, several Chopin stories exhibit particularly French elements; this chapter will focus on three in particular, “A Matter of Prejudice,” “The Return of Alcibiade,” and “Cavanelle,” as they demonstrate the ways French culture predominated the New Orleans of Chopin’s imagination, as well as articulate the changing cultural landscape of the city. In these stories, her characters drink French drinks such as fleur de Laurier; they sing French nationalist songs, and, above all, they speak French fluently. She leveraged this setting and its characters to also show us a world changing, one that offers space to its woman characters, one that offers a place where they could choose how their lives might unfold, where they are the actors and not simply the receivers of action, where they are not simply a man’s wife or daughter, but much more and fully human to boot. Last, her use of the setting also reflects the particularly European character of New Orleans, setting it apart from every other major city in the United States during the nineteenth century. We begin the discussion of Chopin’s New Orleans fiction with a focus on these three short stories because they also enable readers to see the physical city that Chopin saw and remembered as she wrote. Recall that

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she wrote about New Orleans and Louisiana from memory—she began writing for publication after she had left Louisiana, after her husband Oscar’s death, and in St. Louis again, three years after her mother’s death. Her first published work was a piano polka, “Lilia,” titled for her daughter and published in 1888. Her first stories began to see print by the middle of 1889. In her New Orleans stories, we see real street names delineating the ethnic worlds of the city; we see characters, stores, cathedrals, and an opera house that Chopin knew from her New Orleans days. Specific references to places in the city ground the stories in a realistic rendering of urban life: “The recurrence of such well-known places invokes the tangible detail that, on the one hand, provided Chopin’s audiences with the titillation of local color and regional difference they craved, and, on the other, grounded her fiction in place—what Georgia writer Flannery O’Connor called the ‘concrete particulars of a life that [the writer] can make believable’  ” (Ewell, “Placing the City” 122). The plausibility of Chopin’s details, the signifiers of New Orleans, enable us to focus on the characters, as they form the currents in the river of life as it sweeps through and around the city. The real, tangible elements of Chopin’s urban stories shift the readers’ focus to the characters, particularly the women characters, as they encounter a world of oppositions. Many of those characters understand themselves through the context of the city after they have left it. Barbara Ewell speaks to this understanding in terms of perspective and its link to “place”: “Such a departure clearly implies risk … . But if we can take that risk, as Chopin’s characters often do, we can also begin to recognize the relativity of all places: the understanding that while some place is essential, and every place is unique, no place is absolute” (“Placing the City”). The perspective Chopin’s characters gain from departure—and absence, loss, as well—provides a foundation for viewing the trajectory of her women characters as they live within the complexity and contrasts of New Orleans—certainly a metaphor for the complex lives many of them demonstrate in her stories. In Chopin’s fiction, late nineteenth-century New Orleans comes to life, and in the particular short stories discussed in this chapter, its undeniable French elements emerge, revealing a city caught in time and spanning the breadth of the Atlantic Ocean to imagined European origins. Chopin’s short fiction found a receptive market in her day, although by her death in 1904, her popularity was on the decline. But her success was in part due to the synergy of the short fiction market. She was able to publish her stories in the 1880s and 1890s, when thousands of periodicals

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were accepting fiction and publishing. Chopin’s short stories reflect the influence of contemporary French writers, particularly Guy de Maupassant (1850–1893), whose work she translated into English. His simple prose, his use of irony, and his attention to the ways women engage the world and the people in their lives appealed so much to Chopin: It is difficult to overemphasize the effect of Guy de Maupassant on Kate Chopin. Realism was in the air when Chopin started to write. A generation of writers both in Europe and America had eagerly turned away from the romantic tendency to picture human beings as unique, free individuals and were describing people instead as shaped by social, biological, economic, and other forces and struggling to maintain some individuality and freedom by confronting those forces. Maupassant, more than anyone else—except, perhaps, the Russian Anton Chekhov—showed the world how to express such a view of life in short fiction. He created a language for the short story, a way of speaking that sounded like the truth of life, as informed people at the time understood life. Kate Chopin approached that language in its original French and, drawing on her acquaintance with French culture, felt its spirit and force. Maupassant’s markings are everywhere in her work. (Koloski 6)

Chopin scholar Bernard Koloski aligns the author with Maupassant, but he also points out Henry James’ influence on her as well. Koloski notes that both Chopin and James juxtapose two cultures next to each other in their work. James applies an international lens, whereas Chopin applies an intercultural lens to her work. He points out that the pattern of juxtaposition runs throughout much of her fiction, in which “Chopin positions Protestants among Catholics … , blacks among whites, ’Cadians among Creoles, the dominated among the dominant, those coming into their own among those losing what they have” (Koloski 9). My primary interest here is Chopin’s juxtaposition of French and American cultures within the context of New Orleans. In “A Matter of Prejudice,” for instance, we see both the clash of French and American culture, as well as its melding within the city.

“A Matter of Prejudice” Chopin wrote “A Matter of Prejudice” on June 17–18, 1893, and published it in the September 25, 1895, issue of Youth’s Companion. This story presents New Orleans in its own location-specific type of binary:

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French and American, in opposition and in harmony, markers, as it were, of the cultural lean toward modernity. At the opening of the story, though, the reader is fully embedded in the French element: the story is set in New Orleans, beginning at first at the French Quarter home of Madame Carambeau, whose daughter, Madame Cécile Lalonde, a widow, lives with her. Madame Carambeau’s home isolates her from the outside world and enables her to cling to French custom and Spanish legacy: “The houses in ‘A Matter of Prejudice’ embody the values people carry or seek. Madame Carambeau’s old Spanish mansion near the Mississippi River in the French quarter of New Orleans has ‘an impenetrable board fence, edged with formidable row of iron spikes’ which protect it from people—or foreign ideas—seeking entrance” (Koloski, Kate Chopin: a Study of the Short Fiction 33). Although Louisiana belonged to the United States by the time of this story’s setting, Madame Carambeau operates solely—at first— in the French realm, willfully ignorant and resistant to the American culture encroaching on the city. As a character, Madame Carambeau embodies all that is French about New Orleans. To insulate herself from the children’s noisy play at her home, she hums the tune of “Partant pour la Syrie,” a popular patriotic French song. The music of “Partant pour la Syrie” was composed by the stepdaughter and later sister-in-law of Napoleon Bonaparte, Hortense de Beauharnais. Eventually estranged from her husband, Hortense de Beauharnais took up residence in Arenenberg Castle, Austria, in 1820 and lived by all accounts “a brilliant life,” welcoming guests from the elite ranks of France and Switzerland. “Partant pour la Syrie” was one of two very popular romances she wrote, and it became a “rabble-rousing” tune sung by Bonaparte supporters of France’s First Empire, its Restoration period, in addition to a national anthem sung at the time of the Second Empire of France, which was commanded by her own son, Napoleon III (Baldassarre 49–51). Written in the chivalric style, the story of “Partant pour la Syrie” is based on the written work of Alexandre de Laborde, whose romantic poem “Le Beau Dunois” tells the story of a crusader on route to Syria and prays to the Virgin Mary for love and for triumph. It begins: Partant pour la Syrie, Le jeune et beau Dunois, Venait prier Marie De bénir ses exploits:

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Faites, Reine immortelle, Lui dit-il en partant, Que j’aime la plus belle Et sois le plus Vaillant. (“Partant pour la Syrie,” Napoleonic Pleasures) Translation: Leaving for Syria, The young and handsome Dunois Came to pray to Mary To bless his exploits: Make it so, Immortal Queen, He said to her as he left, That I love the most beautiful [woman] And be the most valiant.

Hortense’s musical accompaniment to the poem was inspired by Napoleon’s own campaigns in Syria. The song became so popular that it could be heard at every official event and from hurdie-gurdies in the streets, so much so that people grew tired of it (“Partant pour la Syrie,” Napoleonic Pleasures). The widespread saturation of this song would certainly have reached Madame Carambeau, and her humming it two times during the story—once to distance herself from the noise of the children attending a party at her home, and the other to soothe the sick child who finds her at the party (CW 283, 284)—expresses her alignment with French nationalism. However, “Partant pour la Syrie” reveals more about Madame Carambeau. The reader is told of her preferences for French culture—she speaks only French—and she disdains everything American; she is a woman, we are told, “of many prejudices,” so many that it would be virtually “impossible” to identify every one of them. Madame Carambeau resents non-French speakers, as well as noncoffee drinkers, who “might drink tisane of fleur de Laurier [French tea of bay leaves] for all she cared” (CW 283). Chopin tells the reader: “She detested dogs, cats, organ-­ grinders, white servants and children’s noises. She despised Americans, Germans and all people of a different faith from her own. Anything not French had, in her opinion, little right to existence” (CW 282). Dogs, cats, organ musicians, white servants, and the noise of children irritate her, but her particular resentment toward Americans, Germans, and non-­ Catholics point directly toward her allegiance to France—and to her reluctance to change with the times.

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The recurrence of the French anthem identifies Madame Carambeau with French culture, to the exclusion of all else. Immune to the multiplicity of immigrants and cultures, she rejects all of them and saves her special grievance for the Americans—those residents whose ancestral claims to Europe are erased by their acquiescence to American life. Like Hortense, Madame Carambeau aspires to a reclusive—or perhaps better put, an exclusive—life within New Orleans’s French Quarter. Her alignment with the exiled French queen fortifies the identification of Madame Carambeau with the signifiers of an older New Orleans, a French city of the colonial past. Hortense, Antonio Baldassarre writes, created through her music and art a bastion of the past: Hortense’s Arenenberg was obviously an attempt to rescue an era and a lifestyle which had actually faded years before. Within the walls of Arenenberg Castle, appearance and reality melded together to create a strange form of existence that was in a certain way reclusive since it had almost not real relationship with its surrounding social and cultural environment. Arenenberg appears as an estrangement. The conservative attitude of this lifestyle, although paradoxically influenced and supported by the spirit of Restoration that seized all of Europe after the Viennese Congress in 1814. (51–2)

Madame Carambeau’s resemblance to Hortense echoes of the “conservative attitude” of this lifestyle, as she rejects “white servants”—racial indicators of the end of slavery—and the noises of children, in other words, the sounds of the next generations. “A Matter of Prejudice” establishes the binary of French/American within Chopin’s rendering of New Orleans—a duality that reflected a postbellum perspective. Matthew Paul Smith, writing about George Washington Cable, has pointed out that Reconstruction and the following years in the late nineteenth century affected a “system of tense binaries (North/South, black/white, state/nation).” However, like Chopin’s stories, Cable’s New Orleans stories were predicated upon these binaries as literary opportunities to explore “spaces of flux and instability” (83). Madame Carambeau finds herself in a similar place of “flux and instability,” and her particular disdain of all things American speaks not only to her alignment with French culture but to her resistance to change as well. Her rejection of members not of her “faith” is laughable, since she attends Catholic mass at the St. Louis Cathedral, whereas later in the story, she reluctantly and with great ceremony and intent visits the “American

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church,” St. Patrick’s Church—or as it is also known, St. Patrick’s Cathedral—in New Orleans, which is, as Catholic as St. Louis Cathedral. Her “faith” is delineated by culture and language, not actual religious doctrine, apparently. Madame Carambeau is brought into the currents of change when a sick child finds her on at the children’s party given by her widowed daughter. A girl, chasing another child in play, threatens to interrupt Madame Carambeau’s solitude—she and the other “children seemed to be having it all their own way that day, and the organ-grinders were let loose,” Chopin tells the reader (CW 283). Tenderness and care emerge from beneath Madame Carambeau’s quiet protest to the child’s presence. At first the older woman is “annoyed” because the child does not understand French, but once she realizes the girl, who “sprang excitedly into [her] lap” and “threw her arms convulsively around the old lady’s neck,” is feverish, her propensity for nursing and nurture takes over: Though she was a creature of prejudice, she was nevertheless a skillful and accomplished nurse, a connoisseur in all matters pertaining to health. She prided herself upon this talent, and never lost an opportunity of exercising it. She would have treated an organ-grinder with tender consideration if one had presented himself in the character of an invalid. Madame’s manner toward the little one changed immediately. Her arms and legs and her lap were at once adjusted so as to become the most comfortable of resting places. She rocked very gently to and fro. (CW 283)

Importantly, the narrator assures the reader that Madame Carambeau’s nursing expertise does not distinguish between a little American girl or an organ-grinder, even as they are both beneath her French sensibilities. However, the tapping of her nursing skills propels Madame Carambeau from her self-imposed isolation in the French Quarter and weakens her resistance to change. For soon after the child falls asleep and the older woman settles her into a bed in her house, she decides to care for the girl and sends notice to the child’s parents, telling them that she will stay—a directive that the girl’s parents accept when their white, Irish nurse returns with the message. The child’s presence in her home invites Madame Carambeau to consider the girl’s accident of birth, realizing that there was “nothing really objectionable” besides “her ignorance of the French language, which was not her fault” (CW 285). Chopin withholds the knowledge of the child’s birth

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until the end of the story, after Madame Carambeau makes the trek from the French Quarter to the American church. Like other Chopin characters, notably The Awakening’s Edna Pontellier, who looks at the sea with contemplation and self-reflection, she too looks across a body of water and is transformed; for Madame Carambeau, the sight of the Mississippi River connects her to the warmth of the child (CW 286). Once the child has been restored and returned to her parents, Madame Carambeau orders her Black driver to take her to the American church with her widowed daughter for the Christmas holiday. First, she requests that François, the coachman, deviates from the weekly habit of driving her to the French Cathedral and instead takes the two women to St. Patrick’s Cathedral on Camp Street. The French Cathedral, also known as St. Louis Cathedral, faces Jackson Square, and was established in 1727 in dedication to King Louis IX of France and rebuilt after a fire in 1794. It is the longest-­ standing, active Roman Catholic cathedral in the United States, with two historic buildings on either side: the Presbytere—the former “Ecclesiastical House” that was used as a courthouse and for commerce on Chartres Street—and the Cabildo—built during Spanish rule from 1795 to 1799 and used in 1803 for the brokering of the Louisiana Purchase. All three buildings are landmarks in the French Quarter, and they were central to the French establishment in the city. Madame Carammbeau’s journey to St. Patrick’s Cathedral is more, of course, than a trip to Camp Street; it instead mirrors the transformation that has already begun when the girl—who turns out to be her own granddaughter—was in her care. Although her daughter feels out of place, Madame Carambeau sits in St. Patrick’s Cathedral, listening to the mass “with unruffled calm through the long service and through a lengthy English sermon, of which she did not understand a word” (CW 286). Instead of returning home, she instructs François to take them to St. Charles Avenue, toward the American Quarter, an area she had not visited after its transformation. Without noticing the flowers in bloom, Madame Carambeau “held a bottle of smelling-salts to her nostrils, as though she were passing through the most unsavory instead of the most beautiful quarter of New Orleans” (CW 287)—her disdain undisguised. Madame Carambeau passes through the most beautiful quarter of New Orleans as she also passes through the evolution of time: to make her way to her son Henri’s house—the reason she instructs François to take them to Charles Avenue—her driver would likely have taken them the most direct route on Girod Street, which intersects with Charles Avenue and

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would have placed them directly at the intersection where the St. Charles Streetcar Line now exists, and they would have had to cross over the “neutral ground” that was Canal Street (Bonner, “New Orleans and Its Writers” 199). Earlier in 1833, the New Orleans & Carrollton Railroad had been contracted; its path provided for the streetcars that followed, and importantly, around this railroad track New Orleans began to spread uptown by 1835 (Chase 139–40). By the year 1850 over 9,000 track miles had been built, a growth trajectory only interrupted by the Civil War; however, use of the trains continued to climb despite the decline in laying more track (Moldow 188). Also, cars drawn by mules were still used through the 1890s, even as the New Orleans and Carrolton line had been converted to electricity, carrying passengers to the 1883 Cotton Centennial in Audubon Park (Ewell, “Placing the City”). The Louisianan Cane River region developed significantly with the development of the railroad in its vicinity. By the 1870s, following the Civil War, railroad tracks were again on the increase; America saw the first transcontinental railroad. From 1871 to 1900, 170,000 additional miles of railroad tracks had been laid, during the time that Chopin set “A Matter of Prejudice,” up from the 45,000 miles of tracks laid prior to 1871. In particular, 1880 to 1910 were the “boom years” for the railroad in Louisiana, when many roads in the state were forgotten and centers for trade and commerce began to migrate away from roadways to the railroad tracks. Unlike Thérèse Lafirme in Chopin’s first novel, At Fault, who perceives the railroad with apprehension, Madame Carambeau does not acknowledge the streetcar’s tracks presence as she crosses over to reach her son’s house. Whereas Thérèse, another of Chopin’s reluctant protagonists, initially regards the presence of the tracks and their effective expansion on the region as threatening: Among changes which the railroad brought soon after [her husband] Jêrome Lafirme’s death, and which were viewed by many as of questionable benefit … . She had made pouting resistance to this change at first, opposing it step by step with a conservatism that yielded only to the resistless. She pictured a visionary troop of evils coming in the wake of the railroad, which in her eyes no conceivable benefits could mitigate. The occasional tramp, she foresaw as an army; and the travelers whom chance deposited at the store that adjoined the station, she dreaded as an endless procession of intruders forcing themselves upon èher privacy. (CW 742)

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For Thérèse, the expansion of the railroad raises her resistance to the inevitable social and economic changes that follow. She equates elements of her resistance to the imposition of an “army” or the “endless procession of intruders”—a comparison that echoes the intrusion of the northern army during the Civil War, in other words, a very recent, imaginable evil. And yet, as Susan Moldow has pointed out, Thérèse eventually benefits directly from the railroad; her capacity for love and renewal expands within view of the tracks (189). In fact, after much loss, death, and disappointment, it is as a passenger on the train that she is finally able to reconcile and reunite with Hosmer, whom she loves, when “old supports appear to be giving way,” enabling her to change and to accept change, particularly the encroachment of modernity (CW 872). Thérèse does not necessarily find happiness or contentment in her return to the plantation, Place-du-Bois, but by this point in the story, Thérèse has changed: her earlier resistance to modernity has been edged out by loss and by the prospect of love and marriage with Hosmer. Madame Carambeau’s movement over the streetcar tracks on Charles Avenue similarly marks her transformation, which like Thérèse’s change by the end of At Fault, is characterized by process, and is not instantaneous—a journey, in other words, not unlike a sojourn on a train or a streetcar. Both women characters experience their personal transitions in proximity to technological advancements, specifically in view of railroad tracks. Deborah Lindsay Williams points out that Thérèse, like other white women in At Fault, exhibits her entitlement to “mobility.” She notes that Thérèse goes to New Orleans and Paris; the Worthingtons go to New Orleans from St. Louis; Melicent comes to Place-du-Bois after traveling in multiple directions, as the impulse moved her (Williams 27). And while many of the women who travel in At Fault are not only white, they are childless, freed from the responsibilities of motherhood and nineteenth-­ century middle-class family life. Madame Carambeau is similarly entitled and unencumbered, as she commands her Black driver to take her and her adult daughter first to St. Patrick’s Cathedral, and then across the tracks, literally, to her son Henri’s home that he shares with his American wife. Her freedom to move around the city facilitates the culmination of the story, the healing, as it were, not only of her granddaughter’s illness but of the family relations between mother and estranged son. Now, in view of the streetcar tracks, Madame Carambeau transcends her deeply ingrained prejudice and is able to tolerate the encroaching American Quarter and its inhabitants. In fact, she can

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more than tolerate the American Quarter—she has traveled and crossed the neighborhood boundary for reconciliation and love. The American Quarter developed as a commercial district in New Orleans after 1825, about one hundred years after the Creoles had established themselves in the city. Americans, who spoke English, developed the American Quarter, which came to be known as the Garden District, “upriver” from the Mississippi River. This area is considered to be “the fancy part of town,” home to affluence and opulence, and Americans who settled here sought to distinguish themselves from the French-speaking Creoles in the French Quarter. Charles Avenue is the northside boundary to the Garden District, featuring a long row of mansions. Today, tourist guides recommend taking one of the avenue’s dark green streetcars that run its length in order to fully appreciate the magnificence of the architecture (Karlin). Many of its streets are named after men who led efforts in finance, cotton trade, trade, as well as public education. One name that did not appear on the city streets was James H. Caldwell, who plowed the way for Americans in Faubourg Ste. Marie, the center for business in the American Quarter, when he build the American Theater on Camp street, close to Poydras Street in 1822. In his own words, Campbell noted the triumph of his theater: The gradual rising of the walls of the first American Theatre excited a great deal of curiosity, and naturally so, for people conceived no merchantile use for such a building, speculated jocularly on the idea of its being intended for fortification … For several years the people had to travel on gunwale sidewalks; and carriages could not be used after a heavy rain so far out of the way as Camp street … The success attendant on my building the American theatre rendered it a nucleus around which may be said to have settled and called into existence the Second Municipality. (Qtd. in Chase 122–23)

Campbell’s contributions to the American Quarter helped to expand and secure its longevity in the city. Such efforts would have fortified the resentment of the fictional Madame Carambeau, providing reasons for her never to transcend the American Quarter’s boundaries. The inhabitants of the American Quarter sought to firmly establish their district and wound up fortifying the opposition between itself and the French Quarter. Ewell notes that by “the late 1890s, one distinctive feature of New Orleans was its divisions between French and American culture. In fact, the economic power of the Americans after the Civil War had long since determined the

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cultural fate of the city” (“Placing the City”). Chopin, like other New Orleans authors, leveraged this development in her fiction. Writers such as “George Washington Cable had famously made use of those cultural divisions in his depictions of New Orleans in the 1880s, helping to solidify the contrast between progressive (American) modernity and a conservative charmingly genteel and mostly irrelevant, Francophile past,” and Ewell points out that Chopin drew from the “shorthand” Cable established, as she employed elements from the Americans’ presence in the city (“Placing the City”). Elements such as Henri’s family’s Irish servant and his child’s proficiency in English signaled to Chopin’s readers the solid American presence in the city. And certainly readers familiar with New Orleans might have pictured the other shorthand signifiers of the Americans. For instance, on route to her son’s house, after mass at the American “church,” she might have also passed the statue erected in 1884 in honor of “Margaret,” at the corner of Camp and Prytania. “Margaret,” who was formally named Margaret Haughery but also called “Saint Margaret,” the “Mother of Orphans,” the “Bread Woman of New Orleans,” the “Angel of the Delta,” and other terms of honor and endearment for her work among the poor. Haughery was an Irish immigrant who arrived with her husband in New Orleans in 1835, when she was twenty-one years old. The couple had a baby upon their arrival, but after a year’s time, both the child and her husband were dead. Haugery devoted her life and any profit she made from selling milk to the Sisters of Charity orphanage, and later, as the bakery she founded flourished, the first to use steam in the South, she defied General Benjamin Butler’s orders to stay within federal lines so she could deliver bread and flour to the poor. Butler eventually relented out of respect for her determination to serve the needy, and when she passed his soldiers, they quipped, “there goes the only person of whom General Butler is afraid” (Asher 149). In 1884, long after the Civil War, the city put up a statue in her honor, where the fictional Madame Carambeau would likely have passed on her way to her son Henri’s house, a marker of all she despised about the American Quarter, especially its Irish immigrants. As the American Quarter became an established commercial center in the city, it also positioned to meet the modern new age awaiting New Orleans at the turn of the century. As Madame Carambeau makes her way across the city with her daughter and driver on Charles Avenue, the narrator tells us: “It was like a strange city to old madame, who had not been in the American quarter since the town had taken on this new and splendid growth” (CW 286–87). Holding smelling salts to her nose, they make

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their way to “the most beautiful quarter of New Orleans,” where her son Henri’s “house was a very modern and very handsome one” and answered by a white maid—the servant further evidence of modernity (CW 287). Madame Carambeau is not so “French” that she cannot change or see beyond the false binary of French/American. As she reunites with her son and daughter-in-law’s family, Chopin offers her readers two ironic elements. First, we learn that it has been the son, Henri, who has forbidden French is spoken in his home, which is why when his daughter in his mother’s care earlier in the story, she cannot understand her (CW 288). Madame Carambeau appears to take this realization in stride, as she tells her daughter-in-law (who is trying to speak French with her): “Her grandmother will teach her French; and she will teach her grandmother English. You see, I have no prejudices. I am not like my son” (CW 288). The other irony is that while the narrative focus appears to be on Madame Carambeau’s transformation—her travels to the American Quarter, her acceptance of her son’s family’s Americanness—it is Henri who returns home, so to speak. While he has apparently chosen to live in the American Quarter with his American wife and family, his joy over the end of his exile from his mother’s home leaves him speechless: He would hear again the water beat against the green levee-bank with a sound that was not quite like any other he could remember. He would sit within the sweet and solemn shadow of the deep and over-hanging roof; and roam through the wild, rich solitude of the old garden, where he had played his pranks of boyhood and dreamed his dreams of youth. He would listen to his mother’s voice calling him, “mon fils,” as it had always done before that day he had had to choose between his mother and wife. No; he could not speak. (CW 288–89)

Despite the separation from his mother, Henri clearly values the familial French elements and culture he has known. We never learn why Henri and his mother had become estranged, but we might reasonably assume his marriage to an American had something to do with it. Still, his mother’s journey down Charles Avenue opens the door for reconciliation and coexistence, an acquiescence of the new with the old, but most importantly, not a relinquishing of old French New Orleans. Instead, their characters reassure the reader that French language is here to stay, as one of its sons is speechless (without English, in particular) with joy at the return to what he has known his entire life. “A Matter of Prejudice” may present a

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stubborn older woman who learns to change with the times, but it also reiterates that the “old,” in as far as it is “French,” will always characterize the city of New Orleans and isn’t going anywhere. The French culture that predominates “A Matter of Prejudice” establishes Chopin’s New Orleans on its own, European terms. Every New Orleans story she wrote demonstrates elements of the French culture Madame Carambeau initially hides behind and her son Henri eventually, joyfully, returns to. The French elements in “A Matter of Prejudice” provide context and structure to the story and place the city in a fluid space of time, in which the past, present, and the anticipation of the future exist at once. In this sense, the city presents a space of timelessness—linear time does not in fact exist here, a recurrent theme we see elsewhere in Chopin’s work, notably in her 1899 novel The Awakening. Here, however, Madame Carambeau appears to hold onto the past—her resistance to anything “American” seems to be an expression of that resistance, as she particularly clings to all that is French: the section of the city she lives in, its language, its practices, and its religion. However, it is Henri—the next generation— who reinforces the steadfast nature of all that is French and from an earlier era, once he is reunited with his mother, who has begun to embrace the “new” and “American” by the end of the story.

“The Return of Alcibiade” The notion of timelessness and Chopin’s use of the city of New Orleans offers a key to understanding how her representations of urbanity shape the lives of the characters she constructed. For instance, in the 1892 story, “The Return of Alcibiade,” which was first published in St. Louis Life and later in Chopin’s story collection, Bayou Folk, in the same year, leverages the appearance of Fred Bartna, a commission merchant from New Orleans, as a conduit for exploring the notion of timelessness. Bartna’s arrival to Cloutierville, en route between New Orleans and Shreveport, triggers a well-intentioned deception, when he meets the elderly and demented Monsieur Jean Ba and his niece Esmée. In this post-Civil War setting, Monsieur Jean Ba is caught in a cycle of the past, in which each Christmas he awaits his dead son’s return from the war, as he promised his father before he perished. Bartna’s arrival inspires Esmée’s charade to pretend Bartna is the returned son, as she explains: “Let him have that Christmas dinner with Alcibiade, that he has been longing for so many year’.” Bartna is “good-looking, honest-faced” and

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worries, saying, “ ‘it would be cruel to deceive him; it would not be’—he did not like to say ‘right.’ ” But Esmée assures him that she will “take all the sin” on her own “conscience” (CW 251). Admittedly, Bartna at first wishes to kiss the young woman, which Chopin implies has softened his resolve and leads to his acquiescence. All of the characters present at the house participate in the charade, including the four people of color who work as servants for Esmée’s family, in addition to a “reserve force outside within easy call” (CW 252). The white characters on this plantation are surrounded by Black people who are engaged only to wait on them. Their presence recalls the racial order preferred by Madame Carambeau in “A Matter of Prejudice,” who can barely disguise her disdain for the employment of white servants by residents in the American Quarter. In spite of his discomfort, Bartna plays along, only to find that the act becomes too real to Esmée: Bartna had a stupid impression of acting on the stage and had to pull himself together every now and then to throw off the stiffness of the amateur actor. But this discomposure amounted almost to paralysis when he found Mademoiselle Esmée taking the situation as seriously as her grandfather. (CW 252)

As the meal progresses, Monsieur Jean Ba is steeped in his delusion and only addresses Bartna as his dead son, reminding his niece about how Alcibiade takes his brandy. For as much as Bartna plays the part of the dead Alcibiade, his conscience, the reader is told, continues to remind him of the temporariness of this role. Alone again with Esmée, the New Orleans commission merchant, reminds her that he cannot keep up the deceit and asserts that it would be “cruel” to continue. Esmée only reminds him that she alone carries the guilt and “sin” of their pretend, and she asserts that her prayers in the morning (somehow) exonerates her: “Mr. Bartna,” answered Esmée, daintily holding a rosebud up to her pretty nose, “W’en I awoke this morning an’ said my prayers, I prayed to the good God that He would give one happy Christmas to my gran’father. He has answered my prayer; an’ He does not sen’ his gif’s incomplete. He will provide. “Mr. Bartna, this morning I agreed to take all responsibility on my shoulder’, you remember? Now, I place all that responsibility on the shoulder’ of the blessed Virgin.” (CW 253)

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Bartna is mystified but not entirely troubled by Esmée’s response, as illogical as it sounds. Her praying in the morning alleviates none of his own complicity or guilt, and yet, he is satisfied, “distracted” as he is with his “admiration” of her. Nor is he concerned that she does not actually shoulder any guilt or sin at all, as she explains her “placing” the “responsibility” onto the Virgin Mary. As Bartna plays out his final moments as the deceased Alcibiade, Monsieur Jean Ba dies quietly during his nap. Prior to falling asleep, he calls for Alcibiade, addressing him as “mon fils,” to which Bartna responds, holding the old man’s hand. Monsieur Jean Ba’s final words appear mundane, uttered as if Alcibiade was in fact returned and the past events of the war had never occurred: “Alcibiade, I am going to take a little nap now. If Robert McFarlane comes while I am sleeping, with more talk of wanting to buy Nég Sévérin, tell him I will sell none of my slaves; not the least little négrillon. Drive him from the place with the shot-gun. Don’t be afraid to use the shot-gun, Alcibiade,— when I am asleep,—if he comes.” (CW 253)

The old man passes in his sleep, comforted by the illusion that not only Alcibiade is returned and, more important, alive, but that the Civil War has not occurred and enslaved labor practices remain. In other words, the past is ever present. Linear time is suspended. The suspension of time is further emphasized by Bartna’s driver, who remarks at the end of the story that they’ve lost a whole day in their travels because of the stop at this family’s home—a remark that Bartna responds to with some amazement and an admission that he “hadn’t thought of it” (CW 254). It is Bartna’s presence that has facilitated the notion of timelessness at Monsieur Jean Ba’s household; his arrival enables a façade that permits the old man happiness and the illusion of change. And yet Bartna feels the urgency to return to the road, to get on with the work of the present day. In his “real” role as commission merchant, engaged on the behalf of another, Bartna functions in the story as a reminder of the new, postbellum economy of the South, facilitated, as it were, by the railroads and driven by urban markets. While Bartna himself travels by buggy—which has broken down, becoming the occasion of his visit to the family—the narrator connects his travels with a reminder to the reader of the “Texas and Pacific” railroad, which twelve years after this story occurs linked New

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Orleans with Shreveport, Louisiana. Even though Bartna does not travel by train, the narrative association made between his current mode of travel and the future of Louisiana travel connects him to the encroaching future. His presence obscures the financial desperation and loss of white lives resulting from the fall of the Confederacy. And without Monsieur Jean Ba, Esmée claims to have no reason to stay on the “ole plantation” and resigns herself to what seems to be her inevitable fate: to live in New Orleans (CW 254). As long as Monsieur Jean Ba lives, Esmée herself is granted the opportunity to live in the past—to such an extent that Bartna wonders who believes Alcibiade is back more: Esmée or Monsieur Jean Ba. Like Madame Carambeau in “A Matter of Prejudice,” whose boundaries and resistance to change are predicated on her experiences of physical spaces, Esmée and Monsieur Ba similarly occupy the space of isolation and separateness. Linguistically, their isolation is reflected in their common use of French expressions and the enforced illusion of the practice of slavery and the nonexistence of the Civil War. Monsieur Jean Ba and Esmée drop French expressions and words throughout their dialogue, with Monsieur Jean Ba speaking at times only in French (CW 251). Their use of French language aligns especially Monsieur Jean Ba with Madame Carambeau, who refuses at first to speak anything but French. If their use of French aligns them with the old order, they are also not protected forever from the encroachment of the new. Bartna’s appearance interrupts the cycle of Monsieur Jean Ba’s annual expectation. Each year since the death of his son, Monsieur Jean Ba anticipates his Christmas return, but Bartna’s interruption signals the unavoidable expansion and recovery of the post-Civil War New Orleans economy and the subsequent encroachment of modernity. As a commission merchant, he is also an agent of New Orleans, used here “as an alternative (and often transformative) urban space,” and as Ewell tells us: In fact, New Orleans is typically the source of Chopin’s charming young men, who are sent forth into the countryside as agents of business. Located, like the offices of Harding and Offdean, in the American Quarter, they represent perspectives of modernity and change… . For while these young men bring with them the often vaguely threatening and mercenary values of the city, which imply the need to change the old-fashioned country ways, the real shift in perspective is on their part, as they more or less explicitly choose love and relationships.” (“Placing the City”)

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Ewell compares Bartna and similar young male characters to agents or representatives of change. For many of them, she notes, often the simpler, more rural lives hold appeal, particularly as they also offer the possibility of a woman and of marriage. But in “The Return of Alcibiade,” the woman— Esmée—resigns herself to leaving the countryside for the city, with no mention of joining Bartna in any way in New Orleans. In this story, we do not see the more typical marriage narrative engaged. On the contrary, we see Esmée’s character move into an imagined space of ambiguity, after the illusion of a prewar life has been brought to an end with the old man’s death. As a commission merchant—a representative agent—of New Orleans, Bartna’s character functions as a catalyst of change, but also as an opportunity for reprieve. His presence enacts timelessness, a particular suspension of time, similar to Madame Carambeau and her son’s story in New Orleans, as they transcend the boundaries between the French and American Quarters of the city. Bartna, like his counterparts in other stories, such as Wallace Offdean in “A No-Account Creole,” presumably hails from the American Quarter; he has no idea who Monsieur Jean Ba is before meeting him at his plantation. In fact, he is repelled by the sight of the old man’s worn-looking, aged plantation house: “From the end of the long avenue of magnolias that led to it, the house which confronted Bartna looked grotesquely long in comparison with its height,” along with its colors of pale yellow and “faded green” (CW 250). In other words, nothing about the “ole plantation” appeals to the modern, urban Bartna except the young woman who lives there, and yet even she is not enough to make him want to stay. Eventually, though, like Madame Carambeau, Esmée moves into a space of newness and ambiguity—the reader is left not with the closure of marriage, but instead with a woman character moving into an uncertain future in the city. Relying on similar binaries of French/American and living/dead as found in “A Matter of Prejudice,” “The Return of Alcibiade” emphasizes the uncertainty of the modern era. This short story too offers a lens for viewing the role of French language and culture in Chopin’s narratives, as she leverages them to render characters of complexity, not wholly bound to one time and one place, even as the stories themselves contemplate the perpetual timelessness enabled by the depiction or connection to New Orleans.

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“Cavanelle” Chopin’s use of French culture and language and the ambiguity of time and space also emerge in the story of “Cavanelle,” which was published in American Jewess in April 1895 and also in the A Night in Acadie collection. “Cavenelle,” unlike “A Matter of Prejudice” and “The Return of Alcibiade,” is told by a first-person narrator—Mademoiselle Montreville, a woman living in New Orleans who narrates the story of her acquaintance with Cavanelle, a textile merchant in New Orleans whose sister, he tells her, sings beautifully. The narrator travels across the city via the streetcar system. She is alone in her travels, both to and from Cavanelle’s shop and home, on the Prytania Streetcar, from the uptown American side of New Orleans to what was once known as Goodchildren Street (now St. Claude Avenue) in the French Quarter. The geography of the story, similar to the earlier “A Matter of Prejudice,” presents the cultural binary of French/American within the context of New Orleans. The narrator travels from the American side of the city to the French Market and then to Cavanelle’s home to buy material—presumably for dressmaking—and then later to meet Cavanelle’s sister, whose operatic voice he has claimed to devote his life and earnings to support. In this story, Cavanelle is the merchant, and he is stationery, as it were, as he is a fixture of the French Quarter, unlike Bartna the commission merchant, who travels from the city to the interests he represents outside of it. Cavanelle is a different kind of merchant, engaged in the textile trade. The narrator introduces her relationship with Cavanelle with regard for his warmth and flattery—he is, of course, a salesman. But the narrator appears to be charmed by him, as she “was always sure of hearing something pleasant from Cavanelle across the counter. If he was not mistaking me for the freshest and prettiest girl in New Orleans,” he was putting aside material and trimmings that would highlight her good looks (CW 369). Cavanelle’s warmth prompts the narrator to consider him “an angel” and to believe that his hard work supported his sister, Mathilde, who needed some further training in order to sing at the opera, presumably where she belonged. Cavanelle talks up his sister’s abilities, so the narrator visits them at their French Quarter home, close to Goodchildren Street. The narrator implies that because Cavanelle is a charming and angelic merchant, she is willing to visit his home to hear his sister’s voice. In other words, there is always an exchange relationship with him. She travels from

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the American Quarter—as she indicates leaving the Garden District on the Prytania Streetcar—and following directions through the French Quarter, an area of the city the narrator is unfamiliar with: Over and over I was given the most minute directions for finding the house. The green car—or was it the yellow or blue one? I can no longer remember. But it was near Goodchildren street, and would I kindly walk this way and turn that way? At the corner was an ice dealer’s. In the middle of the block, their house—one-story; painted yellow; a knocker; a banana tree, the knocker, the number or anything, for it I but turn the corner in the neighborhood of five o’clock I would find him planted at the door awaiting me. (CW 370)

Chopin offers readers a visitors’ tour through the French Quarter through the narrator’s trip to Cavanelle’s; her disorientation and eventual discovery of his home accents her ignorance of the French side of town—an ignorance that quickly appears to be reflective of her condescension toward Cavanelle and a subtle disdain toward the French Quarter—a subtler reversal of the overt bias of Madame Carambeau in “A Matter of Prejudice.” At Cavanelle’s home, the narrator notes that Mathilde, who appears to be housebound and infirm, prefers to speak French and “her manner was one of indolent repose.” She explains that the brother and sister engaged “one of those cheap black women who abound in the French quarter, who speak Creole patois in preference to English, and who would rather work in a petit ménage [“small household”] in Goodchildren street for five dollars a month than for fifteen in the fourth quarter” (CW 371). The narrator’s disdain for the inhabitants of Cavanelle’s home extends to her imagining Mathilde drinking from her “own half-bottle of St. Julien” and the Black servant who likely “consulted the Voudoo priestess around the corner as her father confessor” (CW 371). The narrator’s prejudice regarding the French Quarter emerges in these criticisms, in addition to her apparent ignorance of this area of New Orleans. Her presumption of the servant’s “cheapness” speaks to her preference for the higher ground of the more posh area uptown. However, the implication that the servant visited a “Voudoo priestess” like a devout Catholic might visit a priest is a distinctive insult, as Voodoo practitioners were associated by white residents with vice and more questionable areas of the city. On the other hand, there is also a certain equivalency established in the simile, suggesting that a priest serving as a confessor may not be so different from a Voodoo priestess after all.

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Chopin biographer Emily Toth has noted the author’s interest and fascination with Voodoo practice as a unique feature of nineteenth-century New Orleans. The practitioners represented an exotic Other to Chopin: She was fascinated by New Orleans customs and people: the proud and beautiful Creoles of color, the gris gris and voodoo. New Orleans was the home of Marie Laveau, the Voodoo Queen, famous for her magical powers, her love powders and her snake rituals. By 1873, when the Daily Picayune described her monster serpent, named Zombi, seventy-nine-year-old Marie Laveau was said to be the best-known of three hundred Voodoos in New Orleans, among whom were, “strange to relate, at least eight or ten white women who partake as the others in the hellish orgies.” (“Kate Chopin’s New Orleans Years”)

If Chopin’s regard for Voodoo practitioners in the city reveals her interest in things foreign and different, their presence in New Orleans also identified an area of the city known for ill-repute. The implication in “Cavanelle,” in associating the Black servant with a Voodoo devotion, is also another way of suggesting her questionable character—and that of all inhabitants in Cavanelle’s household. Anthony Wilson points out that as New Orleans grew, moral precepts took root as they were associated with particular neighborhoods: As the city developed and grew, its physical topography reflected a moral one. The brothels and houses of ill repute were located “back of town,” in the lower, swampier areas associated more with non-European inhabitants and people of color than with upper-caste white Creoles. The nearer one drew to the areas of town least reclaimed from the surrounding swamps, the stronger the association with license, criminality, and, not coincidentally, non-whiteness. In New Orleans in particular, the combination of cultures, religious practices, and the traditions of hoodoo and voodoo cast the surrounding swamps as picturesque settings for all manner of occult practices. (8)

The narrator makes clear that Cavanelle and his sister live close to areas associated “with license, criminality, and … non-whiteness,” as she points out the Voodoo priestess is right “around the corner.” Originally, the neighborhood where Cavanelle and his sister live had been a distinct neighborhood, with streets named by Bernard Xavier Philippe de Marigny de Mandeville (a.k.a. Bernard Marigny, “one of the greatest personalities of New Orleans history,” a Creole man who began

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life with everything—and enjoying it all—and ended life at ninety-three years with nothing. One of his contributions to New Orleans—perhaps to the United States—is the introduction to the game of Craps, which famously, Marigny taught to everyone in the city, but lost at the game to all he had taught. As a young man, he had inherited a plantation, which he subdivided and which eventually resulted in the neighborhood where much of “Cavanelle” takes place. Marigny’s mark, bestowed in the early nineteenth century, may be found in the names of its streets—one of which he named for the game he loved and lost at: Rue Craps. Streets in the area known as Faubourg Marigny extended in 50 degree angles to the Mississippi River, and its cross streets included Victory, Moreau, Casa Calvo, Greatmen, Craps, Love, and relevant to this discussion, Goodchildren—all of which were named in French originally. The streets that lead to the Mississippi River have kept their names, whereas the cross streets have not, a result, according to John Chase, of Craps Street. The City Ordinance Number 385, issue in 1850, changed Craps Street to Burgundy Street, where three churches now stood and which was eventually co-opted into an unobstructed passage between Faubourg Marigny and the rest of the French Quarter (Chase 98–99). More relevant to the discussion of “Cavanelle” is the street that Craps obscured, Love Street. This was an area of the city where Creole men kept their octoroon mistresses in small houses on back streets, including Burgundy and Rampart. Goodchildren Street more likely translated as “Rue Des Bon Enfants” and meant “Street of the Good (or Happy) Childhood,” and was located near the swamp—a place that offered boys opportunities for fishing and other outdoor sports. However, Goodchildren Street is undeniably close to other streets of ill repute: “Historians, however, take one look at the map, where this street is revealed around the corner from the Street of Love, and raise historical eyebrows” (Chase 99–100)—a point clearly not lost on Chopin. All of the narrator’s condescension toward Cavanelle’s home appears to be founded upon the cultural divide between the French and the American parts of New Orleans. Whereas in “A Matter of Prejudice,” Madame Carambeau held all things American in disdain, appearing to look down upon the Americans as less cultured than the French, “Cavanelle” ’s narrator reverses that prejudice, taking the position of the superiority of the American Quarter, as she condescends to travel to the French Quarter, where Cavanelle and his sister live.

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Remarkably, in both stories, despite these two women characters’ patronizing attitude toward the other Quarter, Madame Carambeau and the narrator, the unmarried Mademoiselle Montreville, both express their condescension through their ability to move about the city. Madame Carambeau’s movement is facilitated by a Black driver and the attendance of her widowed daughter. They travel the streets of New Orleans, rendered recognizable to the readers through Chopin’s use of actual street names. “A Matter of Prejudice” provides a context for understanding the traveling done by the narrator in “Cavanelle,” who travels by herself on streetcars and then on foot. Regardless of how they travel, both women transcend gender binaries that traditionally limited women to the domestic realm in the nineteenth century. Deborah Lindsay Williams makes a similar observation in Chopin’s first and lesser-known novel, At Fault (1892), as she notes that white women in the novel are mobile, an ability that speaks to their affluence. And like the women in At Fault, the narrator of “Cavanelle” is childless, a point not lost on Williams, when she writes about the female characters’ “luxury of mobility”: Thérèse goes to New Orleans and Paris; the Worthingtons go to New Orleans from St. Louis; Melicent comes to Place-du-Bois after going “North, West, or East as alternating caprice prompted” ([At Fault] 14), and the last we hear of her, she is planning an expedition to the American Southwest with a female friend; Bert Rodney, with whom Lou Dawson has an affair in St. Louis, does so while his wife and child are vacationing n Naragansett. These peripatetic women are enabled in their travels by the additional fact that most of them are childless … . It is as if in this novel, Chopin can imagine a world in which “woman” does not necessitate “mother”. (27)

Certainly, Chopin could imagine in “Cavanelle” a world in which “woman” does not necessarily mean “mother,” as the narrator makes no mention of children and she observes no mother of Cavenelle and his sister. At the end of the story, she mentions the aunt he cares for, but she appears as ill and needy as his childlike sister before her death. The more important point is that “Cavanelle,” like At Fault, offers readers with an unencumbered, mobile woman character who travels independently where she wishes. The narrator fusses about the directions, but she does not fuss about having to travel. In fact, after two years pass and she hears that Cavanelle’s sister has died, she travels across town again

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to see him. The narrator tells the reader that she “had been absent that length of time from the city” (CW 371). The development of streetcars and railroads enable women’s mobility across and away from town, as Williams points out. What is really interesting here is that the narrator does not even account for her whereabouts; her ability and freedom to travel are presumed and thus unremarkable. And yet, as Chopin scholar Helen Taylor has noted, New Orleans had been a dangerous place for women: “Despite being celebrated as a feminine city, Parisian-style ‘Queen City of the Mississippi,’ New Orleans remained a perilous site for women in public space. A white woman’s sexuality, her racial and biological destiny, meant that to be on the streets was, however indirectly, to be of the streets.” Like The Awakening’s Edna Pontellier, whom Taylor mentions, “Cavanelle” ’s narrator similarly seems to defy or at least to be unaware of the threat to her reputation and moves about the city in an unhindered way. Taylor also draws a direct connection between the independence of Chopin’s characters, many of whom walk through the city of New Orleans, and its French influence. Taylor expounds on Chopin’s regard for the “feminine” nature of New Orleans. Like the established urban centers of Europe, such as Venice and Paris, New Orleans too has “long been celebrated in feminine terms, often set in opposition to gloomy, serious cities like London and Rome” and therefore names such as “Queen City of the Mississippi” and “Queen City of the South” held some staying power. Even, Taylor explains, author Grace King, who was a contemporary of Chopin, referred to New Orleans as “a Parisian.” Both cities shared parallel, gendered associations: Paris and New Orleans thus share overlapping images and figures as female, the prostitute, consumption, spectacle, and tourism. Both are cities to be looked at, seduced by, lured into sexual sin by. And both are cities that came to depend economically on that modern consumer of the beautiful, bizarre and sexually tempting: the tourist—a figure usually conceived of, like the flaneur whom he succeeds, as male. (Taylor)

While Taylor develops her argument with much attention to Chopin’s 1899 novel, The Awakening—which this study returns to in its final chapter—she emphasizes that for the author, things related to France often represent sexual desire and appetite. Taylor also points out that similar to Paris, New Orleans has been considered a “city of performances,” featuring theater productions, operas, and street performances.

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Reflective of the musical traditions of New Orleans, the occasion of “Cavanelle” is the narrator’s interest in Cavanelle’s sister’s operatic voice. She explains early in the story that the reason Cavanelle invites her to his home is because he has spotted her at the opera the evening before; the reason he works “so faithfully,” she tells the reader, is because his sister “Mathilde had a voice. It was because of her voice that his coats were worn till they were out of fashion and almost out at elbows. But for a sister whose voice needed only a little training to rival that of the nightingale, one might do such things without incurring reproach” (CW 369). Mademoiselle Montreville identifies with a more sophisticated class, located in the fashionable American Quarter, which distinguishes her from the merchant Cavanelle, who works himself to the bone. However, the opera provides a public space where the two might be equally present. Opera had been a long tradition in the city of New Orleans, dating back to the final years of the Spanish occupation in the late eighteenth century. Nearly every year throughout the nineteenth century, the city played host to a company residency that would provide performances during the opera season. Since the opening of the Théâtre St. Pierre, which was located on St. Peter Street, at Royal and Bourbon Streets, opera theaters have dominated the city’s musical offerings. Several over the following century were constructed and succumbed to fire’s destruction, including the first Théâtre d’Orléans, which opened its doors in 1815, on Orleans Street; it was rebuilt and opened again in 1819, with John Davis at the helm, a significant leader of French theater in the city. Davis was responsible for innovating tours for performance troupes, who brought French theater and opera to the urban centers like Philadelphia and New York in the northeast. Today, performance tours are still identified as national “premieres” once they hit the northeast, even though they originate in New Orleans. Through the nineteenth century, a competing theater—the Camp Street Theatre—emerged, along with the introduction of Italian operas, in addition to the French operas already familiar to audiences. The “Golden Age” of the Théâtre d’Orléans ignited in 1842 and persisted till 1859, when the French Opera House was built and the Civil War commenced. The social importance of the Théâtre d’Orléans is reflected in the number of seasons and opera performances given over the nineteen seasons (1841–42 to 1859–60): 109 operas (written by both 35 major and minor composers), totaling around 1550 performances. The most-often produced were La favorite (95 times), Les Hugenots (82 times), and Le Prophéte (79 times).

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The French Opera House, which reigned from 1859–1919, began with its inaugural production of Guillaume Tell by Rossini. During the 1862 Federal troops’ occupation of the city, theater performances were reduced, only to be restored and thriving by 1870. By the end of the nineteenth century, a few of the theaters in New Orleans had been destroyed by fire, but the city also saw the first performances of operas that are well known today, such as Carmen, performed in Italian in 1879, Aïda (1881, sung in English), as well as Les Contes d’Hoffman (1887), Calleria rusticana (1892), Manon (1894), La Damnation de Faust (1894), and Pagliacci (1895) (“A History of Opera in New Orleans”). The appeal of opera and music for Kate Chopin is well documented. Biographer Emily Toth notes that even as a girl in St. Louis, Chopin showed a deep appreciation for music. There, residents were treated to numerous philharmonic societies, German music bands, and less-formal performances. Every year, the Grand Italian Opera Company toured through St. Louis, performing conventional favorites, such as Emani and La Favorita, and new works such as Faust by Charles Gounod. In December 1868, Chopin wrote at some length in her commonplace book about Ole Bull, the Norwegian violinist: Last night I had the pleasure of hearing the famous violinist Ole Bull; never having heard him before, I was at once delighted and surprised. He came forward upon the stage, and was greeted with the most enthusiastic applause… . He handles his instrument, as I thought, tenderly, as though it were something he loved, and in his performance is perfectly at ease—displaying nothing of that exaggerated style most usually seen in fine violinists. His selections were mostly those of his own composition, and these I preferred to his borrowed pieces. (Chopin qtd. in Toth, Kate Chopin 86)

Toth notes that Chopin’s married years in New Orleans (1870–1879) are “mysterious, unknown,” and while the city offered a multiplicity of entertainments, including music, then, it is unclear what else Chopin went to see and hear (Toth 125, 126). Later as an adult, the author hosted musical events at her home in which she played piano herself. In addition to “Cavanelle,” music permeates several of Chopin’s stories including most notably The Awakening, but also other short stories such as “At Chêniere Caminada,” “After the Winter,” “A Very Fine Fiddler,” “A Vocation and a Voice,” “Wiser Than a God,” and “With the Violin.” In these stories, the characters’ responses to music occur on multiple sensorial levels that facilitate some personal transformation. “Therefore,” as Eulalia Piñero Gil

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has written, “music provides not only a powerful sensation but a sort of cognitive path through which other sensory experiences are enhanced, just as the writer herself experienced music at the St. Louis concerts” (86). Further, as Gil notes, music’s transformation can be healing, such as we see in “Wiser Than a God,” written in 1889. In this story, the character Paula von Stolz’s playing of Frédéric Chopin’s (the composer, no relation to Kate Chopin) “Berceuse” allows for Paula’s mother to recover both emotionally and physically. Notably, the “episode [in which Paula plays for her mother] is reminiscent of young Chopin’s description of Ole Bull’s remarkable violin concert and her desire to become blind in order ‘to drink’ that exceptional performance” (Gil 87). Another, better-known example is Chopin’s protagonist in The Awakening, Edna Pontellier, whose development occurs through the novel with well-known musical pieces. Edna, like Paula’s mother, “feels music as a holistic cognitive experience that connects with the rest of the senses,” and like Chopin herself, “appears to be a complete synesthete, as music evokes vivid visual imagery and other sensory combinations, including the tactile, the gustatory, and the olfactory” (Gil 88). In other words, Edna experiences music through her other senses: Musical strains, well rendered, had a way of evoking pictures in her mind. She sometimes liked to sit in the room of mornings when Madame Ratignolle played or practiced. One piece which that lady played Edna had entitled “Solitude.” It was a short, plaintive, minor strain. The name of the piece was something else, but she called it “Solitude.” When she heard it there came before her imagination the figure of a man standing beside a desolate rock on the seashore. He was naked. His attitude was one of hopeless resignation as he looked toward a distant bird winging its flight away from him. Another piece called to her mind a dainty young woman clad in an Empire gown, taking mincing dancing steps as she came down a long avenue between hedges. Again, another reminded her of children at play, and still another of nothing on earth but a demure lady stroking a cat. (CW 906)

In the above passage excerpted from The Awakening, Edna experiences music visually, calling to mind different, vivid images of a naked man, a woman in an Empire gown, playing children, and woman with a cat. Through both “Wiser Than a God” and The Awakening, among other stories, Chopin demonstrates a multisensorial experience of music, rendering the experience of music to be fully satisfying and transformative. In “Cavanelle,” Mademoiselle Montreville experiences nothing like the transformative or multisensorial experience of music such as that is found

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in other Chopin’s texts. That’s not to say she does not brace for such an experience. In fact, after Cavanelle’s talking-up of his sister’s musical abilities, the narrator expects to experience the sound of her voice as a synesthete. She expects to experience the sound of Mathilde’s voice to be “phenomenal” as if “zephyrs would lift [Mathilde] from her feet and … gently waft her in the direction of Goodchildren street” (CW 371). But, in fact, that is not what occurs. With “thin and anæmic” hands, she began to play the piano, accompanied by a voice that was completely unremarkable and unmemorable (CW 371). Mademoiselle Montreville describes her dissatisfaction at length: The day was a warm one, but that did not prevent a creepy chilliness seizing hold of me. The feeling was generated by disappointment, anger, dismay and various other disagreeable sensations which I cannot find names for. Had I been intentionally deceived and misled? Was this some impertinent pleasantry on the part of Cavanelle? Or rather had not the girl’s voice undergone some hideous transformation since her brother had listened to it? … The voice was thin to attenuation, I fear it was not even true. Perhaps my disappointment exaggerated its simple deficiencies into monstrous defects. But it was an unsympathetic voice that never could have been a blessing to possess or to listen to. (CW 372)

Chopin’s narrator is so disappointed by Mathilde’s voice that she experiences multiple emotions, some so “disagreeable” that she does not even know the name for what she felt. She wonders if they have pranked her or if something happened to her voice since the last time her brother had heard it. The narrator keeps going and uses terms such as “monstrous” and “unsympathetic” to describe a voice that was more a curse than a “blessing.” The transformative experience the narrator undergoes in listening to Mathilde parallels the sensorial descriptions other musical enthusiasts experience under better circumstances; however, this narrator’s experience is wholly negative and nearly unbelievable to her, quite the opposite of the musical experiences of Paula’s mother or Edna Pontellier. The horror of listening to Mathilde changes the narrator so dramatically that she does not return to Cavanelle for two years’ time, during which she expects him to be changed. Importantly, Cavanelle is the same but devoted to the point of poverty to his aunt, now that his sister is dead. Perhaps the narrator is also the same, as she expects Cavanelle to be one thing (better dressed, well-fed) and he is not. Her resultant sense of “derision” dissipates as soon as she leaves him and returns on the Prytania

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streetcar, on which she resumes her early estimation, and perhaps false estimation, of Cavanelle as “an angel” (CW 374). Given the profound importance of music in Chopin’s life and its significance in New Orleans’s history and culture, the colossal disappointment of Mathilde’s voice is intentional and speaks directly to the cultural divide presented in late nineteenth century, certainly insofar as Chopin’s stories depicted it. In fact, the author prepares her reader for the disappointment, by suggesting that Madame Montreville half expected Mathilde to be carried away by the wind toward Goodchildren Street—a street known for its proximity to vice and Voodoo. But neither character has changed by the end of the story, and importantly, its ending is ambiguous; the narrator returns on the streetcar and resumes her earlier, perhaps inauthentic, regard for Cavanelle, as she leaves for the American Quarter. In this story, as in “A Matter of Prejudice” and in “The Return of Alcibiade,” certain characters change very little, maintaining earlier prejudices and other unmoving behaviors. In “A Matter of Prejudice,” it is Henri who returns to the comforts of biased French upbringing, after the narrator also reveals that it was he who forbade French to be spoken in his own house. In “The Return of Alcibiade,” Bartna leaves Esmée to drift away from her illusion of the past after her uncle has died, but she leaves the plantation for no apparent reason except that the old man is dead. In all three stories, the endings are ambiguous. In “Cavanelle,” it is not clear why the textile merchant continues to devote his life, sacrificing everything for an ailing aunt, repelling his opportunity to finally live freely. It is further not clear why the narrator, after first dismissing him as a fool, resigns to her opinion of him as an “angel.” The stories echo protomodernist sensibilities and influences of writers such as Guy de Maupassant. Their ambiguities are founded upon the binaries Chopin presents French/American in each story. The cultural divides are predicated upon the street grid of New Orleans, with characters identified with neighborhoods like territories, traveling across town on streetcars and carriages, like their nineteenth-century contemporaries in Jane Austen novels who travel on the English countryside in horse-drawn carriages. The changes for Chopin’s characters, though, are found in the journeys. As long as characters are moving, they are experiencing life on a multiplicity of levels, facilitated by the limited freedoms New Orleans afforded its women residents. The cultural opposition that characters in these exemplary stories demonstrate is on one level reflective of the cultural opposition that existed in

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New Orleans during the nineteenth century, but on another level, it operates in the stories as a lens for understanding how Chopin enables her characters to test boundaries and extend into unknown spaces of existence. In “A Matter of Prejudice,” Madame Carambeau is in fact able to change and welcome her family back into her life—a change that is unimaginable in the beginning, as she appears stubborn and contemptuous of all things not French. Henri, her son, is set up as a foil, as he is shown to be stubborn and unchanging, returning, as it were, to habits of his French upbringing. In “The Return of Alcibiade,” Bartna returns to his life as a commission merchant, continuing to travel, but it is Esmée who relinquishes all that is known for an unknown life in New Orleans. She has spent the majority of the story upholding the charade of the past, clinging to the falsity more than what Bartna feels was necessary to deceive the old man, but once it is over, she releases from the illusion to move toward a new reality that is unknown to her. And finally, in “Cavanelle,” while the narrator appears to be unchanged, the unfortunate experience of listening to Mathilde sing sends her out of the city for two years. In this regard, Mademoiselle Montreville is most like Esmée, as she inhabited an ambiguous space and time for which she is unaccounted for, during a time when young, unmarried women were always accounted for. The only explanation she offers the reader is that during the two years she did not see Cavanelle, following the day at his house, “I had been absent that length of time from the city” (CW 372)—a remarkable non-admitting admission to the reader. What had she been doing? We will never know, but the ambiguity is markedly a departure from the precision with which she describes her movement through the city of New Orleans. The French elements in these stories—and countless others by Chopin—shape their characters linguistically and culturally, and they are recognizable in aesthetics as much as they are authentic in terms of cultural distinctions amid the French and American Quarters at the end of the nineteenth century. And yet for all their realism, the stories leverage their French aesthetics to propel their female characters into ambiguity, as they forge new and unknown spaces. The New Orleans of Chopin’s imagination enabled her women characters freedoms and anonymity even among its most well-known and recognizable landmarks and streets; she placed her protagonists in tangible, realistic settings of place and time, as much as she used those settings to take them “out” of the confines of linear time.

CHAPTER 3

Mobility and Autonomy: Chopin’s Women Characters Around Town

This chapter extends the discussion of women’s urban mobility as we turn to three exemplary Chopin stories that feature women who travel from the country—the plantation, specifically—to the city of New Orleans. Her stories “Charlie” (written in 1900), “Athénaïse” (1895, published in 1896), and “A Respectable Woman” (1894), demonstrate several instances in which women characters come of age—mentally, emotionally, or physically—a process enabled by their movement across the boundaries of the city. In each instance, the female characters in these stories are already depicted as independent-minded—or in the examples of “Charlie” and “Athénaïse,” headstrong to the point of near rebellion. Common among several Chopin stories, these characters are loved and encouraged to varying degrees by supportive, often wise and insightful men. This doesn’t mean that the characters necessarily appreciate the support or recognize it as such in the moment, but in each story, the women—Charlie, Athénaïse, and Mrs. Baroda, respectively—reach a deeper understanding of themselves as they exercise choice and free will, facilitated by their sojourns to New Orleans. This chapter will focus on these three stories, reading them backward through time and not chronologically, for the reason that their subjects demonstrate Chopin’s use of the city as a catalyst, a transformative space for the exercise of a woman’s choice. There are several factors that

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 H. Ostman, Kate Chopin and the City, American Literature Readings in the 21st Century, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-44300-8_3

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contribute to the transformative experience. Firstly, each woman has a man—a father, admirer, or husband—who respects and loves her; her autonomous mind and will are never in question; none of these men try to challenge her—a departure from what we see in other, better-known Chopin stories. For example, Léonce Pontellier unnecessarily annoys his wife Edna in The Awakening, when he challenges her ability to care for their sons’ health, which, as it turns out, is never threatened. Whereas the men in these stories love the female protagonists and respect them enough to allow them to make choices about their own lives. The slight exception to this allowance is when Charlie’s father sends her to boarding school against her will, although that act becomes a catalyst for the development of her authority when she returns to run his plantation. Secondly, in each of these stories, the main women characters travel to the city under different pretenses, but they each return to the plantations, their homes, refreshed, refocused, and ready to take up their “rightful” place in the domestic realm. Of course, with Chopin, that “rightful” place does not necessarily conform to traditional or conventional gender social roles but instead reworks those roles, revising them, as it were, to become suitable, sustainable, for her protomodernist female characters. Finally, these characters’ sojourns to the city are characterized not by spiritual or artistic awakenings, such as we see in Chopin’s The Awakening, in which Edna Pontellier becomes aware of herself on the deeper, more esoteric levels of the spirit and the life of the mind, but instead the characters in these New Orleans stories express their autonomy and choice through consumerist activities. They shop, they go out to restaurants, rent their own rooms in a boarding house, and/or tour the city. Monetary exchange figures centrally in these characters’ transformations, even as it is casually acknowledged. Nevertheless, all three main characters—Charlie, Athénaïse, and Mrs. Baroda—return home with clarity; they return by choice, as they step into newly reshaped roles and understandings of who they are in the order of things.

“Charlie” Chopin wrote “Charlie” close to the end of her writing career in 1900, following the publication of The Awakening, and before her death in 1904. The story was first published in Per Seyersted’s 1969 edited volume, The Complete Works of Kate Chopin. “Charlie” is longer than her typical story lengths, as it follows the transformation of its main character,

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Charlotte, known as “Charlie” among her family, headed by her widowed father, Mr. Laborde. When the reader meets Charlie, she lives at home with her six sisters, whose ages range from six to nineteen. Charlie figures among the middle children, and she has just turned seventeen before the opening the story. Unlike her sisters, and to the dismay of their governess, the fiercely proper Miss Melvern, Charlie exhibits unruliness and unbridled energy. She rides her horse “as if pursued by demons” and charges into the school room of their home sweating and wild (CW 639). Her own disdain for the classroom is hardly contained, as she presents in short hair, sweaty, and wearing a practical outfit of her own making: “something between bloomers and a divided skirt which she called her ‘trouserlets’  ” (CW 639). Despite the nod toward the progressive bloomers, “Charlie” is not explicitly a feminist story. There are many things about it that suggest a more nuanced theme, as the main character finds her place—redefining it—in the domestic sphere. Although not an overtly feminist narrative, the story features Charlie in her bloomers-cum-divided skirt and thus aligns her with the feminists of the nineteenth century, several of whom sought to revise women’s clothing for functionality over constrictive fashion. Long skirts and corsets were rejected by mid-nineteenth-century figures such as Elizabeth Smith Miller, who in 1851, frustrated by her clothing’s restrictions as she tried to work in her garden, shunned the long skirts for European women’s “Turkish trousers,” which would eventually be called “bloomers” by American women who wore them under shorter skirts. The fashion received a boost by Miller’s renown suffragist cousin, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who began to wear them, and then by Miller’s neighbor, Amelia Bloomer, who featured them in The Lily, a newspaper periodical that she edited. The garment became named for her, as she also became an advocate of women’s rights. Bloomer’s and others’ advocacy for the wearing of bloomers was founded upon arguments promoting women’s health, as opposed to a focus on the freedom the garment allowed its wearer. An 1857 Post article claims: “The doctors have declared that the present invasion of colds, gripes, and peritoneal inflammation (which prove usually fatal) are entirely owing to the petticoats, which expose the whole female person, from the waist down to the foot, to the weather” (qtd. in Steckler). This is not to suggest that bloomers were embraced easily or immediately. Miller and Stanton were often ridiculed or shamed for their fashion choices.

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Charlie, apparently unconscious of the suffragist movement outside the plantation she lives on, wears her trouserlets unself-consciously, immune, apparently, to social disapproval. But in fact, no one on the plantation openly criticizes her dress. Charlie is criticized for many other things, though, the narrator explains. For example, she is criticized, when the reader first meets her, for being late to her lessons and for interrupting everyone else’s lessons. She is different: a devoted poet and outdoors person and noted for her kindness (CW 641). The only person on the plantation who withholds judgement is her father. The plot advances when Charlie accidentally shoots Firman Walton, who had come on business from New Orleans and was headed to her father’s plantation. Initially, in the woods, Walton mistakes Charlie for a boy and he scolds her and her young companion, Xenophore, for whom she’d been showing off. Walton recalibrates his response when he realizes Charlie is a girl, and he becomes apologetic and agreeable, as they accompany him back to her home for aid. The general response to the shooting at home is that Charlie has brought shame to herself. Her father, already teetering on near disapproval from an earlier incident, confers with the governess and resolves to send Charlie to a boarding school in New Orleans—a prospect that she doesn’t find entirely disagreeable. In the meantime, Walton is invited to stay on while he recuperates from his somewhat minor if not wholly inconvenient injury; Charlie develops affection for him, while another, more familiar and local young man stays in the wings, watchful and affectionate toward her. Gus, who is on hand to assist Mr. Laborde with plantation business, keeps a more-than-appropriate distance, but sends his regards to Charlie, even when no one else appears to be pleased with her (CW 652). The trajectory of Charlie’s transformation in the story appears to begin when, prior to leaving for the boarding school, she becomes “bent upon making a bit of toilet for the evening” and dresses herself with her sister Julia’s help. Charlie comes to supper in a gown and astonishes everyone in attendance, but her father had a somewhat ambivalent response: “To Mr. Laborde there was something poignant in the sight of his beloved daughter in this unfamiliar garb. It seemed a dismal part of the unhappy situation which had given him such a heartache” (CW 652). On the other hand, Walton’s presence appears to have inspired Charlie’s experimentation with more feminine dress, and it also marks the prelude for her urban transformation. None of her older sisters’ fashion expertise transfers easily to her, so Charlie is sent to her Aunt Clementine for two weeks in the city

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to prepare her for life in New Orleans before her enrollment in the Young Ladies’ Seminary begins (CW 654). Charlie leaves with Julia, Walton, and Madame Philomel, the sisters’ music and dance teacher, and embarks on her journey to New Orleans. Even at Aunt Clementine’s city home, Charlie is resistant to staying “within bounds,” but Charlie, despite clumsy first attempts at fashion, begins to evaluate her appearance and acquiesces to the assistance offered from her aunt and Julia. The city becomes the occasion of Charlie’s education—both socially and educationally and awkwardly she begins to conform: Through mild and firm coercion Charlie was brought to understand that such excessive ornamentation as she favored would not for a moment be tolerated by the disciplinarians at the Seminary. When finally that young person was admitted to the refined precincts—save for the diamond ring and the locket, in the matter of which she had taken a stubborn stand—no fault could have been found with her appearance which was in every way consistent with that of the well mannered girl of seventeen. (CW 657)

Charlie’s “pre-education” includes her new acquaintance with the conventions of the upper middle class: visiting and receiving visitors, eating in restaurants, and going to the opera. She is, it would seem, being trained for the life that Edna Pontellier rejects in The Awakening. The conventions and manners instilled in her are predicated on the women’s most constant pastime in the city: shopping (CW 657). Later, when her father has taken her out for a visit, Chopin points out: “It was well they provided themselves with money. Charlie needed every thing she could think of and what she forgot her father remembered” (CW 661). A detailed list of items they purchase follows, including a hat, a hat pin, multiple handkerchiefs, gifts, and books (CW 661). Other Chopin stories link economic autonomy to women’s freedom. For instance, Li-Wen Chang has read Edna Pontellier’s “awakening” in terms of her attempt to economically liberate herself from her husband. Drawing on Thorstein Veblen’s The Theory of the Leisure Class, published the same year as The Awakening in 1899, Chang argues that Edna herself signifies her husband’s accumulation of wealth; she is “a monetary sign that exhibits her husband’s social standing and pecuniary power in the social jungle” (139). Her primary purpose is to perform “conspicuous consumption” (139). In this view, Edna is, to use Margit Stange’s words,

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“a commodity that circulates throughout a series of interlocking markets. Not only an item of trade, she is an opportunity for investment and profit, a speculative property passed from one agent to the next” (45). In other words, moving from her father’s house to her husband’s, Edna becomes a property to be developed for the benefit of raising her husband’s status. When she begins to withdraw from her social duties during the course of the novel, particularly when she moves out of her house on Esplanade Street, Edna is attempting to disengage from the economic cycle. By contrast, when Charlie is experimenting with dress and curling irons for her hair, prior to her enrollment at boarding school, she appears to be attempting to shape herself for the very same marriage market that Edna seeks to extricate herself from. She has no economic freedom; instead, her shopping spree with her father is part of her informal training as a young woman preparing for a marriageable state. Charlie’s pre-education with her Aunt Clementine and sister Julia prepares her fairly well for boarding school. The girls attending the boarding school are aware of her “lack of accomplishments,” and she feels “her shortcomings keenly” (CW 658). This self-awareness—if we can call it that—prompts Charlie to apply herself to further conforming to the parameters of ladylike behavior: “With dogged determination she had made up her mind to transform herself from a hoyden to a fascinating young lady” (CW 658). However, amid Charlie’s transition to boarding school life is her continuous poetry writing. The girls at the seminary discover she is an adept writer, but their compliments at once warm her and cause her to critically evaluate her looks: Charlie rocked violently and tried to look indifferent. Her hair was long enough to tie back now with a bow of ribbon. On her forehead she wore a few little curls made with the curling irons, and as she glanced in the mirror while she rocked she wondered if her face would ever get beautiful and silky white … . She was given over to putting some kind of greasy stuff on her hands at night and slept in a pair of her father’s old gloves. (CW 659)

Charlie’s exterior transformation is nearly complete when her father comes to visit her. Mr. Laborde is astonished by his favorite daughter’s new appearance, conforming to the conventions of the day for young ladies, unmistakably feminine. Despite his surprise, her father is as delighted to see her as she is to see him, and they visit the city’s attractions and briefly see Walton, whom Charlie appears not to like anymore. The more

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superficial changes, exemplified by the preoccupation with the whiteness and softness of her hands, suggest that Charlie is becoming more and more like Edna Pontellier prior to her “awakening” in the so-­named novel, as she asks her husband to evaluate her hands. This particular exchange echoes the scene early in The Awakening, when Edna’s hands are criticized by her husband: “You are burnt beyond recognition,” he added, looking at his wife as one looks at a valuable piece of property which has suffered some damage. She held up her hands, strong, shapely hands, and surveyed them critically, drawing up her lawn sleeves above the wrists. Looking at them reminded her of her rings, which she had given to her husband before leaving for the beach. She silently reached out to him, and he, understanding, took the rings from his vest pocket and dropped them into her open palm. (CW 882)

The above scene has drawn much critical attention, as it lends itself to an analysis of the economic exchange that structures the Pontelliers’ implicit marriage contract. Mr. Pontellier perceives his wife like one might look over property; her self-criticism parallels his assessment, as she inspects her hands, and their exchange—his approval/appraisal and her acquiescence to it—is confirmed by the receipt of her rings—the financial reward. The scene’s similarities to Charlie’s display of her hands for her father’s approval further aligns her story with the advancement and the shaping of person for the marriage market. The responses from Charlie’s sisters and her father are mixed. On the one hand, her sister Julia assists her with dress and her preparations at Aunt Clementine’s home. Yet, on the other, she expresses concern that Charlie’s attempts make her “a spectacle … if we permitted it,” something she would welcome over the idea that “she could develop such vulgar instincts” (CW 657). Even Mr. Laborde discourages her from trying too hard to become something he believes she is not; his intention for sending her to boarding school was to tame her, not vulgarize her (CW 662). Her own response is dismissive of his advice, and Charlie mentions her dancing lessons are going so well that she may be the next Carnival queen. Charlie’s reference to becoming the next Carnival queen is one of the very few mentions Chopin makes to this well-known element in New Orleans’s culture. Chopin herself had been to Carnival in 1872, at a moment when gatherings of street maskers were beginning to assemble for the Rex parade (“the king”) (Ewell, “Placing the City”). Mardi Gras

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developed in New Orleans during the latter half of the nineteenth century. Organizations of white men formed krewes with particular themes, which they paraded in the city; these parades ended in private balls that had their own themes determined by the individual organizations. Themes varied among topics of satire, history, fantasy, and the exotic, frequently shaped by the literature and culture popular at the time. Krewes’ themes would have been understood by residents of New Orleans in the late nineteenth century, a period in the history of Mardi Gras considered to be the “Golden Age of Carnival” (Blackmore). And further, krewes have their own hierarchies, befitted with ceremonial kings and queens, even as Rex is always masked, but the queens and her attendants are often known (THNOC Visitor Services). Charlie’s reference to the possibility of her becoming queen implies her awareness—indeed her intention—of becoming highly feminized, almost to the point of satire. Her comment to her father also links her external transformation to the vulgar, as she indicates her animal “sound”: “some of these days they’ll be asking your permission to make me queen of the Carnival. And as for temper! Why, it’s ridiculous, dad. I’m beginning to—to bleat!” (CW 662). Mr. Laborde has no comment after her admission, and the narrator tells us that together, he and his daughter had a busy day, replete with music, which filled Charlie with elation (CW 663). Unlike Julia, Mr. Laborde, importantly, is not completely horrified by Charlie’s attempts to remake herself in the image of a southern lady. He enjoys his daughter as much as she enjoys him. It is together that they dine out and shop. In fact, he even gently tells her: “It’s all right, Charlie dear, but you know you mustn’t think too much about the hands and all that. Take care of the head, too, and the temper” (CW 662). Mr. Laborde’s care for his daughter supersedes any arbitrary requirements of society that threaten to reshape the essence of his daughter: body, mind, and heart must remain intact. He, therefore, figures centrally in Charlie’s transformation; his advice becomes a harbinger for the derailment of her trajectory in the city. She does not become a younger Edna Pontellier but instead becomes someone new, someone who stands just outside of conventional southern gender standards. Charlie and her father dine on the western side of Lake Pontchartrain, which had begun to develop in 1871 from a local fishing and recreation space to a more viable entertainment and cultural area, featuring restaurants, venues for music and dancing, open garden spaces, and a hotel,

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spanning an area of piers and repurposed levees. The western area of the lake appears in several Chopin stories and, in “Charlie,” the author describes the scene: “They were almost alone at the lake end save for the habitual fisherman and sportsmen, the restauranteurs and lazy looking garçons. Their small table was out where the capricious breeze beat about them, and they sat looking across the glistening water” (CW 662). The discussion that Charlie and Mr. Laborde have in view of the lake provides a turning point in the story, one in which Charlie begins to confront the limits of her feminine socialization, and one in which the story begins to anticipate the direction of Charlie’s trajectory, when her father encourages her interests and individuality and appears less interested in her pursuit of superficiality—such as the whitening and softening of her hands (CW 662). To push the metaphor of place, the commercial renewal of the western side of Lake Pontchartrain offers a renewed lens for considering Charlie’s purpose for being in the city in the first place, and, notably, her father is central to this shift in her development. Pearl L. Brown has written about the “awakened” men characters in Chopin’s short stories with an emphasis on the Creole regard and approach to conventional social roles; among these men we might count Mr. Laborde. She explains that while Creoles may have engaged the sensual elements of the material life, rigidity was expressed in cultural norms that dictated behavior along the lines of gender. And yet, she points out, multiple men in Chopin’s stories still demonstrate support, tenderness, love, and mutuality, reminding “nineteenth-century readers of what the relationship between a man and a woman could be and should be” (Brown 70, 75). In early Chopin scholarship, Per Seyersted, the Norwegian scholar who was instrumental in reviving international interest in Chopin in the late twentieth century, suggested that Charlie injured Walton as an expression of retaliation for the men who were responsible for controlling and limiting her behavior, imposing, as it were, cultural norms upon her. Seyested extended this interpretation to Chopin herself, arguing that Charlie does for the author what she could not do for herself. Through the character of Charlie, Chopin thus was “hitting back at the males who labeled her a disgrace and silenced her literary gun because she had represented a woman taking liberties of a man” (qtd. in Blythe 207). However, Anne M.  Blythe has taken issue with this perspective, which had some currency during the earlier years, and she points out very directly that it is “nonsense,” and that:

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Her father loves Charlie and misses her when she is away. She loves him. There is not hint of anything abnormal or unhealthy in the feelings of either, no suggestion that this healthy father-daughter relationship is in any way delaying or hampering her maturing as a young woman or growing in need and ability to respond to other men. (207)

Blythe continues by pointing out the fact that in addition to genuinely enjoying the time he spends with Charlie, his decision to send her to boarding school in the city is not an easy one. Mr. Laborde sends her to school for her own benefit, so that she may understand the ways of the world—which consequently also required her to be “tamed” somewhat (Blythe 212). We know Mr. Laborde “almost entirely from the outside,” as Bernie Koloski points out; unlike other male Chopin characters such as Offdean in “No-Account Creole” (published in 1894), who demonstrate a richer interiority. But Walton even appears to have some depth. When Charlie accidentally shoots him, she even imagines that she is interested in him until he asks her sister Julia to marry him, but her disappointment and interest dissipate quickly. Walton is only a catalyst in the story that propels Charlie to the city, where she attempts to socialize herself; where she engages conspicuous consumption; and where she and her father enjoy each other’s company out on the town. The event that collides Walton with Charlie is the trigger for events; when she realizes that he has asked Julia to marry him—which is a surprise only to Charlie, as the narrator mentions his interest in Julia multiple times—he figures again as a catalyst, one that helps her to fully realize who she is. Still, it is Charlie’s father who is central to her development. Her confidence in his affections, as Koloski points out, enables her to mature. Although not perfect, as he certainly does not enjoy the disciplinary aspects of fatherhood, Mr. Laborde “supports each of his girls in their endeavors and gives them the freedom to be different from one another and from him. He looks after them and does what is good for them … . He is an endearing man—and an admirable father” (Koloski 19). In large part due to his support, Charlie is able to return to the plantation when he is injured and unable to oversee its work. After her time in the city, Charlie returns by choice and on her own terms. She will run the plantation with Gus, partnering to keep Les Palmiers running. Charlie comes home with a renewed sense of autonomy and purpose, synthesizing her awareness of expectations for young southern women with a sense of urgency and authority. As Bonnie Shaker has

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pointed out, Charlie “returns to the androgyny of her youth, although her masculine freedoms are checked by her feminine familiar responsibilities” (105). Aunt Clementine’s final attempt to direct her results in Charlie warning, “Please leave me out of your calculations, Aunt” (CW 665). Drawing from both her feminine sensibilities and the restoration of her autonomous self, Charlie is able to form a partnership with Gus and successfully runs the plantation, as its “mistress” (CW 669). Importantly, the narrator states that Charlie comes into her own authority when she has assumed her new place at the plantation. The narrator pointedly associates the boarding school not with her transformation but with her earlier “state of semi-disgrace.” Charlie’s time in the city serves as a kind of incubation period in her life: she must discover the contours of a young woman’s role in society through exhibiting all of the pageantry of dresses, ribbons, and curling irons—leading her to imagine becoming queen of one of the Carnival krewes—as well as consuming goods with unbridled “desire,” without, at least, a concern for cost. But the narrator’s description of this earlier moment of her city “education” is only part of her development. Once Charlie returns to the plantation, she has sufficiently changed to decide on a relationship of mutuality with Gus, one that manifests respect for her individuality similar to that which she has enjoyed with her father. She is able to lead at the plantation and decide “to delay and possibly reject marriage altogether.” Chopin, as Sylvia Bailey Shurbutt has pointed out, does not offer the reader a definitive closure for the story; instead, “if Charlie marries young Gus, theirs will not be a conventional marriage … [a revision of] the spousal institution along the lines of the Wollstonecraft and Godwin relationship: two independent, self-fulfilled individuals who offer each other both friendship and passion” (21–22). The city in this story is essential to Charlie’s development into an autonomous woman who returns to the plantation to join a man as her equal, as a partner in work and in life. New Orleans offers Charlie an opportunity to integrate the essential awareness of herself as a woman in nineteenth-century Louisiana and to reject the elements of that role that hinder her freedom as an individual or that parody the importance of her social role as a woman. While Charlie’s time in the city brings her close to vulgar dress and manners, she ultimately learns the essential role a woman could play in a family business—in her case, the plantation. Gus and her father need her to eschew frivolity and be the autonomous, confident woman she ultimately becomes. “Charlie” offers us a lens to consider earlier stories, such as “Athénaïse” and “A Respectable Woman,” in which

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the city is essential in the reconstruction of the female protagonists’ characters. As we see in “Charlie,” these stories similarly leverage relationships with loving men (however flawed they may be in other ways) and the urban experience, enabling the central women characters to exercise their own wills, as they are in control of who they will live with and how they will live with them. “Charlie” provides this chapter with a lens for considering the ways the city of New Orleans offers several of Chopin’s female characters the opportunity to mature and change, as they confront conventional social expectations for middle-class women. “Charlie” particularly sheds light on how consumerist practices are central to fulfilling these expectations, as much as the self-regulation of behaviors is. But also Charlie’s relationship with her father enables readers to imagine what Chopin could see: a world in which men too were “awakened” or “enlightened”—seeing women as their intellectual and emotional equals, desired on their own terms. Charlie navigates the city’s social lesson and realizes how to adapt to an unchanging world— at least a world not changing fast enough—but she does so in a way that preserves her own autonomy. This doesn’t mean she conforms and loses individuality, but she needs the experience in the city to reconcile gender expectations so that she can decide for herself the life she wishes to live.

“Athenaïse” Through this lens, “Athénaïse,” which Chopin wrote in 1895 and published a year later in the Atlantic Monthly, tells the story of a young wife who is repelled by her new husband, whom she married willingly. In this story, Athénaïse secretly runs away from her home with Cazeau to New Orleans; while there, she learns she is pregnant from the Black woman (“quadroon” [CW 440]) who owns the boarding house where she stays and soon after willingly returns home. However, during her time in the city, she is befriended by a fellow boarder Gouvernail, a man whose love for her compares with the other men in her life. Her father and her brother care for her and respect her. Like Charlie, Athénaïse journeys to New Orleans to discover who she is and to work out how to retain her autonomy within the confines of her new social role as a wife. She experiences the city as a consumer and receives more than simply entertainment and a place to sleep, so that she may return to Cazeau as a fully realized adult woman, who comes home of her own free will.

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When the reader first encounters Athénaïse, she is already in motion. The first line reads: “Athénaïse went away in the morning to make a visit to her parents, ten miles back on rigolet de Bon Dieu” (CW 426). Like Charlie, for whom horseback riding is as natural as walking, she is mobile, testing the boundaries of her (new) home and making a lengthy trek back to her old home. But unlike Charlie, Athénaïse has already gotten married and apparently embarked on her adult life as a wife, and she has married a man who allows her the opportunities for space and autonomy. When she first goes away and doesn’t come home at night, Cazeau “fretted not a little. He did not worry much about Athénaïse, who, he suspected, was resting only too content in the bosom of her family” (CW 426). He is instead more concerned about the horse she took to get there. A widower, Cazeau is familiar with living with women, and experience makes him tolerant of Athénaïse’s impulses. He is also busy with farm responsibilities, and he feels his wife’s absence moderately, “like a dull, insistent pain” (CW 427). The narrator emphasizes Cazeau’s gentleness, in spite of his coarseness. He is contemptuous of Athénaïse’s brothers, and he does not tolerate her brother Montéclin’s behavior lightly. He is quite capable of firmness and perhaps even violence, but the narrator describes Cazeau as a mix of softness, severity, and ruggedness: His voice was low pitched, and even softer than [the servant] Félicité’s. He was tall, sinewy, swarthy, and altogether severe looking. His thick black hair waved, and it gleamed like the breast of a crow. The sweep of his mustache, which was not so black, outlined the broad contour of the mouth. Beneath the under lip grew a small tuft which he was much given to twisting, and which he permitted to grow, apparently for now other purpose. Cazeau’s eyes were dark blue, narrow and overshadowed. His hands were coarse and stiff from close acquaintance with farming tools and implements, and he handled his fork and knife clumsily. But he was distinguished looking, and succeeded in commanding a good deal of respect, and even fear sometimes. (CW 426)

The narrator describes Cazeau in opposing terms: he is as coarse as he is gentle; he is as harsh looking as he is distinctive. He is vain as much as he is unaware of his looks. In other words, Cazeau is himself a complex character, drawn from opposing features, and presenting as a character whose exteriority betrays the depths of his feelings. He is not harsh or hard on

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Athénaïse; he retrieves her from her family—a move that makes her later departure to the city all the more fraught. Given his prior marital experience and depth, Cazeau is also aware of his wife’s “growing aversion” to him (CW 427). Only married two months, Athénaïse is repelled by his sexual attraction to her. This development disappoints him, although he is willing to live with it. Prior to marriage, Athénaïse had exhibited independence of thought and action; she’d married him willingly. The narrator tells us that “she had liked him, and had even been rather flustered when he pressed her hands and kissed them, and kissed her lips and cheeks and eyes, when she accepted him” (CW 430). Despite her early attraction, she feels physically repelled by her husband; however, her lack of complete autonomy, which she believes she felt before becoming a wife, drives her to leave. Her acceptance of Cazeau’s marriage offer had been typical of Athénaïse’s prior independence and will. For instance, when her father demands that she comes downstairs to meet her husband, who has come to retrieve her, her brother Montéclin remarks: “you know as well as me it’s no use to tell ’Thénaïse anything” (CW 430). Later, when Montéclin presses her for the reason she does not want to stay with Cazeau, Athénaïse insists that it’s not Cazeau that repels her, it’s the limitations of marriage itself: “It’s jus’ being married that I detes’ an’ despise. I hate being Mrs. Cazeau, an’ would want to be Athénaïse Miché again.” This admission prompts her to regret not joining the convent, where perhaps she would be spared living with a man, “his coats an’ pantaloons hanging in my room; his ugly bare feet—washing them in my tub, befo’ my very eyes, ugh!” (CW 431). When Cazeau presses her at her father’s house, asking if she is ready to return to his home, she silently acquiesces, even as her brother Montéclin reminds her: “If you don’ wan’ to go, you know w’at you got to do, ’Thénaïse … . You don’ set yo’ feet back on Cane River, by God, unless you want to,—not w’ile I’m alive” (CW 432). And lest readers think that she may be cowed into returning, in the following section (III), the narrator assures us: Athénaïse was not one to accept the inevitable with patient resignation, a talent born in the souls of many women; neither was she the one to accept it with philosophical resignation, like her husband. Her sensibilities were alive and keen and responsive. She met the pleasurable things of life with frank, open appreciation, and against distasteful conditions she rebelled. Dissimulation was as foreign to her nature as guile to the breast of a babe,

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and her rebellious outbreaks, by no means rare, had hitherto been quite open and aboveboard. (CW 433)

Thus, Athénaïse’s decision to secretly run away again—this time to New Orleans, with Montéclin’s aid—should not be surprising. Unable to reconcile her aversion to Cazeau, she conspires with her brother to escape and to start a new life in the city. Two factors serve Athénaïse’s transformation in the city: her arrival in Sylvie’s boarding house on Dauphine Street in the French Quarter and her befriending the journalist Gouvernail. Athénaïse arrives on Dauphine Street, named for the Dauphin of France, who died prematurely, predating his father, King Louis XIV. Popular and likeable, Dauphin racked up multiple gambling debts and was not known for his work ethic, which by most accounts was apparently considered to be absent. He was the only surviving legitimate heir of King Louis XIV, and in 1852, after his death, New Orleans named the street after him (the current spelling is feminized, an effect, some say, of the grammatical desire to align the linguistic gender of “rue” with “Dauphine”) (Asher 49–50). On this historical street, the boarding house is “a three-story grey brick, standing directly on the banquette, with three broad stone steps leading to the deep front entrance.” From the second-story balcony swung a small sign, conveying to passers­by the intelligence that within were chambres garnies (“furnished rooms”) (CW 440). The narrator describes Sylvie as “a portly quadroon of fifty or there-about, clad in an ample volante [“flying”] of the old-fashioned purple calico so much affected by her class” (CW 440). Sylvie’s “class” indicates a very specific caste designation within the social hierarchy of late nineteenth-century New Orleans, when the story is set. Originating with the Spanish occupation of the area, racial identification became a complex measurement of “percentages” of family bloodlines and became the basis of the complex social stratification that organized racial relationships in New Orleans. The category of “cuarterones” (“quadroons”) indicated a person whose racial make-up derived from four parts (two grandparents) of white “blood” (Powell 294). These racial delineations marked distinctions and consequently contention among free people of color (“libres”) and enslaved people of color. The number of free women of color was higher than the number of free men of color by a ratio of two to one. These women, “libres,” were often the recipients of contempt because they were the owners of many rent establishments in the city. Following the Civil War, Black men and women

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gained certain rights, including the opportunity to take on roles of authority and to receive an education. But certain limitations persisted, and the “Black Codes” charged taxes on Black residents who sought employment in areas beyond agricultural work and limited their opportunities to rent property. Compared to other southern cities, New Orleans integrated the races more than most, and offered integrated schools, court juries, boards, law enforcement, and legal interracial marriage (Frith). Perhaps as an indication of their autonomy, though, historian Lawrence Powell notes that New Orleans’s “fememes de couleur libres were famous for giving as good as they got, lashing out angrily when their children were abused or when they themselves were treated with anything less than the civil decency they believed their due” (305). Chopin presents Sylvie, the owner of the boarding house that Athénaïse moves into, as an independent business owner, who is not connected in any way to a man and does not require guidance, unlike her new guest. Heather Kirk Thomas has pointed out that Sylvie is an anomaly among Chopin’s Black female characters, which have received much criticism for being presented often in two-dimensional or racist stereotypical terms. Sylvie, by contrast to these characters, demonstrates an autonomy and authority that is essential to Athénaïse, who would not have even understood that she is pregnant until Sylvie points it out to her—knowledge that emerges later in the story. Kirk Thomas argues that Sylvie’s maturation and ability to take care of herself contrasts the dismantling of Athénaïse’s independence once she becomes a wife. Deviating from her more typical depictions of Black women characters, Chopin constructs Sylvie as a foil to Athénaïse, such as she does with other female characters in “A Sentimental Soul” (1894) and “Regret” (1894), as well as “Two Summers and Two Souls” (1895) and The Awakening. The character of Sylvie in “Athénaïse” and the story’s namesake character follow this type of literary pairing. In this instance, Sylvie is Black, not married, and runs her own New Orleans business, which enables her economic freedom, whereas Athénaïse is white, married, pregnant, and laments the fact that she has lost her identity in becoming a wife (Kirk Thomas). Within the canon of Chopin’s stories, Sylvie is a standout. Racial stereotypes were a facet of white fiction of nineteenth-century local color writing, and Chopin wrote multiple versions of the “Black Mammy” prototype, as well as inexplicably devoted former slaves. Most of these Black characters were depicted two-dimensionally. However, the fact that Sylvie is a

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Black New Orleans business owner sets her apart from Chopin’s other Black characters, as well as from depictions of Black characters in nineteenth-­century American literature (Kirk Thomas): She was a portly quadroon of fifty or there-about, clad in an ample volante of the old-fashioned purple calico so much affected by her class. She wore large golden hoop-earrings, and her hair was combed plainly, with every appearance of effort to smooth out the kinks. She had broad, coarse features, with a nose that turned up, exposing the wide nostrils, and that seemed to emphasize the loftiness and command of her bearing,—a dignity that in the presence of white people assumed a character of respectfulness, but never of obsequiousness. (CW 440)

Among Black people in the story, Sylvie goes by the name “Madame Sylvie,” the narrator continues (CW 440)—a point of contrast among other Black women characters in Chopin’s works who are addressed by the familiar “Aunt,” such as we see in Aunt Belindy, Thérèse’s cook in Chopin’s 1890 novel At Fault. Among white people, she is “Sylvie”—evidence that she understands her customers. She operates within the New Orleans class hierarchy, as it serves her business, and she demands respect among her peers. Kirk Thomas explains that Sylvie’s business further establishes her as a unique and authoritative Black character in Chopin’s texts—and I would add, as a unique and authoritative female character in these stories. The author, she writes, links the boarding house with the notion of autonomy: “In calling the boarding house ‘the house of Sylvie’ Chopin not only contributes a French flavor to this Creole tale but also conveys a sense of economic sovereignty, like the powerful traditions invoked by ‘the House of Chanel’ or ‘the House of Lords.’  ” Sylvie directs Athénaïse to her rooms, and in doing so, indicates to the young wife that she is the authority in this house—in stark contrast to Athénaïse’s experience as a married woman. This is not only a distinctive behavior for a Black character in Chopin’s fiction, but for a female character. Many of the author’s women characters grow into independence largely without a female role model or guide. For a young woman who has grown up on a plantation, where crops are planted and harvested annually, Athénaïse appears to be very ignorant about reproduction. The job of revealing her pregnancy falls to Sylvie,

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who understands immediately when Athénaïse explains that “she was not well; she was not herself … . The climate of New Orleans did not agree with her” (CW 451). Thus, in addition to modeling authority and independence, Sylvie also is essential to propelling Athénaïse into knowledge and preparedness. The knowledge of her pregnancy transforms Athénaïse from the reluctant, repelled, runaway wife to a woman who sees her own face “transfigured … with wonder and rapture” (CW 451). Ironically, of course, Athénaïse meets the news of her pregnancy with awareness, as she prepares for the social and biological role of motherhood, which Edna Pontellier later in The Awakening finds to be a significant obstacle to her independence. Still, in “Athénaïse,” the main character demonstrates a wholly different perspective on motherhood, one shaped by love and expectation. As much as Sylvie is instrumental in Athénaïse’s narrative arc, the issue of race also appears in Chopin’s dramatic rendering of Cazeau’s search for his wife. In this regard, the memory of slavery serves as a metaphor for the husband’s pursuit of his wife, an indicator to the reader of the limits of marriage for women. Both Heather Kirk Thomas and Sylvia Bailey Shurbutt have drawn parallels between Cazeau’s retrieving his runaway wife and his father—a slave master—retrieving his runaway slave, “Black Gabe.” Upon Cazeau’s attempt to bring his wife home from her parents’ home, he recalls when he was a boy and the slave ran away, an event that made a deep impression on him: He was a very small boy that day, seated before this father on horse-back. They were proceeding slowly, and Black Gave was moving on before them at a little dog-trot. Black Gabe had run away, and had been discovered back in the Gotrain swamp. They had halted beneath this big oak to enable the negro to take breath; had agreed at the time that Black gabe was a fool, a great idiot indeed, for wanting to run away from him. The whole impression was for some reason hideous, and to dispel it Cazeau spurred his horse to a swift gallop. Overtaking his wife, he rode the remainder of the way at her side in silence. (CW 433)

Kirk Thomas reads this passage as a satire paralleling Cazeau’s runaway wife. As an element of this satire, she also reads the garden of Sylvie’s French Quarter boarding house as an ironic kind of “sylvan” haven, a lush urban garden space, in which Athénaïse retreats for hours at a time and where she would eventually learn “her own mind”:

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Compared with the evil antebellum tree of knowledge dwarfing Cazeau’s plantation, Sylvie’s lush courtyard seems prelapsarian; more importantly, it supplies the three preconditions mentioned … that will enable Athénaïse to “know her own mind.” The brilliantly-colored flowers, their sensual perfume, and the plaintive lament of the caged birds work the magic on Athénaïse. This diminutive Eden arouses her senses and quiescent sexuality, easing her metamorphosis into womanhood prior to her realization that she is expecting a child. (Kirk Thomas)

Whereas in Cazeau’s memory, Black Gabe is a slave, the Black Sylvie is an entrepreneur and is central to Athénaïse’s understanding of her situation and her ability to make her own decision about where she is to live. Sylvie’s independence, authority, and competence to run her own house are instrumental in providing Athénaïse the insight and confidence to decide for herself and return to her husband—as opposed to the hunted and recaptured Black Gabe. Shurbutt points out Cazeau’s disdain for the memory of Black Gabe’s retrieval directly links to his own task at hand, as he has stepped “comfortably into the dominant role society has provided him” (18). Perhaps a parallel can be drawn between Black Gabe and Athénaïse, but it is Sylvie—a free, independent, woman entrepreneur, who is bound to no one and is the mistress of her own house—who can guide Athénaïse and enable her to assert her own will again. Kirk Thomas points out how extraordinary Sylvie is, not only in Chopin’s body of work but within the nineteenth-century American literary tradition itself. Like John Carlos Rowe who similarly points out that Chopin almost never associates women across class, race, or economic lines, she argues: “For this reason alone Sylvie’s sympathetic characterization is of distinct importance in Chopin’s corpus, notwithstanding its extraordinary significance as a rare literary illustration of an entrepreneurial woman of color” (Kirk Thomas). The city of New Orleans is an essential setting to this story, because it is only there where a woman like Sylvie might exist in the first place. However, the presence of caring men who demonstrate respect for Athénaïse’s will also enable her dramatic change. Athénaïse has four male characters who recognize her independent will and mind: her father, her brother, her husband, and her new friend, Gouvernail, whom she meets in New Orleans. Both her father and her brother ask her why she married Cazeau in the first place, although her brother Montéclin takes special pleasure in the fact that she refuses to return at first to her husband’s house. Athénaïse’s father “had lashed her with the question a dozen times.

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Why indeed?” (CW 430). Importantly, neither her father nor her brother convince her to return; she returns the first time on her own, resignedly and silently. Cazeau, although he appears to assume the role of husband comfortably and familiarly, still wishes his wife to come to him on her own. The second time she leaves, he knows too that he will not be able to “compel her return as he had done once before,—compel her to return to the shelter of his roof, compel her cold and unwilling submission to his love and passionate transports” (CW 438). Ultimately, Cazeau prefers to wait until Athénaïse comes back to him on her own volition or not at all. It is Gourvernail, whom Athénaïse meets in the city, who not only respects her autonomy, but understands her with compassion. He falls in love with her during her brief stay at Sylvie’s boarding house, where he, a local journalist, has a permanent residence. Upon getting to know Athénaïse, he recognizes “that she was self-willed, impulsive, innocent, ignorant, unsatisfied, dissatisfied; for had she not complained that things seemed all wrongly arranged in this world, and no one was permitted to be happy in his own way?” (CW 446). Further, he “commiserated her loneliness” and treats her with respect, in spite of his insights into her character (CW 446). Like Mr. Laborde, who takes his daughter Charlie to the shores of Lake Ponchatrain, Gouvernail takes Athénaïse to the lake as well, where “the trip was comparatively new and strange to her,” and the lake’s water was “studded with pleasure-boats, the sight of children playing merrily along the grassy palisades, the music”—all of which she finds enchanting (CW 447). Although Gouvernail is partial to the fashionable American Quarter, where he finds sophisticated conversation and like-­ minded intellectuals (CW 444), he takes Athénaïse out in the summer evenings around the French Quarter and on weekend mornings to the French Market, and abandons his associates in the American Quarter for a time, in order to be with her. In addition to the unique character of Sylvie, Gouvernail is another unique character in “Athénaïse,” and he also appears in Chopin’s short story “A Respectable Woman” and in The Awakening. Bernard Koloski has called him “remarkable” among the author’s other male characters, and he frequents intellectual circles like the ones Chopin herself hosted in St. Louis in the 1890s. He is sensitive to Athénaïse, and while he is present when she races home to be with Cazeau, upon learning she is pregnant, he withholds his affection, although it hurts him to do so. He helps her to the train station, “a man of intelligence” who “took defeat gracefully,” and once on his own again “was thinking, ‘By heaven, it hurts, it hurts!’  ”

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(CW 453). As Koloski and others have noted, what makes Gouvernail so unique is his insight as well as his self-restraint. He is aware that while Athénaïse is alone in New Orleans, he has become a replacement for her brother, and he is willing to wait until she loves him as well. When he sees her off at the train station’s platform on her way home, he demonstrates a resignation that Barbara Ewell has identified as a “style of hard-won restraint” (Kate Chopin 110). Insofar as Gouvernail is a man of intellect and culture and has introduced Athénaïse to the city of New Orleans, once she understands she is pregnant, she commences to walk the city streets on her own “as if she had fallen heir to some magnificent inheritance” with a “look of pride and satisfaction that passersby noticed and admired” (CW 452). By herself, she moves about the city and visits the offices of Harding and Offdean, where Cazeau does business, “with such an air of partnership, almost proprietorship” and “demanded a sum of money on her husband’s account,” which they easily give her (CW 452). Here, in “Athénaïse,” the main character’s new awareness asserts itself in her immediate independence and ability to spend money—in this case, her husband’s money. Like Charlie, she purchases multiple items in the city, a demonstration of conspicuous consumption and her willingness to participate in the capitalist system, as an expression of her exerted will. She buys gifts “for nearly everybody she knew. She bought whole bolts of sheerest, softest, downiest white stuff” in anticipation of the child she is carrying—a fact that the clerk guesses and embarrasses her (CW 452). Athénaïse returns to her home with Cazeau willingly, supported by the men in her life—all of whom respect her independence, even if they do not see its logic or benefit and after she has expressed her independent will through conspicuous consumption, as if her buying power (on her husband’s account) might serve as an extension of her personal will. Her acquiescence to married life is demonstrated in her return to Cazeau, when she “turned to him with an appealing gesture” and her kiss returns his passion, assuring him of her choice to be with him on the occasion of her pregnancy (CW 454). Her departure and subsequent return—presumably for good now— echoes an earlier Chopin story, “The Going Away of Liza,” which was written in 1891 and published the following year. In this earlier story, Liza too leaves her husband, who is in some ways a bit course like Cazeau, as he also demonstrates a similar level of care for his wife. In “The Going Away of Liza,” the marriage between Liza and Abner appears to be

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ill-­conceived by the local townsmen, who talk about them and even provoke Abner into punching one, when he brings up her name. Like Cazeau, Abner, despite his coarseness has “a kind ring in his voice” and lives with his mother who “had grown patient with age” (CW 113). When Liza returns from the city—presumably New Orleans but not named in the story—she stands in the doorway bereft: Liza-Jane stood like a hunted and hungry thing in the great glow of the firelight, her big dark eyes greedily seizing upon every detail of homely and honest comfort that surrounded her. Her cheeks were not round nor red as they had been. Whatever sin or suffering had swept over her had left its impress upon her plastic being. (CW 114)

Liza returns to her husband and home—a place that she appears to long desperately for, following a difficult experience in the city. Abner at first does nothing, but his mother’s urging prompts him to take his wife’s wet garments from her and kneel at her feet to remove her damaged shoes in a loving act of great tenderness. As a prototype for Cazeau, we see Chopin’s early experimentation with a husband character who is capable of embracing his wife as she is—unsure, doubtful, perhaps foolhardy—it is not clear entirely what drives her away except that Liza, like Athénaïse, is unhappy as a wife, as a wife of this particular husband. Both women return, one sad, the other triumphant, but of their own will to men who are willing to accept them home. Both women need the experiences the city offers them to shift their thoughts and will, as they decide on their own to return and presumably accept their roles in their marital relationships. For Athénaïse, of course, acceptance of her marital role also includes her becoming a mother. And we see the influences of Sylvie and Gouvernail at the boarding house, shaping her experience of New Orleans, whereas the reader does not see what has occurred for Liza, who returns distraught and longing for home. The later “Athénaïse” shows the central and pivotal experiences the main character has in the city, as it prepares her for marriage and motherhood in ways her country experience did not. Supported by men who respect her independence, Athénaïse expresses her individuality once she finds the direction of her life through her participation in the New Orleans marketplace. Gouvernail is especially instrumental in “Athénaïse,” and Chopin’s story “A Respectable Woman” sends him to the country, where he stays with Mrs. Baroda and her husband Gaston on their plantation. Chopin

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published this story earlier than either “Charlie” or ” Athénaïse,” and in its few pages, she demonstrates similar elements: the city functions as a catalyst for dramatic change in its independent female protagonist, who has supportive men in her life and who exerts her financial “autonomy” on the marketplace—all of which contribute to the arc of her development as a character.

“A Respectable Woman” In “A Respectable Woman,” New Orleans offers distinctive social activity and high energy. Mrs. Baroda receives her husband’s college friend, Gouvernail, as a guest on their plantation, after a flurry of “mild dissipation” and entertainment in New Orleans during the winter. By contrast, the plantation is quieter, a place that offers Mrs. Baroda the opportunity for “a period of unbroken rest” during which she was expecting to enjoy “undisturbed tête-à-tête with her husband” (CW 333). And despite her initial resistance to the idea Gouvernail, who is only a journalist and not a man known out in society, she realizes she actually likes him once he arrives at her home. In “A Respectable Woman,” all three characters—Mrs. Baroda, Gaston, and Gouvernail—have returned from New Orleans in need of a rest from its busy-ness. The Barodas have been enjoying the city’s entertainments. Mrs. Baroda’s activities are not named, but may have resembled some of the engagements that Edna Pontellier relinquishes through the course of The Awakening, such as the weekly calling day she is expected to maintain, when acquaintances made the rounds to each other’s homes. Mrs. Baroda may too have attended similar soirées musicales to those that Madame Ratignolle holds in her New Orleans home, in the same novel, as they were typical of amusements for members of the European and American upper-middle classes. During these musical events held in families’ homes, hosts and guests sang and played songs on a piano together (Koloski, Historian’s Awakening 96). In contrast to his hosts, Gouvernail comes to the plantation for rest from work. His relative quietness and reserve bores Mrs. Baroda, and when she complains to her husband, he explains that his college friend is “run down by overwork” (CW 334). This earlier version of Gouvernail, whom we also see briefly in The Awakening, is more reserved at first, respectful of his college friend’s wife, and the conventional boundaries between them. However, he is also an extension of New Orleans—an ambassador of sorts—who brings culture

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to the plantation, as when Mrs. Baroda encounters him on an evening walk. Aware of her, he sits on a bench next to Mrs. Baroda, and the night inspires him to quote Walt Whitman’s twenty-first stanza of Song of Myself: “Night of south winds—night of the large few stars! / Still nodding night—” (CW 335). Following this utterance, Gouvernail candidly speaks with Mrs. Baroda, telling her personal insights and memories of aspirations, and “Now there was left with him, at least, a philosophic acquiescence to the existing order—only a desire to be permitted to exist, with now and then a little whiff of genuine life, such as he was breathing now” (CW 335). Mrs. Baroda is barely able to comprehend his meaning, except that she physically responds to him, soaking in his words; she is moved to touch him, though she resists this temptation: She wanted to reach out her hand in the darkness and touch him with the sensitive tips of her fingers upon the face or the lips. She wanted to draw close to him and whisper against his cheek—she did not care what—as she might have done if she had not been a respectable woman. (CW 335)

Mrs. Baroda responds to Gouvernail physically and emotionally; he has inspired desire in her, and his character provides a link to New Orleans. Gouvernail has come from the city and brings his intellectual sophistication with him. While he is not a member of the same social circles as Mrs. Baroda, he represents a link to the intellectual and cultural society that exists in New Orleans—underscored by his casual and intuitive quotation of the specific Whitman lines. Prior to this meeting with Gouvernail, Mrs. Baroda has decided to go to New Orleans to “have her spring gowns fitted”—an echo, as it were, of the conspicuous consumption seen in the later stories featuring Charlie and Athénaïse, who exert their independence through their ability to purchase items at market. Mrs. Baroda exudes a confidence and security in her relationship to her husband not seen in Athénaïse—or Liza for that matter. In “Athénaïse” and in “Charlie,” both protagonists return home after undergoing substantial, life-altering changes from external forces; for Charlie, her father’s illness prompts her to leave New Orleans and assume her new role at her father’s plantation. For Athénaïse, the knowledge of her pregnancy compels her to return willingly to her role in her marriage with Cazeau. By contrast, Mrs. Baroda returns from the city to continue her role as a wife on the plantation, by Gaston’s side; however, she has considerably warmed to Gouvernail’s presence in her home and wishes for

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his return after he himself leaves. In fact, she intimates in a veiled message to the reader that the next time he comes to their home she will act on her impulse to touch him, as she tells her husband: “This time I shall be very nice to him” (CW 336). Like the two protagonists in the later stories, “Charlie” and “Athénaïse,” discussed here, Mrs. Baroda returns from the city with clarity and resolve— an expression of her independent mind and will. Also similar to Charlie and Athénaïse, she returns to a man—in this case, her husband—with whom she shares mutual respect and love. In fact, she thinks of her husband as an equal and “was greatly tempted that night to tell her husband—who was also her friend of this folly that had seized her. But she did not yield to the temptation” (CW 336). Mrs. Baroda’s return to her home appears to be a return to the status quo of her marriage, except that the visit to the city has prompted a level of permissiveness within her, as she allows herself a private expression of desire, as well as a promise of possible intimacy the next time Gouvernail visits. In this regard, Mrs. Baroda’s desire for Gouvernail parallels Charlie’s and Athénaïse’s redefined roles insofar as all three revise how they choose to engage their lives within conventional roles of daughter, wife, or mother. All three exhibit a similar level of autonomy and self-will, expressed through spending in the city, and all three are supported and loved well by the men in their lives. Theirs is not a struggle for autonomy within limiting relationships—not in the microcosmic worlds of their personal lives, at least. For Charlie and Athénaïse, the city provides a reckoning, though, with the limits and the possibilities of their lives within proscribed gender roles. Mrs. Baroda, an earlier Chopin character, has already acquiesced to her role as a wife; however, by the end of “A Respectable Woman,” she has redefined what is possible for her as such a woman. Whereas she withholds desire once it becomes awakened in the presence of Gouvernail, her visit to the city loosens that hold and desire—illicit though it is—for this respectable woman. In all three stories, the city of New Orleans functions as a gateway for the female protagonists to know themselves and decide for themselves who they wish to be. All three redefine their familial gender roles on their own terms and reshape them in defiance of conventional nineteenth-­ century norms. The city offers the platform for testing out new ways of being, as we see Charlie trying out dresses, ribbons, and curling irons and Athénaïse trying to live on her own in Sylvie’s boarding house, soon thinking about a job after four weeks away from home. A respite from the

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conventions of plantations and small-town life, the city offers these female characters an opportunity to reset their own lives, on their own terms, even as they return to their previous social roles as a daughter or a wife or a new role as a mother. The activity and bustle of New Orleans afforded these characters a whole different kind of respite from the one that draws Gouvernail to the countryside in “A Respectable Woman.” The city offered an opportunity to resist the expectations placed upon them and to return on their own terms with self-determination to the men who appreciate them.

CHAPTER 4

City Business: Commerce and the Short Fiction

New Orleans has long enjoyed its status as a major commercial hub in the United States. Dating back well before the Civil War, the city served as a primary location for distributing and receiving items produced up and down the Mississippi River, as well as exporting products to Europe and the Caribbean. Goods such as midwestern wheat, corn, lard, pork, animal furs and hides, alcohol, hemp, lead, cotton, sugar, molasses, and tobacco were loaded onto steamboats, flatboats, and keelboats headed to the city for warehousing and later distribution (“Antebellum Louisiana”). Located at the mouth of the Mississippi, New Orleans has always been ideally positioned for commerce, including its infamous practice of trading in human slaves, as discussed earlier in this study. The flow of money and goods through the city has paralleled the steady, powerful flow of the river by its side. While multiple stories examined in earlier chapters feature elements of commerce, consumerism, and financial exchange, this chapter will primarily focus on Chopin’s short stories in which commerce of various kinds is more pronounced, highlighting the predominance of business in New Orleans. Thus, this part of the study will begin its exploration with “A Pair of Silk Stockings,” tracing Mrs. Sommers’s delightful city shopping spree, as she shifts from her intention to purchase “responsibly” for her family to buying for her own pleasure during her day out alone. The discussion will

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then focus on the “little store” of Mamzelle Fleurette and the newspapers she sells to Lacodie in “A Sentimental Soul,” followed by the reappearance of the powerful nineteenth-century commission merchant, a figure we see in other Chopin stories such as “The Return of Alcibiade,” this time in “A No-Account Creole,” where his role is central to derailing a doomed marriage, and again in “In and Out of Old Natchitoches,” where the sale of land and the revelation of sin prevents a young woman from making a serious mistake. Finally, this chapter will examine the issue of sin and commerce in the discussion of “Doctor Chevalier’s Lie,” which illuminates the darker side of New Orleans business: prostitution. The stories under consideration in this chapter span from 1891 (“Doctor Chevalier’s Lie”) to 1896 (“A Pair of Silk Stockings”), the years prior to Chopin’s monumental novel, The Awakening, which was published in the last year of the nineteenth century and draws from themes of commerce and consumerism we see in these tales and in earlier ones discussed. The elements of business—commerce, consumerism, exchange, store owners, commission agents—point toward the lifeblood of New Orleans. Its businesses have sustained the city’s vibrancy and centrality to American life. Activities around commerce in these stories at times offer readers insights into Chopin’s own deep appreciation for city life, as some of her characters walk down city streets, shop at stores, stop for tasty treats, or confront the more painful or seedier elements of the city. The focus on commerce in these stories reveals the blurry boundaries between binaries, revealing them to be artificial designations. In particular the opposition of city and country life dissolves as characters in these stories—like in several other stories discussed in this project—travel to and from New Orleans and the plantations in surrounding areas. Their movement points to the interdependency of New Orleans commerce and the productivity of the land beyond its city borders. The blurry boundary between urban and rural life points to the fluidity and the possibilities amid various categories of race, region, and time; perceived binaries such as white/black, North/South, and antebellum/postbellum emerge as less exclusive categories and suggests instead their mutual interdependence, just as the characters’ lives in the stories here are dependent, facilitated, thwarted, and redirected by the elements of commerce.

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“A Pair of Silk Stockings” This discussion opens with an exploration of “A Pair of Silk Stockings,” written in 1895 and published in Vogue in 1896, a story that features Mrs. Sommers, whose fifteen dollars—a surprise windfall of undetermined origins—takes her on an unexpected city shopping spree, in spite of her attempts to be conservative and her plans for how to use the money. Although the city of New Orleans is never explicitly named, the story is set entirely within city boundaries, beginning with Mrs. Sommers’s careful consideration of how to spend the money. At first, Mrs. Sommers conservatively imagines how she will spend the money. She spends “a day or two” thinking, “absorbed in speculation and calculation” until she arrives at “a proper and judicious use of the money,” which includes spending on shoes and clothing necessities for her children (CW 500). The need to ration funds appears to stem from the aftermath of the Civil War, when Mrs. Sommers—before she was even married—and her neighbors had more money, but she, the narrator indicates, does not spend time lamenting the past and instead is entirely focused on the present moment, without much regard for the future (CW 500–501). This brief story details Mrs. Sommers’s shift from careful financial planning and bargain hunting to the indulgence of pleasure derived from spending money and indulging her own material desires in the city. While New Orleans is never specifically identified, Mrs. Sommers’s movement around the streets and the shops she enters resembles its environs. Like “Story of an Hour,” “A Pair of Silk Stockings” is located in a city that appears to be New Orleans, where Chopin draws upon distinctive features of the city, presenting it to her audience in all of its exoticism (Ewell, “Placing the City”). Mrs. Sommers, we are told, is a bargain hunter—perhaps resulting from the scarcity that emerged during the war—but once she is out alone in the city, her bargain instinct abates. She realizes she had forgotten to eat and seats herself at a counter, where she discovers silk stockings for sale—at reduced cost, no less. In this early passage, Mrs. Sommers’s sense of purpose transforms from a space of selflessness to one of self-indulgence. More precisely, the stockings’ reduced price both appeals to her bargain instinct as well as invites her to imagine a different life for herself, one in which she is affluent and at ease with spending money. After seating herself,

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An all-gone limp feeling had come over her and she rested her hand aimlessly upon the counter. She wore no gloves. By degrees she grew aware that her hand had encountered something very soothing, very pleasant to touch. She looked down to see that her hand lay upon a pile of silk stockings. A placard near by announced that they had been reduced in price from two dollars and fifty cents to one dollar and ninety-eight cents; a young girl who stood behind the counter asked her if she wished to examine their line of silk hosiery. She smiled, just as if she had been asked to inspect a tiara of diamonds with the ultimate view of purchasing it. But she went on feeling the soft, sheeny luxurious things—with both hands now, holding them up to see them glisten, and to feel them glide serpent-like through her fingers. (CW 501)

In this passage, Mrs. Sommers shifts from weary, hungry, and preoccupied with her children’s needs to a discerning consumer. She takes on the countenance of affluence and extends the indulgence by not buying the stockings first, but instead feeling their softness with both hands. Soon she asks about the size, selects the color she wants, and buys a pair for herself. Mrs. Sommers has fifteen dollars to spend—somehow—we are told. The kinds of concerns she has for buying for her family do not impart the sense of sustained poverty, and her interest in the purchases, which the stockings ignite, reflect an awareness of fine goods and products, not unlike what a reader might have seen advertised in a woman’s magazine at the time, in particular, Vogue. Vogue’s content in the 1890s spoke to its fashionable sensibilities. Typically, a copy of Vogue magazine devoted space to an editorial as well as reviews of theater and books, two to three short fiction pieces, letters to the editors, and fashion, which took up to eighteen pages, making it the predominant topic. These eighteen pages featured articles on the most recent fashions for women as well as men, in addition to sewing patterns and advice on buying fashionable clothes on a restricted budget (Johnsen 55). The price of the magazine during this period was ten cents an issue and four dollars for a year’s subscription, costs that spoke to its targeted readership: middle- to upper-class women. Its advertisements seem to have the same women in mind, as they broadcast messages and images urging women to buy undergarments, corsets, and dress materials—items, in other words, for themselves. Other ads for items such as men’s fashion, cruise trips, wines, and china suggest the readers’ abilities to buy for the men in their lives or to imagine lives of affluence, a glimpse, for example,

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into the lives of the very wealthy by virtue of the products they might buy (Johnsen 55). Emily Toth notes that “A Pair of Silk Stockings,” the last story Chopin published in Vogue, would appear to be a story for affluent readers but in fact reflects the spirit of many of its advertisements, providing a window into the material lives of the rich. Toth has written about Chopin’s sympathy toward women, readers, in other words, like Mrs. Sommers, and in fact Toth reads the character more in terms of poverty; however, Johnsen’s insight into readers of Vogue, whom Mrs. Sommers somewhat resembles, suggests that the fifteen dollars she holds is perhaps indicative of her financial status—in other words, not fully at the poverty level, though like other women of the middle and upper classes who lived through the Civil War, scarcity was not unknown to them. In other words, Mrs. Sommers has not always known such hard times. In any event, Toth describes the main character of “The Silk Stockings” as someone easily ignored by Vogue readers: Mrs. Sommers was the kind of woman that Vogue readers might pass by on the street without noticing—but by the late 1890s, living frugally in St. Louis, Kate Chopin had seen the effects of poverty and urban strife on women. Vogue, unlike other magazines, did not expect her to write for “the young person” about domesticity and womanly self-sacrifice. Vogue allowed her to describe what she had seen, honestly and fearlessly. (Kate Chopin 281)

The story follows Mrs. Sommers through her day of purchasing. After she buys the silk stockings, her sense of her buying power—her sense of herself out in the city—changes, expands, even, and “after that … she did not move in the direction of the bargain counter” (CW 502). She changes the cotton stockings she is wearing for the silk ones she has just bought, and the narrator indicates the change in her thinking: She was not going through any acute mental process or reasoning with herself, nor was she striving to explain to her satisfaction the motive of her action. She was not thinking at all. She seemed for the time to be taking a rest from that laborious and fatiguing function and to have abandoned herself to some mechanical impulse that directed her actions and freed her of responsibility. (CW 502)

In short, Mrs. Sommers appears to be enjoying herself: acting on impulse, ignoring any sense of duty and responsibility—in other words, avoiding any sense of limitations. The city offers her a respite, then: she does not

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have to concern herself with the loss and scarcity of war, nor does she have to worry about her maternal responsibilities. For this brief moment, she is released, and she chooses to spend the fifteen dollars on herself—and enacting the imagined behavior of a Vogue reader. Mrs. Sommers proceeds to buy several items, including gloves, boots, and “two high-priced magazines such as she had been accustomed to read in the days when she had been accustomed to other pleasant things” (CW 502–3). This sentence appears to also support the idea that Mrs. Sommers is unused to poverty, and her enactment of conspicuous consumerism speaks to her familiarity with “nice” things—items she may have encountered in a woman’s magazine, such as Vogue, at one time. Further, when she stops for something to eat, she waits at a table, where she “picked up a magazine and glanced through it, cutting the pages with a blunt edge of her knife” (CW 503). Opening the new magazine and looking through it while she dines, completes the experience, which she finds “all very agreeable” (CW 503). The magazine Mrs. Sommers skims through further underscores the centrality of commerce in the city. There at the lunch counter, she would have been in proximity to merchants selling goods from local, national, and international suppliers. In New Orleans, imports from international locations were distributed and sold regularly in retail shops throughout the city and nearby towns. In New Orleans and Baton Rouge, larger retailers obtained more goods from wholesalers and importers, and public buyers could purchase merchandise through city shops. A high number of these shops were located on Canal Street and in between the levee and Bourbon Street, considered to be one of New Orleans’s busiest commerce areas. Prior to the Civil War, smaller retail shops were adjacent to each other in rows or in a singular building, a harbinger of modern strip malls. Additionally, smaller retail sellers appeared in city markets, on the streets themselves, or sold their wares in neighborhoods, house to house. Mostly the sellers were women, especially African American and Native American women. Items for sale were often manufactured on location; shops featured baked goods, butchered meats, clothing, shoes, furniture, silver products, tobacco, lithographs, daguerreotypes, prints, and books (“Antebellum Louisiana III”). Mrs. Sommers’s city excursion shows her immersion in the consumer products nineteenth-century New Orleans offered its shoppers. Her delight at the restaurant, as she eats, reads the magazine, and drinks wine, elevates her sense of self-importance and luxury—emphasized by the waiter’s bow as she leaves coins on the tray to tip him once she is through with

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her meal (CW 503). Her visit culminates in her attendance at the theater, where “she was ushered in, between brilliantly dressed women who had gone there to kill time and eat candy and display their gaudy attire” (CW 503–504). The women in the theater are described several times as “gaudy,” which indicates their ostentatious attire perhaps in the modern sense of the word as “tasteless,” but may also indicate its second meaning, deriving from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, indicating something joyful or festive (“11 Words”). Regardless of Chopin’s intention, their outfits make them appear extraordinary. Mrs. Sommers shares this moment of enjoyment with a “gaudy woman” next to her, with whom she cries at the sad parts and discusses the show. She is, for all intents and purposes, one of them for the moment—one of the gaudy women in the crowd, who appear to have time to kill at the theater in the middle of the day. The last paragraph of the story follows Mrs. Sommers onto the cable car, on her way home, presumably to another part of the city. A man who sees her on the car appears to admire her, and yet the narrator tells us: “In truth, he saw nothing—unless he were wizard enough to decipher a poignant wish, a powerful longing that the cable car would never stop anywhere, but go on and on with her forever” (CW 504). The “nothing” on one level indicates the unremarkable appearance of Mrs. Sommers on the cable car—another attractive woman in the city, returning home. However, “nothing” also points to the vacancy of meaning in Mrs. Sommers’s life; her longing to stay on the cable car—not even necessarily out in shops, theater, and restaurants of New Orleans—points to her wish not to return to her family life, where she is mother of several children. The transformation back to her ordinary life already is occurring in the space of the desire; she truly now becomes, as Toth says, “the kind of woman that Vogue readers might pass by on the street without noticing” (281). This kind of ordinariness achieves what emergent capitalists intended, as Robert Arner calls “the appropriation and manipulation of female desire by an increasingly aggressive and male-managed capitalist culture in an attempt to create and sustain an inexhaustible market for services and goods, especially for luxury goods.” These efforts sought to instill a consumerist desire based on imitating the affluent; Mrs. Sommers’s spending “spree,” Arner argues, “is exactly what the male managerial system had intended should happen, not particularly to her as an individual but to her as a member of an invented class of people, female shoppers, within the world that May and Macy and Wannamaker [department store owners] were in the

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process of creating” (qtd. in Editors). Following her city excursion, Mrs. Sommers enacts the dutiful return readers witness in other characters: Athénäise, Charlie, and Liza, all of whom return to their designated roles as wife, mother, or daughter in their families. For other Chopin characters, the return is joyous, meaningful, or a relief, but for Mrs. Sommers it is only responsibility, literally nothing more, and the joys of the city and its opportunities to spend money on oneself have ended.

“A Sentimental Soul” Chopin’s short story “A Sentimental Soul,” published in the New Orleans Times-Democrat in December 1895 and A Night in Acadie, departs from the return themes seen in “A Pair of Silk Stockings” and other stories discussed earlier. By contrast, “A Sentimental Soul” features the perspective of the shopkeeper Mamzelle Fleurette who longs for Lacodie, a locksmith and a customer who purchases his daily newspaper from her. He is younger and shorter than she, “whom he pitied, and even in a manner revered” (CW 388). Lacodie buys a copy of L’Abeille each day from her notion store, and he, the reader is told, sometimes works for Mamzelle Fleurette for free, when she needed a small job done, refusing payment and laughing that he’d charge the “rich lawyer” or “top-lofty druggist” more to make up for it (CW 389). Mamzelle Fleurette is depicted in terms that echo the chasteness of a nun. She religiously attends confession at the cathedral, and her black alpaca skirt “hung in long nun-like folds around her spare body” and a black lace veil drapes her straw hat (CW 389). Her increasing fondness for Lacodie disrupts her nunlike existence, as she becomes more aware of him and sensitive to his presence. Alone, she makes her way through Chartres Street, but this day with preoccupation and agitation; she passes the locksmith’s shop and the voices she overhears make her grow “tremulously self-conscious, fingering her veil, swishing the black alpaca and waving her prayer book about with meaningless intention” (CW 389). The next day, Lacodie’s absence from her shop alarms her, although other customers arrive to the shop to purchase a different newspaper, the Courier des États Unis, and an image of a favored Ursuline nun. The story follows Mamzelle Fleurette’s religious struggle to reconcile her love for Lacodie, who is married to someone else. She visits confession and receives impractical direction from the priest—at least, direction she cannot follow because her love for Lacodie is tenacious. She has not sinned

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yet, and Father Fochelle’s advice is intended is to prevent her from sinning. The priest’s direction is ironic, since she never commits adultery with Lacodie, and the narrator tells us that Mamzelle Fleurette ironically keeps a picture that resembles Lacodie she has clipped from a newspaper in her prayer book. This image, while not of the locksmith himself, is taken from the periodical he was in the habit of buying. The newspaper figures throughout this story, as Mamzelle Fleurette worries whether Lacodie is coming into her shop or not. Eventually she learns from his wife that he has taken ill, when she comes to buy the paper for him. Each day he does not come for the newspaper, Mamzelle falls deeper into despair, until finally: In the evening she took an Abeille from the top of the pile on the counter, and throwing a light shawl over her head, started with the paper over to the locksmith’s shop. She did not know if she were committing a sin in so doing. She would ask Father Fochelle on Saturday, when she went to confession. She did not think it could be a sin; she would have called long before on any other sick neighbor, and she intuitively felt that in this distinction might lie the possibility of sin. (CW 393)

And in fact, Mamzelle Fleurette’s fears are confirmed, as she discovers Lacodie is near death when she delivers his newspaper to his home—soon after, he is buried and his widow sells the locksmith shop and opens a laundry service down the street. Then, another merchant—a good-­looking and rich-looking man who owned a French Market stall—begins to pay attention to Lacodie’s widow, whom he eventually marries. Their marriage catapults Mamzelle Fleurette out of her faithful obedience, and she avoids the cathedral and instead goes to another, smaller church out of the way, and when she returns, she puts the picture of Lacodie’s likeness in a frame, bought with thirty-five cents (CW 397). Mamzelle Fleurette’s defiance of Father Fochelle’s guidance/commands and her assertion of her love for Lacodie all take place within her travels through the French Quarter and are punctuated with the purchase and presentation of issues of L’Abeille. All of the drama takes place essentially in the same area, in view of Chartres Street—from Mamzelle Fleurette’s notion shop, to the locksmith shop, to the laundry above the bakery, to the kiosks in the French Market; in other words, all of the drama takes place in proximity to commerce and is facilitated by the purchase of newspapers.

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“A Sentimental Soul” highlights the centrality of commerce in New Orleans, particularly as it enables women’s autonomy. Mamzelle Fleurette, like women characters in other Chopin stories, such as the narrator in “Cavanelle” and “A Pair of Silk Stockings,” among others, moves freely and unencumbered about the city—for instance, to and from the cathedral and to and from Lacodie’s home—without hesitation. Her dress is “nunlike,” thus distinguishing herself from other types of women who might frequent the streets under different business. Helen Taylor has written about the dangers that sometimes threatened women walkers in nineteenth-­century New Orleans. And yet all of Chopin’s female characters, both older and younger, move around the city freely, unworried for their own safety. Chopin’s depiction of their city movements suggests the subversion of social hierarchy and even echoes the defiance of New Orleans women in the face of northern insult during the Civil War, when General Butler tried to control them; Taylor expands on this idea: In these contexts, women—especially young unattended women—threatened male power and hierarchy; the city represents the forbidden, thus sexual experience, and woman accordingly embodies that threat to rational civic order. Prostitution represents the possibility of social disorder, unless patriarchally confined and controlled. A good example of this logic in New Orleans history is the shocking insult General “Beast” Butler paid the ladies of the city when he defined any woman defying or insulting Union troops as “a woman about town plying her avocation” … . It was no coincidence that these “respectable” women were defying Union occupation on the streets. Butler, in a city known for institutionalized prostitution and its sexual laxity, was taunting white middle class women with the greatest fear they had in a public space—that of being misidentified as whore. (Taylor)

In Chopin’s city, many women characters experience freedom, and in the cases of Mrs. Sommers and Mamzelle Fleurette, they experience joy amid the city streets, however temporarily. For Mamzelle Fleurette, this joy hinges on the purchase and distribution of the newspaper, L’Abeille. Published in French, L’Abeille de la Nouvelle-Orléans (Translation: The New Orleans Bee) was produced from offices on 323 Chartres Street—the same street where Mamzelle Fleurette’s notion shop and Lacodie’s locksmith shop are located. L’Abeille featured international, national, and regional news in 1895, the year of “A Sentimental Soul’s” publication in another newspaper, the New Orleans Times-Democrat. L’Abeille began publication in 1827, first in French, then

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in French and English, then returning to French exclusively until its close in 1925 (Jefferson Parish Library). Briefly, it also featured Spanish pages. Headlines, for example, on June 1, 1895, announced “Une Journée Solemnelle,” the solemn day of decorating the tombs of fallen Civil War soldiers, as well as telegraph dispatches, news about the new mayor, and accounts of crime; March of 1895 saw news reported about the Cuban uprising, and the issue of July 1, 1895, featured new fiction on its first page by Pierre Sales: “Miracle de Amour”—Grand Roman (“Miracle of Love”—a great novel). L’Abeille also featured announcements in its back pages for items for sale, such as farm equipment and plots of land. The newspaper office’s proximity to Mamzelle Fleurette’s and Lacodie’s shops facilitated the periodical’s distribution to locals on Chartres Street, but it also connects Mamzelle Fleurette and Lacodie to the community on the street. Lacodie, the reader is told, argues about politics; Mamzelle Fleurette “held no opinions” (CW 388). The sale of L’Abeille, however, becomes the conduit for their connection, particularly for Mamzelle Fleurette’s love of Lacodie, whose appreciation for her never seems to expand beyond pity or reverence (CW 388). Regardless, this particular newspaper is central to the connection between the two characters and the city, and the narrator even notes the sale of a different newspaper, Courier des États Unis—a title that does not appear to reflect a newspaper sold in New Orleans in the nineteenth century. Only the Le Courier, which was published in New Orleans from 1859–1860 (“Louisiana French Newspapers”), echoes the title of the newspaper a gentleman customer buys from Mamzelle Fleurette (CW 390). L’Abeille was specific to New Orleans, a local publication that offered New Orleans news, as well as current events on the national and international levels. In this story, commerce links the characters of Mamzelle Fleurette and Lacodie through L’Abeille, the locally published newspaper, which connected New Orleans residents, particularly these two on Chartres Street, to the region, the nation, and the international community. Mamzelle reckons with her love for Lacodie, as well as her resentment toward his hasty widow, as she rejects the judgement of the clergy—representative of the ever-present authority of the Catholic church. The image that resembles Lacodie, which Mamzelle Fleurette displays at the end of the story, is taken from the newspaper—an act of love as much as it is an act of defiance, as the newspaper clipping supersedes the authority of the church. The local newspapers published on the same street as their businesses in “A Sentimental Soul” connects Mamzelle Fleurette to Lacodie in life and in death.

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“A No-Account Creole” One of Chopin’s better-known short stories, “A No-Account Creole” draws readers down Canal Street and later to the fashionable Esplanade Street, as its main characters, Offdean, Euphrasie, and Placide Santien travel back and forth from New Orleans to the Santien family’s deteriorated Red River plantation. In this story, the figure of the New Orleans commission merchant provides the opportunity for love to flourish, bringing with it new banking and commercial opportunities as the old is displaced. An early story, first written in 1888 and later written again in 1891, “A No-Account Creole” first appeared in the pages of Century in 1894 and then in Bayou Folk, also in 1894, and aside from a story Chopin wrote when she was nineteen, “A No-Account Creole” appears to be her first short story (Editors). In this story, the financial world of New Orleans extends to the surrounding Santien plantation through the business of the commission merchant, Wallace Offdean, a thoughtful young man of twenty-six who works for his uncle’s commission house. Representing Harding & Offdean, which we also see in “Athénaïse,” Wallace Offdean volunteers to conduct the land inspection of the “troublesome piece of land on Red River” (CW 81). His trip to northern Louisiana places him in the orbit of the lovely Euphrasie, with whom he falls in love, only to discover she is engaged to Placide—a volatile, “A No-Account Creole” (CW 84) whom Euprhasie has grown up with and has agreed to marry because “she saw no reason why she should not be his wife” (CW 86). Offdean’s business at the Red River plantation stems from the prominence of banking in New Orleans, as he is sent there to salvage the deteriorating place, stop the hemorrhage of loss following the destruction of the Civil War, and restore the plantation to its financial potential in a post-war landscape. Chopin uses the occasion of the commission merchant’s appearance—in this case, Offdean’s work at the plantation—as an opportunity for characters to determine where their own places are—where home is—in the postbellum world of New Orleans and its surrounding, dependent environs. Chopin invites readers into the business world of New Orleans, even as much of the text brings Offdean and Euphrasie out into the open, natural world of the Santien plantation, where her father, Pierre Manton, has served as manager. When the story opens in New Orleans, Offdean’s older friend Fitch advises him of financial opportunities, as they stand outside a Canal Street gentlemen’s club. Fitch encourages him to invest his twenty-­ five-­thousand-dollar inheritance, since he is only invested in “the pitiful

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two and a half per cent commission racket” at Harding & Offdean (CW 80). Offdean declines; he is more conservative and thoughtful about how he spends his money and time. And in fact, he looks to the trip to the Santien plantation as an opportunity for contemplation and discernment for his life: 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 to alternately exist, and which reduce him, naturally, to a rather ragged condition of soul. (CW 81)

Offdean’s work in New Orleans, however unimpressive his commission rate, places him at the nineteenth-century center of finance in the Mississippi Valley. A thoughtful, educated young man, he is resistant to losing his sense of integrity and contemplative nature for the high energy of New Orleans’s financial world. Leaving the clubhouse with Fitch, Offdean already participates in city’s customary business practices: commission merchants, such as Offdean, frequently met in coffee shops and hotels, such as the St. Louis Hotel, for business deals. In spite of Fitch’s financial advice, Offdean’s job has linked him to one of the most prosperous business opportunities in the city. The commission merchants (also known as “factors”) exercised the highest levels of influence, power, and money in New Orleans, as they performed as agents for plantation owners throughout Louisiana and the region, including Arkansas, Mississippi, and Texas. Factors sometimes specialized in cotton and sugar, as they were the greatest exports in the area, as well as the most profitable, rendering these commission merchants among the wealthiest. As a point of reference, by 1861 over 450 commission merchant firms represented more than 9300 plantation owners in the region. The primary function of the firms was to ensure the solvency of the plantations with which they contracted. With the help of the six insurance companies in New Orleans, they collectively worked to raise the returns and reduce the risks involved with the production and export of products and goods, and prior to the Civil War, this included high numbers of slaves. In addition, bankers and lawyers were directly involved with the commission merchants’ financial work (“Antebellum Louisiana”). An entire network of

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financial professionals worked to maintain New Orleans’s centrality and stability as the financial center of the region. Their collective efforts were effective. Earlier in the nineteenth century, between 1835 and 1842, the city’s banking enterprises surpassed New York City, which was the financial center of the entire United States. There were twenty-six banks that provided loans for railroad construction, plantation expansion, goods purchasing, among other projects. Louisiana’s banking laws emphasized stable practices over speculative practices. Its Bank Act of 1842 required banking companies to maintain gold or silver reserves to counter notes and deposits; this was the first of such laws passed in the United States (“Antebellum Louisiana”). When “A No-Account Creole” takes place in the 1880s, commission merchants and factor firms engaged a much altered financial landscape from that which New Orleans had enjoyed prior to the 1860s. During the Civil War and the Reconstruction period that followed, numerous plantations in the Louisiana were destroyed through violence, wreckage, and economic instability. The fortunes of many plantation owners, such as Chopin’s fictional Santiens, were gutted by the loss of labor sources— both black and white—marking a financial loss of around $500 million. Like the Santiens, owners abandoned their plantations or remained but were unable to keep their properties up to prewar levels. Many found their land’s worth had been decimated by the effects of the war and Reconstruction. Auctions became the standard practice for selling plantation land when the planters could not maintain the property. As a Scribner’s Monthly writer observed: “There was no longer the spirit to maintain the grand, unbounded hospitality once so characteristic of the South. For it was a grand and lordly life, that of the owner of a sugar plantation; filled with culture, pleasure, and the refinement of living;--but now!” (Edward King qtd. in “Antebellum Louisiana”). This is the condition of the Santien plantation when Offdean arrives to assess the land for auction. Chopin tells us: In the days of Lucien Santien and his hundred slaves, it had been very splendid in the wealth of its thousand acres. But the war did its work, of course. Then Jules Santien was not the man to mend such damage the war had left. His three sons were even less able than he had been to bear the weighty inheritance of debt that came to them with the dismantled plantation; so it was a deliverance to all when Harding & Offdean, the New Orleans creditors, relieved them of the place with responsibility and indebtedness which its ownership had entailed. (CW 82)

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The plantation has already been relinquished to Offdean’s firm, and his job is to ready it for auction. Of course, although the original owners have abandoned the plantation, their familial ties and inherited sense of entitlement extend through Placide, whose ties to the land connect him not only to the buildings and the people there, but Euphrasie in particular. Offdean’s arrival at the plantation at once sets off the financial business of releasing the plantation from its pre-Civil War legacy, but it also forces the main characters to reconcile the idea of “home” in the postbellum, post-Reconstruction world of New Orleans and its surrounding areas. After 1860, residents moved from their homes in large numbers—this was especially true for Black, former slaves, who migrated from rural to urban places; the number of Black residents doubled in New Orleans by 1870, whereas the number of white residents diminished (“The Cabildo”). Representative of white migrations, the Santiens have relinquished the responsibility of the plantation and dispersed from its location. Even Placide, who “alone tried to keep a desultory foothold upon the land which had been his and his forefathers. But he too was given to wandering—within a radius, however, which rarely took him so far that he could not reach the old place in an afternoon of travel, when he felt so inclined” (CW 82). The aftermath of the Civil War displaces Placide as well as his father and brothers, and the notion of “home” becomes disconnected from the land that has been in the Santien family. Placide knows, however, that with Euphrasie he may still access the idea of “home.” The narrator explains to the reader that he has always loved her: “And now Placide was going to marry Euphrasie. He could not recall the time when he had not loved her. Somehow he felt that it began when he was six years old, and Pierre, his father’s overseer, had called him from play to come and make her acquaintance” (CW 85). The narrator underscores the consistency of his love for her even later in their lives: “Placide continued to see her at intervals, and to love her always” (CW 85). Although Placide exudes confidence and entitlement—in spite of his family’s diminished state—he feels most at home near Euphrasie. In New Orleans, when they visit for Mardi Gras, Placide is “lost” and finds comfort at the sight of her, however distant that is: Placide was not very well acquainted with the city; but that made no difference to him so long as he was at Euphrasie’s side… . He asked nothing better than to walk with Euphrasie along the streets, holding her parasol at an agreeable angle over her pretty head, or to sit beside her in the evening at the play, sharing her frank delight.

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When the night of the Mardi Gras ball came, he felt like a lost spirit during the hours he was forced to remain away from her. He stood in the dense crowd on the street gazing up at her, where she sat on the club-house balcony amid a bevy of gayly dressed women… . (CW 93)

Placide’s attachment to Euprhasie enables him to feel secure within the lesser-known space of New Orleans; with her, he feels at home, safe, and content. Separate from her in the city, he feels “like a lost spirit,” waiting to be near her again. Placide, of course, is not the only man who feels “at home” by her side. Within two weeks of being near her on the Santien plantation, Offdean also feels “very much at home with old Pierre and his daughter”—so much so that the nagging “personal questions” he brought with him from the city and the expectation that he would spend his time on the Red River plantation in contemplation seemed to ease and dissipate (CW 89). Offdean returns to the plantation after he buys it with the intention of making a home there with Euphrasie and asks her to be his wife (CW 99)—this is before he knows that she is engaged to Placide. The contrast of New Orleans and the old Santien plantation foreground the main characters’ sense of homelessness and their desire for home. Santien “wanders” and looks to Euphrasie as his home in New Orleans or in the house he paints for her in Orville, as he anticipates their wedding. Offdean imagines a physical home with her at the plantation he buys and intends to restore, with her by his side. And although Euphrasie owns nothing and appears to be the recipient of these two characters’ affections, she sets the plot in motion initially as she has been urging Offdean & Harding to take on the restoration of the plantation (CW 83). Euphrasie’s interest in the plantation’s restoration sets off the plot, as it fills Placide with dread (CW 84). Her inquiries to Offdean’s firm initiate the shift in his own plans, as he treats his first journey to the plantation as an opportunity for self-reflection, but it is Euphraisie’s interest that facilitates the auction of land that forms the opportunity for their connection. A foil to Placide, Offdean presents Euphrasie—who indeed loves him— with kindness and respect, as well as an authentic desire to see her be happy, even if that means that she marries Placide. Bernard Koloski (and Barbara Ewell) has suggested that Offdean presents an ideal match for Euphrasie:

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Kate Chopin offers us few ideal characters, female or male. Yet because of his level-headedness, his courage, and what Barbara Ewell calls the ‘rational moderation’ of his goals, Wallace Offdean emerges as an engaging young man, a good partner for Euphrasie, along with—as Ewell also points out—a representative of ‘the new order of the South’ since he will draw upon his business experience and his resources to restore prosperity to the Red River plantation. (Koloski, “Chopin’s Enlightened Men” 17)

Offdean’s connections to the business world of New Orleans are essential to the revitalization of the plantation and to the winning of Euphrasie’s heart. To underscore this point, Chopin depicts Offdean’s initial intention in going to the plantation as an opportunity for deep contemplation, to “retire and take counsel with his inner and better self” (CW 81). His desire to retreat from the bustle and busy-ness of New Orleans faintly echoes the biblical retreat of Jesus Christ, who departs for forty days into the desert (Matthew 4:1-5). For Jesus, this is an opportunity for the Devil to tempt Him, as the Gospel of Matthew explains; for Offdean, who likewise retreats, the plantation offers him the opportunity to reconsider his life and realign it with the renovation and revitalization of the old plantation, an opportunity, as Barbara Ewell and later Bernard Koloski have noted, to ring in the new order—the post-Reconstruction order. Importantly, the only way to affect this change is through the commerce of the city. Placide’s own retreat from the plantation and eventually from Euphrasie signals his defeat: he cannot love Euphrasie as she deserves, “to think first of her happiness,” as Offdean tells him (CW 101). And he also cannot muster the energy or the funds to revitalize the plantation in the new order either. Offdean’s character as well as his concrete connection to Canal Street and the world of New Orleans finance is essential to fulfilling Euphrasie’s first desire for happiness. To underscore this point, when Pierre affirms the broken engagement between his daughter and Placide, she insists that Placide has instead done her a favor, specifically “saved” her from “sin,” an assertion that suggests Chopin’s emphasis on the crucial importance of authentic love and mutual respect.

“In and Out of Old Natchitoches” Sin, as it appears in “A No-Account Creole” provides a segue to a later Chopin story, “In and Out of Old Natchitoches” (published in Two Tales in 1893), and shifts the discussion of business and commerce in New

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Orleans to its darker side of vice and illegal commerce. While Euphrasie is using “sin” as code for the betrayal of her true feelings—her genuine love for Offdean, who respects her and represents a future-looking option and devoid of the resigned inevitability of Placide, “sin” as it appears in “A No-Account Creole” and in “Doctor Chevalier’s Lie,” which will be discussed shortly, points toward the illicit activities on the streets of New Orleans. “In and Out of Old Natchitoches” draws from multiple tropes, themes, and even characters that appear in many of Chopin’s stories, several of which have been discussed here. This story features the slow pursuit of Alphose Laballière after the local Suzanne St. Denys Godolph, a romantic interest which is prompted by his purchase of a debilitated plantation on the Cane River, following the Civil War. Like Charlie and Athénaïse and others, Suzanne departs to New Orleans, where she meets with Hector Santien—Placide’s brother—who arranges for her to live in a boarding house, like Athénaïse. Laballière, who is brother to Alcée and brother-in-­ law to Clarisse, whom readers encounter in Chopin’s “At the Cadian Ball” (also published in Two Tales in 1892) and “The Storm” (which was never published in the author’s lifetime), is for the most part level-headed and moral; his respect and courtesy of Suzanne resembles Offdean’s good nature and reverence for Euphrasie. Finally, even in New Orleans, news of Athénaïse’s betrothal reaches Hector and Suzanne (CW 262), a connection that emphasizes the parallels to Athénaïse’s journey to New Orleans and her stay at the boarding house, before she returns home with the knowledge of her pregnancy. Suzanne is not pregnant, though, when she departs for New Orleans, but she is offended by Laballière’s introduction of Andres Giestin, the “mulatto” son of the family that lives on the dilapidated plantation he purchases “for next to nothing” (CW 255)—an echo of the Santien family plantation that appears in “A No-Account Creole,” and another casualty of the post-war, post-Reconstruction period in Louisiana. Amid rumors that Laballière spends “too much” time with “free mulattos” than he does with white men, he brings Andres to Suzanne’s school for enrollment, and she very reluctantly accepts him there, reminding Laballière that the schoolhouse is for white children only. Laballière’s revolt stems from the offense he initially takes from the locals’ criticism, which the Giestin family warns him about. His reaction is almost violent, as he asserts:

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“Oh, ho! so I’m not to associate with whom I please in Natchitoches parish. We’ll see about that. Draw up your chair, Giestin. Call your wife and your grandmother and the rest of the tribe, and we’ll breakfast together. By thunder! if I want to hobnob with mulattoes, or negroes or Choctaw Indians or South Sea savages, whose business is it but my own?” (CW 257)

This outburst prompts him to drag the Giestin’s son to school, from which Suzanne quits the next day over the “insult” (CW 258). Soon after, Laballière learns she has left for New Orleans, but not before regretting his behavior and acknowledging to himself the charm of her features. His earlier anger toward the townspeople’s criticisms redirects toward the Giestin’s themselves: “He would have liked to exterminate the Giestin family, from the great-grandmother down to the babe unborn” (CW 259). The family, sensing this shift, leave for the nearby safety of “l’Isle des Mulâtres.” Half in love with Suzanne, Laballière seeks her at her home, which is also a dilapidated place, and upon receiving the news from her mother, he follows Suzanne to New Orleans. “In and Out of Old Natchitoches” features these familiar themes and tropes of the young woman in the city, testing her independence, as well as the level-headed, moral male pursuer. Laballière’s apparent (and relative) morality does not emerge until later in the story, and his abrupt reversal on the question of how he spends his time with people of color does not recommend him to modern reading audiences. Chopin herself was not known for progressive racial insights or attitudes; hence, a character like Suzanne, who appears haughty, though is poor, resigns from the only job keeping her alive on the basis of the racial insult Laballière has shown her. Both of these actions—Suzanne’s arrival in New Orleans and Laballière’s appearance there—prompt the commercial elements of this story, though. While Laballière has purchased the old plantation before the story begins, he buys a parcel of land from Suzanne’s mother while she is in New Orleans, which is also the location where he informs her by way of delivering her mother’s letter of his most recent purchase. While the land is in disarray, like many of the Louisiana plantations of the time, Suzanne accuses him of using “sorcery” to take the land “that has been in the St. Denys Godolph family since time untole” (CW 264). Here, New Orleans acts as the frame for the transaction; there is no commission merchant present and the deal, like the first one Laballière makes, takes place

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offstage, as it were. Like Offdean, Laballière presents a view to the future of Louisiana plantations and the hopeful restoration of its agricultural industry. However, the focus of this discussion is more concerned with the commerce that Suzanne tangentially encounters in New Orleans. Like Liza in “The Going Away of Liza,” Suzanne comes into contact with the shadier elements of city life; however, her naiveté and her family relationship to Hector Santien protect her from “sin,” to use Euphrasie’s word. Suzanne, like her boarding house landlady, also regularly attend mass at the cathedral, perhaps further protecting her—or suggesting an alignment of Catholicism and the darker practices within the city. Chopin lets us decide. In any event, Hector—of the Santien clan that has abandoned its family homestead in “A No-Account Creole”—is Suzanne’s connection in New Orleans. He is also linked to the demise of the Santien fortune and the despondency of the post-Reconstruction economy. And yet he is warm and protective of Suzanne upon her arrival to the city, as he brings her to Maman Chavan’s boarding house, located on a side street near Canal Street, between Royal and Chartres Streets. Royal Street was originally called Royalle-Bourbon, named for French royalty, but Governor Bienville (born 1680 and died 1766) changed it to Rue Royal, its name to the present time. Sally Asher tells us that Royal Street boasts culture and hotels, in opposition to Bourbon Street, better known for its more sordid offerings (58–9). Therefore, Suzanne lands precisely at the crossroads of virtue and vice. While she is staying at Maman Chavan’s boarding house, she and her landlady smoke cigarettes even as they attend mass regularly; however, the longer she stays, the text implies, the less protected from vice she will be. During a breakfast visit with Hector: Suzanne rested her elbows on the table, adjusted the ruffles around her wrists, puffed awkwardly at her cigarette that kept going out, and hummed the Kyrie Eleison that she had heard so beautifully rendered an hour before at the Cathedral, while she gazed off into the green depths of the garden. Maman Chavan slipped a little silver medal toward her, accompanying the action with a pantomime that Suzanne readily understood. She, in turn, secretly and adroitly transferred the medal to Hector’s coat-pocket. He noticed the action plainly enough, but pretended not to. (CW 262)

Here, we see Suzanne “awkwardly” smoking—she is not natural, and she is humming the Kyrie Eleison, the musical rendition of “Lord, have

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mercy” sung at Catholic masses. The appearance of the Kyrie Eleison suggests that Suzanne is in need of mercy—of divine intervention—as she stands on the figurative edge of sin. In the passage above, she discreetly passes a silver medal to Hector, who acts as if he does not see it. This action is the reader’s only hint to Hector’s real job as a gambler, and in this scene Suzanne, not only smoking—a risqué thing to do for a woman in the late nineteenth century—becomes conscripted into the transfer of funds. Her awkward smoking, though, suggests too that she is trying out the role of the independent, urban woman, but the awkwardness betrays her authentic self: she is not made for the illicit activities of the city. Up until the 1920s, American women were not encouraged to smoke; in fact, smoking cigarettes was associated with moral looseness (“A Century”). And so while Suzanne learns to smoke presumably from Maman Chavan, she may not understand why she is handing the silver medal to Hector: when Laballière warns her not to walk with Hector Santien on the streets of New Orleans, she dismisses him. In fact, she will not even believe Hector when he admits that Laballière is right and “there are reasons” to not be seen in public with him and further: “Ah, Suzanne, Suzanne,” he says, “you are not going to make yourself unhappy about a bon à rien [good for nothing] like me” (CW 264–5). Suzanne returns to her mother, with Laballière accompanying her, but not as a romantic companion. The narrator does not reveal Hector’s occupation to Suzanne, but instead, Chopin retains her character’s innocence, as she only reveals to the reader that Hector Santien is known as “Deroustan, the most notorious gambler in New Orleans” (CW 267). To late nineteenth-century readers, the presence of such a gambler would certainly have been believable. In fact, among the kinds of criminal activity that flourished in New Orleans at the time, newspapers frequently documented the activities of “dangerous and suspicious characters”—those individuals whose arrests ranged from crimes associated from being a “dangerous character” or “notorious vagabond” or “incorrigible vagrant,” terms that were code for the absence of a steady job or home. Such individuals often adopted pseudonyms (Gray 62). In addition, rumors of organized crime were fueled by violent crimes such as murder and theft attributed to Spanish and Sicilian gangs in New Orleans during the mid-­ nineteenth century. The Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI), for instance, was rumored to have traced the first appearance of Sicily’s organized criminal organization La Cosa Nostra in the United States in the city

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of New Orleans during the 1880s. There is little evidence to support this claim, but newspapers and political figures, as well as journalists and writers, kept the idea afloat. Historian Michael Kurtz points to the “dearth” of research debunking the sensational narratives about organized crime in New Orleans (356), but which nonetheless sustained the imaginations of Chopin’s audiences, as she revealed the true identity of Hector Santien and his alias at the end of “In and Out of Old Natichtoches.” The story shifts midway, as the narrative focus turns to Suzanne, Hector, and Laballière in New Orleans. There, Suzanne is less haughty and more innocent, even as she tries to assimilate into Maman Chavan’s and Hector’s world. Laballière is less combative and has completely abandoned his willingness to associate with people of color or to procure an education for their children. He is instead firm, but loving, pursuing Suzanne as he keeps a respectful distance. He buys property from her mother, with intentions that seem similar to Offdean’s—certainly with Suzanne in mind, as he calls her home to her mother. The shift in this story redirects the readers’ focus to the financial transactions in New Orleans, of which Suzanne has no business. Her mother’s land is sold without her notice, and she passes a silver coin to Hector, without apparent understanding of his gambling business. Yet, commerce of land and betting appear to be the elements that drive the story’s plot. There is mention, too, of Suzanne’s job in the city, but it is minimally addressed. The real exchanges take place in the realm of men: property and finance. This story, though, brings the reader insight into another side of New Orleans business. The finances of Hector provide him with a viable income, making up for the loss of his family’s plantation, which the reader understands from “A No-Account Creole.” Hector meets Suzanne first in Gretna—a city across the Mississippi River from New Orleans—when she arrives and brings her to the other side. His appearance is impressive and sophisticated: His black hair was dashed with gray on the temples; he wore a short, parted beard and a small moustache that curled. From the crown of his glossy silk hat down to his trimly-gaitered feet, his attire was faultless. Suzanne knew her Natchitoches, and she had been to Shreveport and even penetrated as far as Marshall, Texas, but in all her travels she had never met a man to equal Hector in the elegance of his mien. (CW 260)

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Gambling has been good to Hector, who has risen above the demise of the old plantation. He is one of the Santien family, the fictional clan in Chopin’s stories through whom Chopin depicts “a sustained portrait of the Creole aristocracy in crisis” (Gunning). Hector, we are told in “A No-Account Creole,” has run the family plantation business into debt and then abandoned the land (CW 82). He finds solvency, or the appearance of it, in gambling. The narrative shift in “In and Out of Natichtoches” refocuses the readers’ gaze toward the preservation of Suzanne’s innocence and chastity. She is returned home, despite her obvious enjoyment of the city, as she quickly falls into the contradictory habits of mass attendance at the cathedral and smoking cigarettes. New Orleans offers her an alternative to the smallness of the schoolhouse, where the biggest event is the appearance of a mixed-­ race child. For Suzanne, the joys of Mardi Gras and New Orleans coffee houses do not belong to her, as they do for other Chopin characters. She, like many of those same characters, returns home, to rural Louisiana, dutifully but, in this story, safely protected from the allure of the city’s illicit commerce.

“Doctor Chevalier’s Lie” In case Chopin readers do not heed the warnings of “In and Out of Natichtoches” or even “The Going Away of Liza” and the broken, unhappy return of Liza to her husband’s house, “Doctor Chevalier’s Lie” makes explicit the dangers of the city, hinted at through Hector’s and Maman Chavan’s financial exchange. This brief story, first written in 1891 and then published in Vogue in 1893, foregrounds the seedier elements found in the evenings within the city’s “unsavory quarter,” where Doctor Chevalier is called when a young woman is found dead from a gunshot in a brothel. A familiar scene, the doctor could not but note the ghastly sameness of detail that accompanied these oft-recurring events. The same scurrying; the same groups of tawdry, frightened women bending over banisters—hysterical, some of them; morbidly curious, others; and not a few shedding tears; with a dead girl stretched somewhere, as this one was. (CW 147)

However, this time the doctor recognizes this young woman; he remembers her from a year before, when he met her and her family in Arkansas.

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She was “too clever to stay in an Arkansas cabin” and thus was going to New Orleans to “seek her fortune” (CW 147). Although Bernard Koloski does not study him in his essay on “Chopin’s Enlightened Men,” Doctor Chevalier certainly holds rank among Offdean, Mr. Laborde, and Gouvernail—all of whom have appeared within these pages as catalysts to Chopin’s female protagonists’ development. These characters, Koloski tells us, are not necessarily “paragons of virtue or strength, but they are honest and affectionate, sometimes courageous, occasionally uncommonly insightful. They seek to make the most of what they have to work with” (“Enlightened Men” 25). Doctor Chevalier aligns with the likes of Koloski’s “enlightened” male characters, as he assumes the responsibility of informing the young woman’s family of her death, obscuring the sordidness of her situation to soften the shock. The development of this character is intentional; Chopin modeled his character on her own family’s doctor, Dr. Charles Jean Faget, who appears to have made a deep impression on Chopin. He was the recipient of the Chevalier of the Legion of Honor after his discovery of a key symptom for diagnosing yellow fever (and distinguishing it from malaria) (Toth, Kate Chopin 126–7). His appearance in the story provides the possibility of redemption—in this case within the prostitution trade. His willingness to obscure the truth to save the young woman’s family from worse grief incurred the criticism of “society,” but “for some reason or other” he was never ostracized for his association with a dead fallen woman (CW 148). This particular story does not identify New Orleans per se, but readers would have recognized the scene as a familiar event in that city’s life. Furthermore, the story is based on an actual event in a doctor’s professional life, according to Chopin biographer Daniel Rankin (Toth, “Chopin’s New Orleans”). “Doctor Chevalier’s Life” points to the lawful practice of prostitution and its history in New Orleans, dating back before the Civil War. Its accepted presence in the city, however, made the occupation no less dangerous. As a notorious case from 1851 arose from the murder of a “Lewd and Abandoned Woman” in State of Louisiana v. Abraham Parker. In this case, Lieutenant Michael Hughes found a partly undressed man running across Poydras Street, heading for the Mississippi River. Although the man denied committing any crime and instead insisted he had been robbed in a “house of ill-fame somewhere on Basin or Bienville streets,” where he had been attacked and thus had run to save his life. However, once Hughes, with Parker, returned to the brothel, Hughes

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and now additional officers discovered the murdered body of Eliza Phillips, apparently from a gunshot wound (Kelleher Schafer 19–20). News reports characterized the murder in terms like: “Another Horrible Murder” and “A Woman Murdered in Gravier Street,” with emphasis on her sordid associations and practices. One journalist identified her as a “degraded woman … in the habit of living with some dissolute character who aided her in extorting money from her visitors” (qtd. in Kelleher Schafer 20). The reporter’s language—the use of the word “another”— points to the commonality of the event as well as the linguistic representations of prostitutes in the public’s imagination. In this instance, the reporter also identified the man whom Lieutenant Hughes encountered as an “upstanding man who had a wife and children in Tennessee,” even as he had been indicted for the woman’s murder. Thus, from this actual account, readers can see how Doctor Chevalier’s concern in preserving the dead young woman’s character in Chopin’s story is justified—there was much prejudice levied against prostitutes, even as they were victims of crimes against them. “Doctor Chevalier’s Lie” shows Chopin readers the dark underside to commerce in the city—a warning to the author’s other characters who find varying levels of autonomy and freedom within New Orleans. The doctor’s presence, however, serves as a beacon of some justice—or at least kindness—within the city’s business life. This story, like the others discussed in this chapter—“A Pair of Silk Stockings,” “A Sentimental Soul,” “A No-Account Creole,” and “In and Out of Old Natichtoches”—points to the centrality of business and commerce in New Orleans. For each of these stories, the city and its market offered women and men opportunities to expand and contract in their lives, as many characters made their way to and from the city’s confines. By the time Chopin was writing, and certainly among these stories, the business of slavery had been abolished. In its wake, the city and its environs sought to restore the prosperity of its past as the center of southern business. The demise of Louisiana’s plantations echo in the depictions in the dilapidated Santien acreage—a scene that appears again in Suzanne’s home, as well as in other Chopin stories, such as “Ma’ame Pélagie,” where again, an outsider—in this case, the niece of Ma’ame Pélagie and her sister Mam’selle Pauline arrives at their failing plantation, another casualty of the Civil War, only to disrupt their acquiescence to demise. Had they been men like the Santiens, Ma’ame Pélagie and her sister may have run off and abandoned the property, but instead, they remained resigned to live amid the decimation. The

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reoccurring trope of the dilapidated southern plantation points to the economic collapse that followed the war. That Chopin’s characters find opportunities to buy, sell, and enjoy aspects of a market creeping back from collapse points to the ever-present possibility of the new world order dawning on the New Orleans of Chopin’s imagination. Important to note, Chopin’s main characters in these stories are white women and white men, all of whom find a certain level of comfort or agility within the spaces of the New Orleans commercial scene. With the exception of Sylvie, the boarding house owner in “Athènaïse,” no women of color appear engaged as free agents in Chopin’s depictions of the New Orleans commercial marketplace. This is a racial omission typical of Chopin, and at best identifies her as a white woman of her cultural era and consequently points to her myopic vision for women in dawning of the modern era. Nevertheless, the stories discussed here also do not prevent the women characters in them from expressing their abilities to walk, travel, leave, or arrive within the city. Commerce enables and justifies their presence upon the city’s streets—either for legitimate or illicit reasons. Like the men in the stories, Chopin’s characters find their place in the city’s market in their attempts to act as their own agents in the New Orleans commercial life or in their own lives.

CHAPTER 5

Bayou St. John Stories

This chapter will examine three Chopin stories that are set in the Bayou St. John neighborhood, which is found in the middle of the city of New Orleans. The area is also known as Faubourg St. John (“faubourg” as in “suburb”), particularly if one is drawing the distinction between the neighborhood and the literal bayou. In the eighteenth century, Native Americans showed European traders Bayou St. John as a shortcut to access the Mississippi River. Europeans began to settle the area’s higher ground by 1718 (Craig). The area has long offered city dwellers deep connections to the natural world, as well as to the precolonial and pre-Civil War past. Although New Orleans is largely surrounded or saturated by water, Bayou St. John offers the only “front-yard water scene” to its residents, and because of Bayou St. John, New Orleans was and still is a central, strategic port on the Mississippi River. Within this central neighborhood, three essential Chopin stories trace the lives of Madame Delisle, Zoraïde, and Chicot in “A Lady of Bayou St. John,” “La Belle Zoraïde,” and “Nég Creol” within Bayou St. John, oblivious and unconcerned with any event, including the Civil War, beyond its parameters. Bayou St. John offered Chopin a microcosm of the world, one that contained love, longing, pain, and loss for her characters. These stories depend upon the depiction of Black servitude to white women; Chopin frames the desires for autonomy, for love, and for the past within complex relationships predicated on racial

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 H. Ostman, Kate Chopin and the City, American Literature Readings in the 21st Century, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-44300-8_5

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inequity. The author never raises the question of inequity or even challenges its presence but instead uses its presence to foreground the central human desires for freedom and love. This chapter will explore the setting of Bayou St. John as it appears in each story. Chopin published “A Lady of Bayou St. John” in 1893 and soon after published its prequel, “La Belle Zoraïde.” These stories frame the life of Madame Delisle, before and after her widowhood; however, the focus of the latter story is on the narrative told within its pages by the slave character Manna-Loulou, setting “La Belle Zoraïde” before the end of the Civil War. These stories trace Madame Delisle’s life from her young wifehood through her older years as a widow, lived in the shadow and loss of the war, and dependent upon Black servitude. Through the sequential depictions of this character, Chopin offers readers a lens through which to view the passage of time in Bayou St. John; as time proceeds and war leaves its mark, the narrative threads the loss of the past into the stories of the present. “Nég Creol,” on the other hand, tells a different kind of story, one in which a former Black slave sustains the vitality and reputation of a former white performer. Through the protagonist Chicot’s fidelity and protection, the formerly known “Mademoiselle de Montallaine” survives into her old age, surrounded in life, as she is later in death, by a range of New Orleans inhabitants, exemplifying the ways Bayou St. John has offered a home to a wide diversity of city residents.

Bayou St. John Chopin set all three stories distinctly in Bayou St. John, an area of New Orleans that was vital to the lifeblood of the city, thus foregrounding the loss, pain, and desires of her characters, and reflecting the human lives imagined within it. Without the establishment of Bayou St. John, New Orleans would never have found its foothold on the Mississippi or become the flourishing trade center it was. Before French settlers arrived in 1699, Bayou St. John was home to the ancient village of the Acolapissa Indians, right at the curve of the western border, where Moss Street connects to Carrolton Avenue. Soon after, the Biloxi Indians moved into the deserted homes of the Acolapissa’s, as well as French occupants, who came to the area by—then known—Bayou St. Jean. The bottom end of Bayou St. John is found where the Mississippi River abuts the French Quarter. In this area, the stream stretches from east to north, over three and a half miles, opening to Lake Pontchartrain. On the right-hand side of Carrollton

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Avenue, the Esplanade Avenue Bridge is visible, and across from it is the entry to City Park, one of the biggest parks in the United States today. On the other side of the bayou—its eastern border—is another Moss Street, where many of the oldest and most beautiful homes in the city are found, between the avenues of Orleans and Esplanade. Several of these homes (in particular, numbers 924, 1300, and 1440) were built during the Spanish occupation of the area. Since that time—around 1795—through until the 1920s, the Carondelet (or Old Basin Canal) linked the city-side of the bayou with the elements of the original city, which is the French Quarter, along the streets of Toulouse and Basin, the canal streaming by what is now Lafitte Avenue (Frieberg i–ii). Prior to its European settlers, Bayou St. John had several names. The word “bayou” derives from the Choctaw or Mobilian word “bayuk” or “bayouk,” and not from “boyau,” which comes from French. In 1699, the Indian residents had named the area “Choupithatcha” or “Soupitcatcha,” deriving from the Choctaw words “shupik,” which indicates a mudfish or grindle, and “hatcha,” which indicates “river.” As an extension of these terms, the bayou was also known as “Bayou Choupic” or “Shupic,” since such fish swam in its slow currents (Frieberg ii–iii). Through the next century, the bayou acquired other names, finally settling into the name it is still known by today: Bayou St. John, which was named by an eighteen-year-old French Canadian settler, Jean Baptiste LeMoyne, Sieur de Bienville (New Orleans’s founder), perhaps in recognition of his patron, Saint Jean the Baptist (also the patron saint of Quebec, French Canada), or perhaps in honor of himself. Regardless of the origins of its name, Bayou St. John was soon recognized as essential to travel and shipping, particularly as it provided a five-and-a-half-mile shortcut via water between the Mississippi River and Lake Pontchartrain (Frieberg iii). Up until the 1820s, which became the age of the steamboat, Bayou St. John served as the “most important reason for founding New Orleans in its present location” (Frieberg iv). The area offered a beautiful site for residents who preferred to look out on water, and it has since become a place where drainage, as well as recreation, has developed, further fortifying the value of the city. The 1830s saw New Orleans emerge as one of the world’s leading ports, becoming a major contributor to the expansion of the city’s and by extension the nation’s expanding economies. Regardless of the city’s flourishing economy, its political world was fairly unmovable, as Creole residents continued to control politics, even as Americans sought to split the city into three parts. American residents only began to gain

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traction when they found allies in the German and Irish immigrants, together finally outnumbering the Creoles. The shift in power resulted in the greater foothold of American culture in New Orleans, which brought with it a singular emphasis on nativism and race—a change that would greatly affect New Orleans’s native and free people of color. And yet, even as the city appeared to expand its population and affluence, in many ways it was not growing: … at the time of the Louisiana Purchase, most of the city consisted of a compact grid along the river, a mere eleven by six blocks. Development spilled along the ridges that scarred the swamp behind it—as evidenced by the small population communities along Bayou Road and Bayou St. John— but these settlements remained sparse. The more the city grew the more this “untamable” swamp behind the city began to take on symbolic significance beyond even its logical implications. (Pruyn 52)

After the Louisiana Purchase, Daniel Clark, Jr., one of the most affluent North Americans at the time, sought to establish his own neighborhood by purchasing plantations in the areas of Bayou St. John and Fairgrounds neighborhoods. He envisioned the area stemming out from his own home, Place Bretonne, like radiance of the sun. However, this vision did not manifest, as his daughter, an heir born from his mistress, kept the land in dispute through a lawsuit claiming her legitimate right to her father’s property that ran for twenty-one years. In the meantime, other neighborhoods developed, beneath the French Quarter and next to Bayou Road, where many Creole families and free people of color resided. By the 1830s, the posh Esplanade Avenue reached the bayou, and within the same century it became known as a “streetcar suburb” for its new mode of transportation—such as we see in multiple Chopin stories. Streetcar lines enabled affluent residents to live in New Orleans but away from the unpleasant elements of city life (Pruyn 53). In addition to becoming a central water passage and a significant area of urban development, Bayou St. John expanded the city’s drainage system and its recreational facilities, thus codifying its importance to the identity of New Orleans. The efforts to build sophisticated drainage led to the development of important outdoor areas for recreation and leisure, separate from residences, military, or other ceremony uses. One of the best-known areas was the Spanish Fort summer resort, which developed a hotel on the lake side of Bayou St. John, offering—according to an 1841

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newspaper ad, “every variety for amusement—Billiards, pistol shooting, bathing, &c. The Restaurant is furnished with the best markets afford” (qtd. in Pruyn 55). Other attractions continued to add value to the area, including the Bayou St. John Hotel, and later in the 1870s, promenades, as well as a casino, a theater, amusement park rides, pavilions for dancing, and more restaurants. In the late nineteenth century, city dwellers dressed up to watch rowing club races by the Old Basin Canal. Other recreational places included the multiple gardens beside the bayou and its canal: The Tivoli, Jardin de Rocher de Ste. Helene, Tivoli Gardens, Vauxhall Gardens, and Magnolia Gardens—which featured music, ballrooms and dance halls, bars, gaming areas, and refreshments. Next to the Old Basin Canal, Congo Square became a place during the nineteenth century where slaves and free people of color came together (Pruyn 58). Prior to the Civil War, the area had been called Place du Cirque (“Circus Park” or “Circus Square”), but the people of color who congregated there referred to it as “Congo Circus,” or the “Congo Plain,” or even “Congo Square.” Here, as Lawrence Powell has indicated, after mass on Sundays, Black women would dance African ring dances with slow, repeated movement of their feet, along with the rhythms of percussion often on homemade instruments (271). Bayou St. John’s drainage and recreational efforts continued after the Civil War, particularly when the swampy area around New Orleans became a pestilence danger. Leaders in the city saw the area as a serious obstacle to its growth, and it “had to be drained and developed, or else New Orleans would be left behind as all other American cities expanded and modernized” (Pruyn 65). This view drove the building of a large drainage network comprised of gutters, pipes, drains, and canals, across twenty-two acres within the city parameters, including six pump stations. Finally, by the early 1900—well after Chopin had left Louisiana—New Orleans had harnessed its drainage issues and established City Park, both developments emblematic of “the city’s fast-paced progress” (Pruyn 65). Bayou St. John signified the city’s efforts to expand and progress, to keep up with modern technologies and economics. It presented a space where the natural world abutted urban life, affording multiple spaces for reprieves from the worries and hassles of city living. Also, Bayou St. John offered space for people from all castes and classes, as the draw to the outdoors knew neither social construction nor distinction between free and enslaved peoples, prior to the Civil War.

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Amid this landscape, Kate Chopin set three of her most important stories. “A Lady of Bayou St. John,” “La Belle Zoraïde,” and “Nég Creol” feature the complex lives of diverse residents of the bayou, where life is predicated upon complicated love and insurmountable loss. These particular stories articulate the cycles of power, loss, and gain against a backdrop of a city becoming, as it were. New Orleans, from its inception, has been a city of tectonic change—all of which is distilled down into Chopin’s stories set in its most essential neighborhood, Bayou St. John.

“A Lady of St. John” The first of two chronologically-published stories, “A Lady of Bayou St. John,” appeared in the pages of Vogue on September 21, 1893, as well as in Bayou Folk (1894). It was followed by “La Belle Zoraïde,” a prequel that she wrote on the day of publication of “A Lady of Bayou St. John,” and published in Vogue on January 4, 1894. This story focuses on Madame Delisle as a young wife, at home “in the old house” in Bayou St. John, awaiting her husband Gustave’s return from war (CW 298). The story narrates her flirtation with a Frenchman, Sépincourt, who is staying in New Orleans during the time of the Civil War but who is not interested or engaged in the war. Bayou St. John frames the tale, as the couple becomes closer until news of Madame Delisle’s husband’s death derails their plans to leave the country and start a new life together in France. The narrator describes Madame Delisle at first as very young and very beautiful. In fact, she is so attractive that she stares at herself in her mirror for hours “contemplating her own loveliness; admiring the brilliancy of her golden hair, the sweet languor of her blue eyes, the graceful contours of her figure, and the peach-like bloom of her flesh” (CW 298). She is a woman with little to occupy her attention besides looking at her mirror and playing with the pets in her home. And like a child, she depends on the stories that the Black servant Manna-Loulou tells her at bedside. So childlike is she that Madame Delisle is “not able to realize the significance of the tragedy whose unfolding kept the civilized world in suspense,” but she was not unaware of the “gloom” that extended all around her as a result of the war (CW 298)—perhaps felt through the acute diminishment of recreational activities in Bayou St. John at this time. Sépincourt, a Frenchman staying in New Orleans and thus not fighting in the war, alleviates her sense of gloominess. Bayou St. John was not a

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central location of the Civil War and did not “see much action” (Pruyn 62)—and as close to an ideal space from where one might try to ignore the war. Together, Madame Delisle and Sépincourt share a “sympathy” that staves off her “dim” eyes, and as he visits her more frequently through the summer, they grown more intimate, “talking, talking incessantly during the first days when they were unconsciously unfolding themselves to each other” (CW 299). Their confiding in each other leads to a moment when there is little to discuss beyond the war and the letters sent from Gustave. Their silences hold a budding intimacy, but when Sépincourt declares his feelings for her, suggesting they run away to Paris, Madame Delisle withdraws at first, unsure of how to respond, until she receives a letter from him, “awakening in her a delicious tumult that seized and held possession of her whole being” (CW 300). That evening, she does not require Manna-Loulou’s stories to soothe her to sleep, and the next day, she greets him with evidence of a new maturity, inspired by his declarations of love. Sépincourt presses her again, kissing her and declaring his love. She relents and tells him that she will go “anywhere” with him (CW 300). However, news of her husband’s death thwarts their plans in an unexpected way. Although Sépincourt backs off and allows her some time to grieve, he is astonished when she tells him that it is “impossible” for her to leave for Paris with him. At this point, she is fully dressed for mourning, and the way she receives his visit left him the impression that “he held no place in her thoughts” (CW 300). Sépincourt’s presence up until this moment has taken the form of a distraction, although their intimacy and closeness have served as a protection from the reality of the war—or more precisely the pervasive “gloom” of the Civil War. Sépincourt’s admission of love triggers Madame Delisle into a new kind of adulthood, one in which she becomes an agent, acting on her own feelings as she at first concedes to Sépincourt’s proposal to go with him to Paris. The death of her husband catapults her into widowhood and an entire change in her feelings and fidelity. If Sépincourt’s love propels her toward maturity and agency, widowhood enables her to fully engage both and relinquish her from any desire to elope with him. Madame Delisle not only has no remaining affection for Sépincourt; Gustave appears to be more present to her in death than he was when he was alive. She makes no distinction between his life when he was at her side and his life while he was “away yonder in Virginia somewhere, with Beauregard” (CW 298). She tells him:

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“My husband has never been so living to me as he is now” … . “Every object that surrounds me speaks to me of him… . I see him again sitting in this chair or in that one. I hear his familiar voice, his footsteps upon the galleries. We walk once more together beneath the magnolias; and at night in dreams I feel that he is there, there, near me. How could it be different! Ah! I have memories, memories to crowd and fill my life, if I live a hundred years!” (CW 301)

There is no evidence that Madame Delisle lives for a hundred years, but the narrator tells the reader that she continues to live on Bayou St. John as “a very pretty old lady,” for whom “the memory of Gustave still fills and satisfies her days” (CW 302). The transformation of Madame Delisle realigns her character to the appropriate role of widowhood, following her husband’s death—regardless of the wait period Sépincourt observers for decency’s sake. Her about-­ turn stuns him, but her residency in Bayou St. John suggests otherwise, as it is the constant in her life. In the “old house” she has been protected from reality, and even as the war threatens her serenity, Sépincourt appears and dilutes its effects. He awakens her maturity and agency, so that she is able to decide that she will not go to Paris with him. A handful of scholars have addressed Sépincourt’s presence in the story as emblematic of Chopin’s “good guys.” Pearl L. Brown categorizes him under the author’s “awakened men” and points to Sépincourt’s function as a catalyst for Madame Delisle’s reckoning as a woman of integrity: “With Sépincourt’s declaration of love and his proposal for a new life abroad, she momentarily becomes ‘a woman capable of sacrifice’” (75). He relinquishes his claims to her love when he realizes it is useless to convince her to leave with him and does not press his point. But “sacrifice” is not necessarily the virtue that is at issue here. Silvia Baily Shurbutt points out that Madame Delisle’s widowhood releases her from the obligations of marriage. Just when she “had almost given into the temptation to run away with the sympathetic Sepincourt, … she commits herself to [her husband’s] memory and the loyal vernation of the conventional ideal of marriage. Of course, since the stifling reality of marriage is now quite out of the question for the widowed Madame Delisle, commitment to the ideal presents no special difficulty” (19–20). Her reconciliation to widowhood and the “ideal” reality appears to appeal to her very much, as the memory of Gustave is enough to last her all of her days, “suggesting not only that the ideal of conventional marriage is completely palatable, in the purest sense, only when the

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spouse is out of the picture but also that the cares and duties of marriage and motherhood are likely to take the toll on the physical and emotional vitality of a woman” (Shurbutt 20). Thus, Madame Delisle decides to remain in mourning, and more importantly, on Bayou St. John, which has remained her consistent companion. Through the story, there are three direct references to the bayou. The French word “marais,” which means swamp, appears several times to remind the reader of the proximity of Bayou St. John, the body of water. The first reference follows the narrative description of the image of Gustave’s portrait in the drawing room and its lessening importance. After months of detachment from the image and its significance, the narrator explains, “One day at sunset, when she and Sépincourt stood silently side by side, looking across the marais, aflame with the western light, he said to her: ‘M’amie, let us go away from this country that is so triste” (CW 299). Later, when they sit in the drawing room, in front of Gustave’s portrait, the narrator tells us: “There was a soft air blowing gently over the marais” (CW 300). And finally, after Madame Delisle asserts that Gustave is more present to her in death than in life, she explains to Sépincourt: “I look yonder across the marais, and I see him coming toward me, tired and toil-stained from the hunt” (CW 301). In each of these French references to the Bayou St. John—and here, the literal bayou—Madame Delisle associates the physical space to the memory of her husband, particularly a memory that does not interfere with her independence in the present. The memories of Gustave, like the bayou itself, sustain Madame Delisle, satisfy her, even, so that she is no longer in need of eloping to Paris with Sépincourt. Insofar as Shurbutt may be correct in pointing out that widowhood becomes Madame Delisle, the bayou suffices as her companion and offers an adequate stand-in for her husband—or any husband, including Sépincourt, as the narrator assures the reader that she continues to live in Bayou St. John. She is, of course, safe there, a safety further emphasized by Manna-Loulou’s care and—more important—involuntary servitude. She has no urgent reason to leave Bayou St. John. Sépincourt’s affection presents Madame Delisle the opportunity to leave the “sad” nation—a conflict he appears to be indifferent to: “He shrugged his shoulders over this strife between brothers, this quarrel which was none of his” (CW 298). But his connection to New Orleans is tenuous. His appearance echoes the brief stay of the well-known nineteenth-century impressionist painter, Edgar Degas, who lived in New Orleans from 1872–1873. Chopin

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and he had both spent time in New Orleans in the 1870s. And as Christopher Benfy has noted regarding the painter and the writer, “Ties of friendship and family linked these people, in turn, to others, connecting the stubbornly French (and still French-speaking) Creole colony in nineteenth-­century New Orleans to its little-known mirror image: the ‘Louisiana colony’ in France” (5). Degas arrived in New Orleans in autumn of 1872, visiting his American relatives. Not only does this visit mark a pivotal moment in his artistic trajectory, it also marked a dramatic shift in New Orleans politics. Obviously, this is not the Civil War of Sépincourt’s visit to the city, but it marked a definitive period during Reconstruction within New Orleans, which was controlled by the Federal government and the possibility of occupation always loomed. Degas himself had come to New Orleans following his service in the National Guard during the Prussian invasion of Paris and the violence that came after the Commune was founded in 1871 (Benfy 12–13). By the time Degas arrived in New Orleans, he’d seen multiple attempted coups, the precedents to the later “Battle of Liberty Place” in 1874, when a white militia battled with the Metropolitan police, a fight that resulted in the deaths of thirty individuals and was finally stopped by Federal troops (Benfy 15). Yet while he stayed in New Orleans, Degas mostly spent his time in his family’s house on Esplanade Avenue, painting in a gallery upstairs (Toulouse and Ewell 89). Here, in this detail, we see a parallel to Chopin’s character Sépincourt, who appears to be insulated and disengaged from the Civil War, even as he was not unaware of it. Sépincourt, like Degas, was never bound to the city and his invitation to Madame Delisle is based in his French loyalties. But Madame Delisle is bound to the city. Even after her husband has died, she has no reason to leave Bayou St. John. In an area so central to the vitality of New Orleans, she is ironically protected from the encroachment of the Civil War’s “tragedy” (CW 298) as much as anyone in New Orleans might have been, but as a widow, she is further protected from changing her life—her newly discovered autonomy as well as the safety she feels in the stories told by Manna-Loulou. In other words, the small world Madame Delisle occupies on Bayou St. John does not require her to search anywhere or be with anyone else; she is safe here and the past and the future have no bearing on her perception of the world, since the memories of her dead husband sustain her until her old age. Madame Delisle’s specific variety of autonomy is emblematic of many of Chopin’s women characters who find or test out their independence in

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New Orleans. A change in her life occurs within sight of the central waterway of Bayou St. John, a reminder of the impossibility of stasis. Chopin sets the story and its prequel in Bayou St. John, foregrounding the autonomy of Madame Delisle and thus linking it to the paradoxes of this place. The busy-ness and activity that characterize this area ironically offered sanctuary and protection during the war. The proximity of the natural landscape is a central feature of Bayou St. John and further emphasizes the paradoxes of place and circumstance. Here, Madame Delisle finds her widowhood preferable to marriage, even as she has earlier chosen the companionship with Sépincourt. These ironies emphasize the paradoxical desire for independence and agency exhibited by Madame Delisle and other Chopin characters in New Orleans—a place that ordinarily considered too unsafe or too unsavory during the nineteenth century for white middle-class women to find independence amid its streets. And yet Chopin’s women characters do.

“La Belle Zoraïde” The second story published after “A Lady of Bayou St. John,” “La Belle Zoraïde” returns the reader to the “marais” with a more detailed description of the bayou opening the story. According to Emily Toth, Chopin wrote the prequel, “La Belle Zoraïde,” on the day of Vogue’s publication of “A Lady of Bayou St. John.” The second story was similarly published in Vogue in January 1894 and Bayou Folk, as well, and features a story within a story, in which its Black main character, the slave Zoraïde, faces a similar opportunity to choose her own destiny, but because she is a slave, unlike Madame Delisle, she has no control over her body or her child. A narrative within a narrative, “La Belle Zoraïde” presents a younger Madame Delisle listening, with the reader, to one of Manna-Loulou’s bedtime stories, intended to lull Madame to sleep. The narrative opens in summer in Bayou St. John; the evening “was hot and still; not a ripple swept over the marais. Yonder, across Bayou St. John, lights twinkled here and there in the darkness, and in the dark sky above a few stars were blinking. A lugger that had come out of the lake was moving with slow, lazy motion down the bayou. A man in the boat was singing.” (CW 303). Madame Delisle wears her wedding ring, as this story occurs before “A Lady of Bayou St. John,” and she is soothed by Manna-Loulou’s stories—a habit that is at least interrupted by Sépincourt’s later declaration of love.

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Oddly intended to ease her mistress into sleep, Manna-Loulou narrates the horrific story of Zoraïde, an enslaved mother who is deprived of her child. The story comes to her mind readily after the evening song of the man in the boat on the bayou reaches her. He sings “an old, half-forgotten Creole romance,” which she starts to sing and thus prompts the story she tells to Madame Delisle, who prefers only to hear “true” stories (CW 304). Manna-Loulou tells the story of the beautiful slave woman of mixed ethnicity whose owner keeps her from heavy labor and “raises” her with the expectation of a life with many similarities to her own, including a wedding at the cathedral. In particular, her mistress, Madame Delarivière wishes for Zoraïde to marry M’sieur Ambroise, a slave owned by Doctor Langlé and hated by Zoraïde, who is in love with Mézor. Raised to expect be able to choose the outcome of her life, Zoraïde at first demurs and tells her mistress that she wishes to remain unmarried and thus by Madame Delarivière’s side. Her story embodies the ambiguity of social roles among races in nineteenth-century New Orleans, as Sandra Frith states that in this story “the confusion of the blacks’ role in society is shown through” the ethnically-mixed Zoraïde, “who has been encouraged by her white mistress to live a similar life” (Frith). But the truth is that she wished instead to marry Mézor, whom she had watched “dance the Bamboula in Congo Square. That was a sight to hold one rooted to the ground. Mézor was as straight as a cypress-tree and as proud looking as a king. His body, bare to the waist, was like a column of ebony and it glistened like oil” (CW 304). Congo Square, as noted earlier in the introduction of this study, was a designated “Black” space, where Black people, both enslaved and free, could dance. Zoraïde’s love for Mézor, who dances there, aligns her with her Black ancestors and the Black residents of New Orleans, and serves as an implicit rejection of her mistress’s presumed supremacy and control. Doctor Langlé is also his owner, and when Mézor speaks with Zoraïde, he is also kind and gentle. When she asks Madame Delarivière for permission to marry him, her mistress flies into a rage; she appears to be angry because Zoraïde wishes to marry a man with darker skin than hers, but her mistress’s protests seem to be a screen for the challenge she feels to her authority over Zoraïde, as seen in her response: “You deserve to have the lash laid upon you like any other slave; you have proven yourself no better than the worst” (CW 305). The violence of her language betrays her anger over Zoraïde’s choice for a husband and perhaps more importantly the very expression of the existence of her self-will.

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In spite of Madame Delarivière’s fury, Zoraïde continues with her admission of love for Mézor, claiming that her love for him transcends any other response her mistress might enact: murder or forgiveness. Madame Delarivière is “so wounded at hearing Zoraïde’s confession” that she prompts Doctor Langlé to sell Mézor and then after Zoraïde delivers their baby, she sends the baby away and tells her that the child is dead. Her mistress intends for Zoraïde to return to her earlier state: obedient and without family ties to Mézor or their child. But this act of cruelty does not produce the intended effect. Zoraïde becomes listless and passive, and eventually mad, as she believes a roll of rags is the shape of her sleeping infant. Seeing the pain and mental illness she has caused, Madame Delarivière brings the child back to Zoraïde, but Zoraïde rejects the girl for her bundle of rags (CW 306–307). Manna-Loulou concludes the story of grief with an ending that echoes “A Lady of Bayou St. John.” She tells her own mistress: “And now this is the end of Zoraïde’s story. She was never known again as la belle Zoraïde, but ever after as Zoraïde la folle [the madwoman], whom no one ever wanted to marry—not even M’sieur Ambroise. She lived to be an old woman, whom some people pitied and others laughed at—always clasping her bundle of rags—her ‘piti’ [pity].” (CW 307)

Madame Delisle, who has been following the story with the reader, remarks that death would have been better for Zoraïde—a comment that ignores their shared narrative: both live to be an “old woman.” For Madame Delisle, she is still “pretty” but she is apparently contented alone, without a husband or Sépincourt, although with the service of Manna-­ Loulou. The story ends with a repeat of their exchange in Creole, in which Manna-Loulou asks if Madame is dreaming, and Madame Delisle affirms she is not asleep and that the poor woman would be better off dead. The repeated ending in Creole suggests the story of “La Belle Zoraïde” is an echo or duplicates the story of Madame Delisle herself. While Gustave is away at war, Madame Delisle appears to enjoy herself like a child. Occasionally she made aware of the gloom of war, but she is otherwise distracted, particularly when Sépincourt appears, himself uninterested in the war among “brothers.” Like Zoraïde, she finds herself in a triangle with two men, her husband and Sépincourt, and she becomes aware of her own ability to choose. However, once she is free in her widowhood,

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eloping with Sépincourt is no longer attractive; her autonomy as a widow is far more enticing. Sylvia Bailey Shurbutt reminds us of another parallel between this story and “Athénaïse,” which Chopin draws between Athénaïse’s attempts to free herself from her marriage and Cazeau’s memory of the runaway slave in his youth. Shurbutt points to a parallel “given double potency” when Zoraïde is faced with a forced marriage herself. Toth interprets this ending as emblematic of Chopin’s own perspective on her autonomy, as well as an expression of empathy: In “La Belle Zoraïde,” Kate Chopin—the daughter of slave owners—looked on the thoughtless white world through the eyes of a woman of color, at a time when her Louisiana contemporaries Grace King and Ruth McEnery Stuart were still writing about happy slaves and tragic octoroons. Kate Chopin’s Zoraïde, like the black women in Chicago—and like Chopin herself—insists on her own free will and her own destiny. (Kate Chopin 222)

(Toth’s above reference to women of color in Chicago appears to refer to Chopin’s awareness of Black women who were protesting their exclusion from the Congress of Representative Women at Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893 [Toth, Kate Chopin 221].) The loss of autonomy in marriage is a theme seen over again in Chopin’s work; she develops the parallel to “A Lady of Bayou St. John” in “La Belle Zoraïde” with a more extreme expression of cruelty and ownership of another human being, emphasizing the limits for women that she perceived in marriage, certainly, but also the limits that circumscribed the ability for a woman to choose the direction of her own life. Both Madame Delisle and Zoraïde express their choices; however, the consequences for the Black woman are dire—worse than death, as Madame Delisle remarks to her own slave. Both stories are told in view of Bayou St. John; Manna-Loulou’s tale of Zoraïde ironically echoes her own constraints as a slave in the household of Madame Delisle. Unlike Zoraïde, she is never threatened with violence and she appears loving and attentive to her mistress’s needs and desires. However, the singing man on the boat prompts the story of Zoraïde and suggests that its narrator, Manna-Loulou, perceives more about the injustice in her situation than she lets on. Of course, as a slave, this would have been obvious, but as a construction in Chopin’s imagination, Manna-­ Loulou’s story reveals more about Chopin’s perception. Manna-Loulou’s

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inspiration from her tale comes from the bayou itself, where a man is singing in a boat alone. In the middle of the nineteenth century, Bayou St. John served as a central area to New Orleans’s development, providing construction supplies via its waterways. High-quality bricks as well as the best pinewood could be found by distributors along Bayou St. John. Further, more sophisticated steam-driven motors on boats, as well as luggers, dinghies, and scows, were now populous on the bayou and used by local businessmen to bring products to the city (Starr 12). In the early nineteenth century, Cassie Pruyn continues: … the turning basin [of Bayou St. John] thrummed with commerce, even as the canal itself, only three and a half to six and a half feet in depth, had to be dredged seemingly constantly to allow even flat-bottomed craft to ply its length. In the basin, scows, schooners, luggers and sloops sat in clusters while workers loaded and unloaded timber, oysters, charcoal and other goods. Oyster houses on North Rampart Street awaited shipments of the bivalves. Planing mills and lumber yards along the edge of the canal, like Jouet Lumber Yard on Toulouse Street, processed timber shipped to the city from points north of the lake. (59)

Amid such an active waterway scene, the song Manna-Loulou overhears is described as “a lover’s lament for the loss of his mistress” and “floating into her memory,” inspiring the story of Zoraïde. Her mind, floating like the boat on the bayou, remains free to imagine and tell a story—the ultimate expression of freedom for Chopin, as one’s imagination, unlike the body, can never be controlled by another. This and the irony of listening to her own slave Manna-Loulou’s story about a slave treated cruelly by her owner appears to be unnoticed by Madame Delisle, however.

“Nég Creol” The explosive development of New Orleans, particularly of Bayou St. John, had cooled considerably following the Panic of 1873, which was, of course, during Chopin’s tenure in the city. When Manna-Loulou would have told her story to her mistress, the city had not yet experienced the full shock of the Civil War nor the financial devastation of the following decade. But Chopin, writing in the 1890s, already knew a different New Orleans, a city that reflected a foregone age:

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This financial crisis impacted New Orleans profoundly. For several generations, the city had viewed itself much the way Houstonians view their city today. This was the place where fortunes could be amassed in the wink of an eye, and where bumptious, self-made businessmen set the tone of local life. In the wake of the prolonged panic, however, many New Orleanians came to view their city in an entirely different light, as a somewhat quaint repository of the past, where old ways and old buildings prevailed. (Starr 14)

This was the Bayou St. John of Chopin’s memory. By the time she lived in New Orleans, Bayou St. John had become a reputable neighborhood; the construction of the prewar period had slowed considerably, rendering much of what is there today. But when Chopin set “A Lady of Bayou St. John” and “La Belle Zoraïde” there, the neighborhood was emblematic of days gone by—just as the stories themselves were set in an age well before the Civil War changed everything. If “A Lady of Bayou St. John” and “La Belle Zoraïde” reflect a Bayou St. John of the past, the periods before and during the Civil War, then “Nég Creol” represents the aftermath of an idealized former Black slave in the wake of the Civil War. This story, published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1897 and in A Night in Acadie, shifts the reader’s attention from the songs flowing from boats on the bayou toward the streets of the neighborhood. In this depiction of Bayou St. John, Chopin again presents relics of the past; however, their configuration is different in some ways than what we see in other stories. In “Nég Creol,” a Black man retains reverence and loyalty—as well as service—to a former actress, La Chouette, who now lives on her own in the city at seventy-five years old. The narrator here speaks through a third-person perspective, attached to the point of view of a Black man known by various names, but spoken of in this story as “Chicot,” as he is called by the fishmongers at the French Market. His name, the narrator explains ambiguously, is a matter of privilege, as Chicot “was so black, lean, lame, and shriveled” (CW 505). The former actress he attends to is also known by multiple names. Readers are told that in the house she lived in, she was known as “La Chouette” (translation: “The Owl”), but on the stage, as a minor actress, she had been known as “Mademoiselle de Montallaine.” She was baptized “Aglaé Boisduré” and is referred to in the story as “Mamzelle Aglaé.” Chicot’s master was named “Boisduré” and presumably was the progenitor of many “rich, cultured, powerful” residents who lived in the large, elegant houses of New Orleans. Here, as in other Chopin stories, such as the

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widely-anthologized “Désirée’s Baby,” family lineage has special emphasis but not without irony: Men of note and position, whose names were familiar to the public, he swore were grandchildren, great-grandchildren, or, less frequently, distant relatives of his master, long deceased. Ladies who came to the market in carriages, or whose elegance of attire attracted the attention and admiration of the fishwomen, were all des ’tites cousins to his former master, Jean Boisduré. He never looked for recognition from any of these superior beings, but delighted to discourse by the hour upon their dignity and pride of birth and wealth. (CW 505–506)

Chicot’s visits to and care of Mamzelle Aglaé appear to be the result of his belief in her family lineage. Despite her name changes over the years, and her minimal fame, his presumption of her origins suffices to engage him in her informal service until her death. Chicot’s own origins are also obscured, particularly because of his former status as a slave. However, the narrator treats his origins, like his name, with reverent ambiguity. Chicot himself likely holds a “fantastic notion concerning the origin of his being”—a phenomenon that he attributes to his “young master” (CW 505). What this “fantastic notion” is, the reader is not told, but its reference is enough to cast doubt upon the character’s judgment—his ability to perceive Mamzelle Algaé’s own family pedigree may be equally “fantastic.” The ambiguous origins of Chicot also extend to where he goes home on the Bayou St. John: Nobody knew where Chicot lived. A man—even a nég creol—who lives among the reeds and willows of Bayou St. John, in a deserted chicken-coop constructed chiefly of tarred paper, is not going to boast of his habitation or to invite attention to his domestic appointments. When, after market hours, he vanished in the direction of St. Philip street, limping, seemingly bent under the weight of his gunny-bag, it was like the disappearance from the stage of some petty actor whom the audience does not follow in imagination beyond the wings, or think of till his return in another scene. (CW 506)

St. Philip Street links Chicot’s modest squatter’s home to la maison gris— the house where Mamzelle Aglaé keeps her rooms. This street was first named Rue de Clermont, for Robert, the Count of Clermont, one of Louis IX’s sons and head of the line of Bourbons; however, St. Philippe was also one of the patron saints of both the House of Orléans in France as well as

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a New Orleans’s saint. Originally, the street extended six or seven blocks, reaching from the river to the “back of town” and lengthened as New Orleans itself grew (Asher 66). St. Philip Street brings Chicot to Mamzelle Aglaé, as he delivers good food to her and then listens to her incessant complaining. Beyond his loyalty to an idea of who Mamzelle Algaé is, Chicot’s attention to her is otherwise inexplicable. He takes her impoverished state personally and “felt that she had a right to quarrel with fate… . Her poverty was a disgrace, and he hung his head before it and felt ashamed” (CW 508). His reverence for Mamzelle Aglaé ignores his own poverty; to offer her treats, he has to “work hard, and scheme and whine a little” at the market (CW 509). However, once she finally dies, Chicot appears indifferent; she is all but “a woman who had died in St. Philip street,” for whom he does not even interrupt his preparatory work on a red snapper fish at his job (CW 510). Amid the story of Mamzelle Aglaé’s life and eventual death is a diverse array of human life in nineteenth-century New Orleans, particularly in the French Quarter. St. Philip Street places Chicot in contact with Irish women, Italians, Jewish people, Choctaw Indians, and Arabs. Mamzelle Aglaé’s death is acknowledged in various ways by many of the immigrants to the quarter. When asked, Chicot denies that she is a descendant of “his Boisdurés,” as she dies “same-a like church rat” (CW 310). Her death, her poverty, appear as disgrace, and as if Chicot himself were biologically related to the Boisdurés, he disowns her. He turns his attention to his job with apparent indifference; importantly, he is focused on own work, which will support his sole survival, as he is no longer concerned with Mamzelle Aglaé’s survival. Her death in effect releases him from the remnants of the past: as a free Black man he no longer needs to concern himself with any of the tasks central to the life of a white woman. No longer providing basic needs for her, Chicot also no longer has to argue about divinity with Mamzelle Aglaé; an ongoing point of contention between them had been issues regarding Catholic faith. This continued disagreement adds a mystical element to the question of origins, even as it affects a kind of equalization among the two characters. Chicot, himself of ambiguous origin, was inclined to entertain that “‘Michié St. Pierre et Michié St. Paul’ had created him,” but he thought low of “Michié bon Dieu” and “[t]his fantastic notion concerning the origin of his being he owed to the early teaching of his young master, a lax believer, and a great farceur [prankster] in his day” (CW 505). (“Michié” appears to be a

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corruption of the title “Monsieur” [Ewell, et al.]. Therefore, the mystical origins of his birth are thrown into ambiguity, as much as the possibility of Mamzelle Algaé’s own origins. The insinuation that there is a degree of mysticism surrounding Chicot’s birth are complicated by the antagonism he feels from Mamzelle Algaé’s religious practices: “Bitter was the religious warfare that had raged for years between them, and Mamzelle Aglaé had grown, on her side, as intolerant as Chicot. She had come to hold St. Peter and St. Paul in such utter detestation that she had cut their pictures out of her prayer book. St. Peter is the patron saint of fishermen, a clear link to Chicot’s daily work. St. Paul is the patron of missionaries and evangelists. Both saints appear to be in service of fishing in some form or other. The idea that both saints might have created him appears as a wild corruption of the narrative of Jesus, whose own origin is attributed to divine intervention. Still, the links between Saints Peter and Paul lend themselves to the notion, perhaps ironically, of Chicot’s holy mission: to keep a dying former actress of lesser renown alive—a relic, in other words, of a dead, idealized past. Regardless of his saintly associations, Chicot further expresses his own opposition to Mamzelle Aglaé’s Catholicism by visiting the voodoo practitioner, because he can still hear Mamzelle Aglaé’s wailing agony from his place “among the reeds of the bayou” (CW 509). He purchases a talisman from Mimotte the Voudou, and he plans to bring it to Mamzelle Aglaé the next day. By the 1870s, the area where Chicot lives in the story had been home to many voodoo ceremonies. Despite the common belief (mostly of white) people who thought they were watching voodoo practices in Congo Square, authentic voodoo was practiced in secret, in private homes as well as at the shoreline of Lake Pontchartrain. Still, Marie Laveau—the most prominent voodoo practitioner of the day—performed ceremonies at lakeside and attracted sometimes as many as twelve thousand spectators, often white, to see the St. John’s Eve festival (on June 24) at the place where the bayou connects to the lake (Pruyn 63). One of Marie Laveau’s self-identified relatives, Luke Turner claimed: “Nobody see Marie Laveau for nine days before the feast. But when the great crowd of people at the feast call upon her, she would rise out of the water of the lake with a great communion candle burning upon her head and another in each one of her hands. She walked upon the waters to the shore” (qtd. in Pruyn 63–64). Late nineteenth-century white newspaper accounts reported St. John’s Eve festivals, conjuring images of evil and mayhem, with titles such as “Voudous on the Rampage” and “Full Particulars of the Hell-Broth and

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Orgies” and coinciding with the “black and tan” legislature of Louisiana and the commencement of Radical Reconstruction (Gordon 768). The coincidence of these reports was hardly mysterious and supported presumptions of white supremacy: In newspapers, national magazines, travel narratives, city guides, histories, folklore journals, and expositions on the “Negro,” both slave and free, Voodoo narratives and semipublic spectacles confirmed for many whites what they presumed to be about black savagery, feared about losing social control, and fantasized about policing hypersexualized blackness and “imperiled” white womanhood. (Gordon 768)

Michelle Y. Gordon identifies the ways such Voodoo accounts were leveraged to reinforce the rhetoric of white supremacy, as it was predicated on imagined notions of Black barbarism. She points out that during Reconstruction, when desegregation of public areas were legislated through the 1868 “black and tan” constitution and marriage between races was legalized (only until 1894), for many white residents Voodoo came symbolize “Negro domination” threatening white supremacy. The new discourse fostered fear among white supremacists who looked for control as the only way to subdue the threat. The modified language around Voodoo “moved away from the white-only rhetoric of democracy and republicanism that had justified the coexistence of black slavery and white liberty, to issue ominous warnings about the perils of racial equality” (Hodes qtd. in Gordon 769). The historical figure of Marie Laveau provides a lens for considering Chicot’s purchase of the talisman to bring to Mamzelle Algaé, as Chicot himself is caught between worlds—the world of the past, as he clings to his devotion to Mamzelle Algaé herself, to whom he would sacrifice everything, and the world of the present, in which his efforts are futile. And yet, the unlikely alliance of Chicot and Mamzelle Algaé, as disagreeable as she is, fosters an ironic defiance of white supremacist fears. Chicot’s purchase of the voodoo amulet aligns him—and her by association—with the Voodoo religious practices by the bayou. As much as Chicot appears to hold tightly to the past and its old notions of revered white families, Mamzelle’s poverty and death, as well as his former master’s chicanery, expose the past as irrelevant and powerless. Because nothing can save Mamzelle Algaé’s life. No religious belief of any kind can save Mamzelle Algaé. Neither Chicot’s delivery of tasty treats

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and food, nor the purchase of the amulet from Mimotte the Voudou prove effective. Her various names and her lineage die with her. Her death is instead ushered in by “Purgatory Mary,” who tellingly calls for a priest and suggests where Mamzelle Algaé may be winding up after death. Mamzelle Algaé’s passing occurs unacknowledged by Chicot but is instead recognized by a multitude of immigrants who have now moved into the city. Their presence reminds the reader of the shifting demographics of New Orleans, home to people who hailed from around the world, and whose residence mark the dawning of the new world. Thus, the story closes with the image of a throng of immigrants marching through the streets, an acknowledgment of Mamzelle Algaé’s death as much as it is an acknowledgment of the death of old New Orleans and a “fantastic” Bayou St. John. In “Nég Creol,” as in “A Lady of Bayou St. John” and “La Belle Zoraïde,” characters wrestle with the ties to a stubborn past, even as the present—the future, really—encroaches. All three stories are set in Bayou St. John, a rich, central neighborhood in New Orleans, without which, the city would not have become what it is today. In these stories, it serves as the site where the past exists in full view of the present. Characters in each of these stories have deep holds on the past—or more precisely, the past has deep holds on them. Madame Delisle’s long life straddles the time before and during the Civil War in a place that is affected less than most by the war. She refuses to relinquish her loyalty to her husband after his death, even when presented an opportunity for happiness with the French Sépincourt. Going to France with Sépincourt would be a move more firmly into a symbolic past, as the return would echo the long-ago origins of the city itself, a more distinctive step back in time. Of course, Madame Delisle’s refusal to let go of her loyalty to Gustave in her widowhood may have more to do with the freedom she now has without him. Widowhood offers her a socially acceptable alternative to conventional marriage, one that enables her to retain the contentedness she experienced even before she met Sépincourt—and even as he commiserates with her over the gloominess of the war. In the prequel to “A Lady of Bayou St. John,” readers receive insight into both the perspective of Madame Delisle’s slave as well as insight into the stories about marriage and motherhood that soothed Madame to sleep at night. Manna-Loulou appears to be a gentle, loyal servant, and she tells Madame a story about a slave woman who loses her mind from her mistress’s cruelty, after she sends her lover away and tells her that their child is dead. Unlike many of her contemporaries, Chopin depicts the pain and

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suffering of a slave woman, inflicted by her owner. However, twenty-first-­ century readers may be disappointed to find that her purpose here may be less concerned with revealing the humanity of a slave woman and more concerned with a more symbolic value, as the two stories, “A Lady of Bayou St. John” and “La Belle Zoraïde,” are linked, suggesting that any marriage—or any situation that limits a woman’s choice—is equal to enslavement. For Madame Delisle, her hold on the past—retaining her widowhood and reverence for her dead husband—is essential to her freedom, even as it is a freedom predicated on the enslavement of others. Whereas Chicot’s hold on the past is based on the reverence of a minor actress who may or may not have been a member of a distinguished family, to which he was once enslaved. On the one hand, “Nég Creol” `of a former slave; but on the other hand, through his depiction, Chopin demonstrates a deep riff between the legitimacy of the past—its revered families, its slavery, as well as its Catholicism, are all revealed to be inauthentic, as Chicot navigates his way through Bayou St. John and up St. Philip Street, negotiating the stubborn symbols of a dead past and the persistent presence of the new world. The immigrant residents who usher Mamzelle Algaé unto death reflect the shifting city demographics, particularly in the anchor of New Orleans, Bayou St. John.

CHAPTER 6

“Her position in the universe”: The Awakening’s Edna Pontellier and New Orleans

This study culminates in an examination of Kate Chopin’s depictions of New Orleans in her most well-known narrative, the 1899 novel The Awakening. Of the thirty-nine chapters in the novel, twenty-two are set in the city, and the other seventeen take place at the summer resort of Grand Isle, which had been a favorite resort among New Orleans residents but was decimated by a powerful hurricane by the time Chopin wrote The Awakening. We already know how Chopin loved cities; her deep appreciation resonates from the pages of her commonplace book, where she exalted: New Orleans I liked immensely; it is so clean—so white and green. Although in April we had profusions of flowers—strawberries and even blackberries. One evening I passed in N.O. Which I shall never forget—it was so delightful and so novel. Mamie and myself were invited to dine and spend the evening with a Mrs. Bader—a German lady […]. [who] lived in a dear little house near Esplanade St., a house with an immensity of garden. (Private Papers 85)

Born in St. Louis, Missouri, Chopin had an innate appreciation of city life, and the nine years she spent as a young, married woman in New Orleans profoundly shaped her adult life and authorial imagination. A widow, she wrote The Awakening almost twenty years after she had moved back to St. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 H. Ostman, Kate Chopin and the City, American Literature Readings in the 21st Century, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-44300-8_6

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Louis. “Louisiana,” Emily Toth has written, “was an education for Edna Pontellier, as it was for her creator” (“Kate Chopin, Edna Pontellier” 122). Although her first and only other novel, At Fault (1890) mentions New Orleans and features St. Louis in certain passages, this early, lesser-­ known novel primarily takes place on a late-nineteenth-century Louisiana plantation and minimally acknowledges city life. St. Louis is referenced more often than New Orleans in At Fault, but it certainly did not offer Chopin the same imaginative inspiration. On the contrary, St. Louis does not provide her with the resonant historical, cultural, symbolic landscape of New Orleans. Her perspective on that city rarely moves into controversial and difficult areas… . Her New Orleans is a feminized site of consumerism rather than production; of individual spatial relationships rather than political landscapes; of eroticism rather than racial and physical danger. It is a city of secretiveness and suggestion—the very qualities that were central to Chopin’s own life and indeed her allusive work. And, of course, it is very much a city of the street, full of spectacular, olfactory, and musical delights. (Taylor)

The delights begin to emerge for Edna as the novel unfolds. New Orleans offers her opportunities for consumerism and for walking—such as in “Charlie,” “A Pair of Silk Stockings,” “Athènaïse” and others. Edna originates from Kentucky—with some time spent in Mississippi—and lives as a married woman in New Orleans, the only place where the boundaries between time and space are fluid, enabling her to seek where she belongs in the world. When we see Edna Pontellier walk the streets of New Orleans, Chopin allows us to witness a woman outgrowing all previously-held ideas of who she is and what she wants in this life, a logical extension of the awareness she begins to develop while on vacation in Grand Isle. The city setting for her growing self-awareness places Edna amid “heterogeneous groups, who came there for work, wealth, pleasure, crime, sex and deviant practices of many kinds. As commentators have noted, by the end of the nineteenth century, the city was not only the center of production, but also a place of new kinds of consumption and spectacle” (Taylor). From the quiet, contemplative spaces of Grand Isle, Edna begins to test out the idea of who she is—her new sense of herself—at home on Esplanade Street, in the heart of the French Quarter. She ventures out solo, onto the streets of New Orleans, exploring the spectacles of the city, as she simultaneously explores the essence of her identity—a sense of self distinct from

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the proscribed familial social roles of mother, wife, and daughter that have defined most of her life. For women, as noted earlier in this study, the city required some savvy to navigate its streets and to keep their reputations intact. Helen Taylor, in her seminal study on Kate Chopin and the woman flaneur, has pointed out that the streets of New Orleans posed specific challenges to women residents who sought public constitutionals. In an outdoor space where men exercised easy movement, women in the nineteenth century were marginalized, subordinate to this specific freedom enjoyed by men: “In these contexts, women—especially young unattended women—threatened male power and hierarchy; the city represents the forbidden, thus sexual experience, and woman accordingly embodies that threat to rational civic order. Prostitution represents the possibility of social disorder, unless patriarchally confined and controlled” (Taylor). In spite of the threat to a woman’s reputation and/or her safety, Chopin set the majority of Edna’s “new” life—her new awareness, her new self-determination—amid the streets of New Orleans. Toth notes that the “sixteen Grand Isle chapters that open the book are about knowledge, and there are mentions of serpentlike waves. But the forbidden fruit does not appear until the novel moves to New Orleans” (“Kate Chopin, Edna Pontellier” 124). Through the novel, Chopin regularly references familiar streets of the French Quarter. As she unfolds the story, the reader is taken through a scenic route—Esplanade Street, Carondolet Street, Bienville Street, Canal Street, Shell Road—grounding Edna’s evolution in the setting of place. And yet, while Chopin locates The Awakening on the city’s streets, rendering the story as tangible, Edna Pontellier herself becomes less and less connected to that other element of setting: time. The period she spends in the city—where she lives much of the year—appears to disconnect her from any sense of linear time. She appears to be less governed by the habits and rituals of time, as she begins to ignore appointments and comes and goes as she pleases. This detachment from time parallels Edna’s simultaneous detachment from acquaintances, friends, and family. Her return to the city, after a summer of “awakening” at Grand Isle, a move that would ordinarily place an individual in the midst of many people, the busy-ness of city life, ironically enables Edna’s increasing self-imposed isolation. In the middle of New Orleans, she seeks out particular people, ignoring the many. So what happens to Edna in New Orleans? How does her time spent there—all twenty-two chapters of it—reflect the development of an inner

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life that makes the external life ultimately intolerable? Informed by the explorations of the short stories in the previous chapters, this chapter will examine how New Orleans sets the stage for the fulfillment of Edna Pontellier’s trajectory; it will look at the ways the physical signifiers of nineteenth-century New Orleans offered not only a map to the city but a map to a woman’s emancipation in the only ways available to her at the time.

Grand Isle The plot of The Awakening opens on Grand Isle, a summer resort frequented by New Orleans residents up and through much of the nineteenth century. When the reader first encounters Edna Pontellier, she is a woman who appears to be “sleepwalking” through her life. A nineteenth-­ century, white upper-middle class woman, she has done all the things that were expected of her: married a man of an acceptable financial caste (although Creole—to the dismay of her Presbyterian father and sister) and became a mother to two boys. The marriage between Edna and her husband Léonce Pontellier up until now has been characterized by familiarity and habit. The opening chapter introduces their marital ritual in a well-­ critiqued scene: Mr. Pontellier finally lit a cigar and began to smoke, letting the paper drag idly from his hand. He fixed his gaze upon a white sunshade that was advancing at snail’s pace from the beach. He could see it plainly between the gaunt trunks of the water-oaks and across the stretch of yellow chamomile. The gulf looked far away, melting hazily into the blue of the horizon. The sunshade continued to approach slowly. Beneath its pink-lined shelter were his wife, Mrs. Pontellier, and young Robert Lebrun. When they reached the cottage, the two seated themselves with some appearance of fatigue upon the upper step of the porch, facing each other, each leaning against a support post. “What folly! to bathe at such an hour in such heat!” exclaimed Mr. Pontellier. He himself had taken a plunge at daylight. That was why the morning seemed long to him. “You are burnt beyond recognition,” he added, looking at his wife as one looks at a valuable piece of personal property which has suffered some damage. She held up her hands, strong, shapely hands, and surveyed them critically, drawing up her lawn sleeves above the wrists. Looking at them reminded her of her rings, which she had given to her husband before

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l­eaving for the beach. She silently reached out to him, and he, understanding, took the rings from his vest pocket and dropped them into her open palm. She slipped them upon her fingers; then clasping her knees, she looked across at Robert and began to laugh. (CW 882)

The above scene is well cited by Chopin scholars who have noted the property analogy within the exchange between Edna and her husband. In this chapter, though, we will focus on the familiarity of the encounter, the ease and nonthinking quality of the married couple’s communication. The return of Edna’s rings is predicated on Léonce watching her return from the beach with Robert Lebrun, her Creole admirer and constant companion at Grand Isle—a man closer to her age at twenty-six than her husband is at forty—and an established, “safe” admirer of married women at the resort (CW 900–901). Robert poses no threat to Léonce’s sense of security and position with his wife—a lack of jealousy the narrator attributes to the Creole constitution. Thus, the exchange between Edna and Léonce is devoid of suspicion and their silent communication is foregrounded by the narrator, who tells us later that their marriage—at least for Edna—was “purely an accident, in this respect resembling many other marriages which masquerade as the decrees of Fate.” Instead, in spite of (or perhaps because of) her father’s and sister’s protestations, she married the Catholic Pontellier, and became “the devoted wife of a man who worshiped her, [taking] her place with a certain dignity in the world of reality, closing the portals forever behind her upon the realm of romance and dreams” (CW 898). When the reader meets Edna on Grand Isle, she has already resigned herself to an existence devoid of romantic love and imagination. Encouraged by the Creole vacationers’ warmth and unguardedness, Edna’s transformation on Grand Isle enables her to try new things, learn to swim, discuss topics with individuals, dabble in drawing and painting, and eventually fall in love with Robert. Edna’s metamorphosis is an interior one in nature: from the inside out, she changes from a somnambulist, going through the motions of a conventional white, upper-middle-class wife’s role, to a woman who seeks her own definitions of contentment, identity, and peace. The interior transformation begins on vacation— where millions of people have gotten into touch with their more essential selves under less stressful circumstances, detached from their everyday lives, but Edna’s transformation continues once she returns to her regular city life in the house on Esplanade Street in the French Quarter of New

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Orleans. And here is where things get interesting; the forbidden fruit that Toth notes becomes accessible. Because this continuance makes sense in one way: the city is never far from Grand Isle. Chopin’s references to New Orleans permeate the conversation and consciousness of the vacationers. Instead of a city/country binary in The Awakening, New Orleans/Grand Isle presents a kind of symbiosis; the resort exists because of the city. The characters in the novel appear to move fluidly between both spaces, and the city appears to always be present, even when they are away from it. For example, from the earliest pages Léonce totes the newspaper to Grand Isle, bringing the city’s news ahead of the usual newspaper delivery: “The day was Sunday; the paper was a day old. The Sunday papers had not yet reached Grand Isle. He was already acquainted with the market reports, and he glanced restlessly over the editorials and bits of news which he had not had time to read before quitting New Orleans the day before” (CW 881). In this instance, the news of the city enlivens Léonce’s stay on Grand Isle; its events hold importance even while on vacation, where time appears a bit delayed. Further, Léonce continues his social life in the city as he plays cards with “a good many New Orleans club men at Klein’s” on the island, and his brokerage firm in the city takes up much of his time and energy, so once it is time to return, “He was eager to be gone, as he looked forward to a lively week in Carondelet Street” (CW 886). When he is back to the city, he sends a package of exquisite sweet treats, emblematic of the sophisticated luxuries available in the city, and which Edna shares generously with the women who remain on Grand Isle (CW 887). At the end of each week, Léonce and the other men return and the weekly cycle continues. A few weeks into the Pontelliers’ stay and “after the intimate conversation held between Robert and Madame Ratignolle,” during which she warns him to take care with Edna’s emotions, “An unusual number of husbands, fathers, and friends had come down to stay over Sunday; and they were being suitably entertained by their families, with the material help of Madame Lebrun” (CW 903). (Madame Lebrun is Robert Lebrun’s mother.) Later, before the end of the summer, Edna learns that Léonce met Robert on Carondelet Street (CW 928), the center of New Orleans’s financial world in the late nineteenth century. Léonce is a cotton broker and works on the Cotton Exchange, located on Carondelet Street (Koloski, The Historian’s 43). Carondelet Street’s presence exerts itself throughout the summer, seen later during another moment in the summer, when

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Léonce “had gone over to Klein’s looking up some cotton broker whom he wished to see in regard to securities, exchanges, stocks, bonds, or something of the sort” (CW 912). Certainly the nineteenth-century divide among social roles between men and women suggests itself in the movement of men back and forth between Grand Isle and New Orleans, as Léonce and other men inhabit both spaces and the women remain at leisure and caring for children during the summer weeks. Regardless, the city still permeates Edna’s consciousness, as she admits to imagining returning at the end of the summer, where she expects to see Robert and continue the life she has grown to know at Grand Isle. Her disappointment is acute when Robert leaves the island abruptly, before summer’s end, and she tells him: But can’t you understand? I’ve grown used to seeing you, to having you with me all the time, and your action seems unfriendly, even unkind. You don’t even offer an excuse for it. I was planning to be together, thinking of how pleasant it would be to see you in the city next winter. (CW 926)

Although the narrative provides an account of Edna’s “awakening,” her sense of herself always retains an identity rooted in her city life. Robert has been central to her transformation, and for much of the novel, she believes that her love for him is at the heart of her new life; however, he is not necessarily the cause nor is he the energy behind her new consciousness. In fact, her flirtation with Robert might only be an effect of the shift in her thinking and “being,” which is characterized by a renewed sensuality. Amid Edna’s transformation, New Orleans remains a steady constant, however; she fully expects to see Robert in the city, as much as she fully expects to continue as she has—an extension of the trajectory of her awareness that began in the summer. As much as she individually changes, Edna never relinquishes the idea of living in New Orleans. On the contrary, she imagines fully realizing her autonomy and self-awareness in the city, and in fact, in New Orleans she comes to realize that Robert is a passing relationship like all romantic connections (CW 999). The nature of Edna’s “awakening” has been the subject of much critical study over the last fifty years. Early critics read Edna Pontellier’s transformation in terms of subjectivity and gender, aligning The Awakening with the burgeoning feminist movement of the time and drawing conclusions that supported or distanced the novel from feminist theory. Bernard Koloski’s 2009 edited volume, Awakenings, documents the “revival” of

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cultural interest in Chopin’s fiction, presenting multiple essays by early Chopin scholars, many of whom are still contributing today to Chopin scholarship, such as Emily Toth (who also wrote “The Awakening as Feminist Criticism” in 1976, in addition to the authoritative biography Kate Chopin (1990), and other seminal volumes on Chopin or featuring her work); Barbara C. Ewell and Thomas Bonner, Jr., both of whose work informs this study; as well Linda S. Boren, Anna Shannon Elfenbein, and Bernard Koloski himself. Additionally, several early studies compared Edna Pontellier’s narrative trajectory in The Awakening to Nora’s liberation in Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House (1879), notably William Warnken’s 1976 study. In addition to the feminist lens, The Awakening also lent itself to studies in Naturalism, such as Nancy Walker’s work, “Feminist or Naturalist: the Social Context of Kate Chopin’s The Awakening” (1979), which bridged the two conversations. Cynthia Griffin Wolff’s 1973 Freudian reading of Edna Pontellier and The Awakening echoed through the subsequent decades, as multiple scholars addressed sexual and psychological perspectives on the novel as they sought to outline the development and parameters of Edna’s subjectivity. Such readings of the novel included a cohort of Chopin scholars during the 1990s, including Carol Wade, Amadeo Chen, Reiko Yongi, and Ivy Schweitzer, who articulated the links between subjectivity and motherhood in The Awakening in 1998. Bert Bender contributed to this conversation with an influential study on Darwin’s influence on Chopin’s thinking and its effect on The Awakening: “Kate Chopin’s Quarrel with Darwin before The Awakening,” which appeared in Journal of American Studies in 1992. These earlier explorations of Edna’s awakening established the foundation for further studies that drew from similar threads and forged new ones. Some of these slightly later interpretations included Zoila Clark’s 2008 “The Bird that Came Out of the Cage: a Foucauldian Feminist Approach to Kate Chopin’s The Awakening” and Mehmet Recep Tas’s 2011 article, “Kate Chopin’s The Awakening in the Light of Freud’s Structural Model of the Psyche.” More recent interpretations of Edna Pontellier’s awakening have reflected varied contemporary concerns, seen in work by Meeyoung Kang, who explores desublimation in the context of the novel (2019), Ali Khoshnood, who interprets Edna’s transformation in terms of mid-life crisis (2017), and Amanda Lee Castro, who reads Edna’s trajectory as apocalypse (2014). Additional recent studies continue Ivy Schweitzer’s earlier work with further analysis of Edna’s transformation of

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consciousness in terms of motherhood and subjectivity, including studies by Jarleeth Killeen (2003) and Nilsen Gökçen (2018), and comparative studies of Edna’s journey such as Linda Kornasky’s 2021 “‘Shuddering, Shrinking, Shriveling’: Intimacy and Repulsion in Kate Chopin’s ‘The Unexpected’ and The Awakening” and Robert Evans’s 2021 comparison of Leo Tolstoy’s 1877 Anna Karenina and The Awakening. Finally, my own 2020 study, Kate Chopin and Catholicism, reads Edna’s transformation in religious and spiritual terms, tracing her evolution from dualistic religion to mystical consciousness, such as found in the writings of mystics like Teresa of Ávila and Julian of Norwich. This study, of course, is indebted to most of the works noted above and many others, in fact, not noted above. They collectively point to a broad field of study devoted to interpreting Edna Pontellier’s transformation from a sleepwalking, unthinking individual to a vibrant, conscious woman through the course of The Awakening. This study seeks to locate the points of her transformation within and in relation to the city of New Orleans, which remains a constant for the majority of the novel. The echoes of New Orleans sound through Edna’s time at the vacation resort of Grand Isle. Once she returns to the city, she resumes the trajectory begun on vacation.

Timelessness While the presence and proximity of New Orleans is constant on Grand Isle, Edna’s growing autonomy and self-awareness begin to release her from the constraints of time and space, a release that flourishes for her amid the streets of the city. In earlier short stories, notably the stories set distinctly in Bayou St. John discussed in Chapter Five, Chopin similarly experiments with notions of time; however, in those stories—“A Lady of Bayou St. John,” “La Belle Zoraïde,” and “Nég Creol”—the author allows the past to interrupt the present. In other stories, such as “The Return of Alccibiade,” characters appear to be stopped in time. In The Awakening, on Grand Isle, the narrator characterizes Edna’s narrative trajectory in terms of space and time. Chopin locates her developing sense of self in relationship to her cosmic awareness: “In short, Mrs. Pontellier was beginning to realize her position in the universe as a human being, and to recognize her relations as an individual to the world within and about her” (CW 893). This sentence expresses a cosmic awareness of the interior life, as much as it expresses an awareness of the physical realm. Soon after, the

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narrator explains the changing interior landscape further: “That summer at Grand Isle she began to loosen a little the mantle of reserve that had always enveloped her” (CW 893). The expression of time is directly linked to the relaxing of Edna’s “mantle of reserve.” For instance, when she falls asleep at Madame Antoine’s home, after leaving mass early with Robert, she awakens “with the conviction that she had slept long and soundly” (CW 918). She remarks to Robert that she must have slept for ages: “How many years have I slept?” she inquired. “The whole island seems changed. A new race of beings must have sprung up, leaving only you and me as past relics. How many ages ago did Madame Antoine and [her son] Tonie die? and when did our people from Grand Isle disappear from earth?” He adjusted a ruffle upon her shoulder. “You have slept precisely one hundred years. I was left here to guard your slumbers; and for one hundred years I have been out under the shed reading a book.” (CW 919)

Edna’s sense of timelessness characterizes her growing awareness of herself on Grand Isle. The reference above to the disappearance of “our people” on Grand Isle echoes the disastrous hurricane of 1893, which destroyed Our Lady of Lourdes Church in Chênière Caminada—referenced above by Chopin and in her short story “Chênière Caminada”—as well as hurricane-­decimated Grand Isle (Daffin). Chopin was already living again in St. Louis by 1893, but news of the disaster would have reached her. The hurricane of 1893 was one of a series of historic storms that are still recognized as among the worst, even in light of the twenty-first century’s Hurricane Katrina. The Charleston Hurricane and Chênière Caminada Hurricane (also called the Great October Storm) hit in the months right after the Sea Island Hurricanes, which reached land in South Carolina in August of 1893 about these natural disasters (George 26). Even in St. Louis, Chopin certainly would have read different records, including brief weather accounts and human-interest narratives (George 30). Therefore, at the time of writing The Awakening, Chopin already knew that Grand Isle was no longer a resort for New Orleans vacationers. Barbara Ewell and Pamela Menke, as well as Amanda Lee Castro, have addressed Chopin’s knowledge of the devastating hurricane that led to the “steep decline” in the resort life on Grand Isle:

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As the storm was widely publicized in newspapers at the time and for several years thereafter, for many of Chopin’s contemporaries, the utopianism of the island culture would have seemed elusive and unstable from the moment they opened the novel, and Chopin’s narrative space mirrors the instability of this utopianism. (Castro 69)

The despair and futility of Edna’s trajectory are anticipated by the knowledge of the 1893 hurricane and its decimation of Grand Isle. In terms of the novel, this awareness informs and foreshadows the ending of The Awakening, but it also offers Edna a vision of the physical space that releases her from time—she speaks to an event that happens after the actual moment she appears to be inhabiting on Grand Isle—and thus characterizing her transformation as something that takes her out of the confines of time.

Edna Pontellier in New Orleans It is this sense of timelessness that Chopin paradoxically locates on the streets of New Orleans, as Edna continues her awakened journey through the narrative. The first New Orleans-based chapter in The Awakening is the seventeenth chapter, which opens with an elaborate description of the Pontelliers’ home on Esplanade Street in the French Quarter—a highly fashionable and affluent area of the city, one that still held tightly to the city’s French influences. The narrator describes the home: The Pontelliers possessed a very charming house on Esplanade Street in New Orleans. It was a large, double cottage, with a broad front veranda, whose round, fluted columns supported the sloping roof. The house was painted a dazzling white; the outside shutters, or jalousies, were green. In the yard, which was kept scrupulously neat, were flowers and plants of every description which flourishes in South Louisiana. Within doors the appointments were perfect after the conventional type. The softest carpets and rugs covered the floors; rich and tasteful draperies hung at doors and windows. There were paintings, selected with judgment and discrimination, upon the walls. (CW 931)

This description opens the New Orleans section of the novel and is soon followed by the knowledge that Edna has abandoned her “at-home” days, when she would formerly receive visitors on Tuesday afternoons. Her previous sense of timelessness—or her uprooted sense of time—travels with

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her to New Orleans and releases her from convention and habit, to the dismay of her husband, who scolds her, insisting that if she had to leave and miss an at-home calling day, she should have left a reason (CW 932–933). That it was Tuesday made no difference to Edna, who had left for the day because she felt the desire to go out. After the argument with Léonce, Edna is again located within her Esplanade Street home; rich description paints the setting as the outdoors calls to her. After her husband storms off to his social club to finish his dinner, she is left alone: It was a large, beautiful room, rich and picturesque in the soft, dim light which the maid had turned low. She went and stood at an open window and looked out upon the deep tangle of the garden below. All the mystery and witchery of the night seemed to have gathered there amid the perfumes and the dusky and tortuous outlines of flowers and foliage. She was seeking herself and finding herself in just such sweet, half-darkness and the sky above the stars. (CW 934)

Despite the luxuries of her home, the external natural world calls to Edna, where she seems to look for validation and self-determined identity. This draw to the window and seeking meaning echoes the movements of Louise Mallard in Chopin’s earlier “The Story of an Hour,” which was published in Vogue in 1894. In this story, Louise Mallard, upon receiving the news of her husband’s death, sinks into a comfortable chair by a window and senses “something coming to her” from the external world, and “she was waiting for it, fearfully. What was it? She did not know… . But she felt it, creeping out of the sky, reaching toward her through the sounds, the scents, the colors that filled the air” (CW 353). “The Story of an Hour” is considered to be another New Orleans tale by Chopin; however, the city is never explicitly named. Regardless, the movement of Louise Mallard toward the window, where she seeks the sights and sounds of the external world, prompt her to utter the words “Free! Body and soul free!” and descend the staircase with “feverish triumph in her eyes” as she moved “like a goddess of Victory” (CW 354). However, her husband returns, having been on a different train than the one that had been in the accident described by the news, and Louise Mallard promptly collapses into her own death when she sees him walk in the house. The parallels between the two stories point toward the symbolic links between freedom and the external world. Both Edna Pontellier and Louise

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Mallard see the possibilities for their subjectivity and self-possession out beyond their city homes. Louise never makes it out of the house, but Edna does. The unique combination of natural elements amid the New Orleans cityscape prompts her unaccompanied travels around the city. She walks and visits friends from Grand Isle, as well as treats herself to meals that are distant from the more fashionable venues she had been previously accustomed too—and which enable her to dine alone. When Edna looks out the window at the “half-darkness” (CW 934), she “seeks herself” as a free individual but in the city. The next time the reader sees Edna, she is walking in New Orleans, after declining her husband’s invitation to accompany him to on a purchasing expedition for library fixtures. Léonce leaves for the day, and Edna surveys the scene from her veranda: her sons are playing, their nurse is watching them, and a “fruit vendor was crying his wares in the street”—all of which, the narrator explains, “were part and parcel of an alien world which had suddenly become antagonistic” (CW 935). Still, Edna is not deterred and she sets out to walk on the street. As she moves through the French Quarter on her way to Madame Ratignolle’s home, located on a side street corner not far from her own home, she thinks of Robert, and the reader is deprived of her additional city observations. She reaches Madame Ratignolle’s residence, and the reader learns that the family lives in quarters above Monsieur Ratignolle’s drug store, which had been owned previously by his father and which was still appearing to thrive. Edna perceives the home as “very French, very foreign,” including how the family lived within the upstairs quarters, with regular card games and music among friends: “The Ratignolles’ soirées musicales were widely known, and it was considered a privilege to be invited to them” (CW 936). Edna’s visit with the Ratignolles, specifically Adèle, is a continuation of their summer friendship. Madame Ratignolle engages her Black servant casually as she speaks to Edna, and praises—Edna feels overpraises—her paintings. When Monsieur Ratignolle ascends from the drug store for his midday meal, the couple’s harmony is on display, emphasized by their preferred use of French: [Mr. Ratignolle] and his wife spoke English with an accent which was only discernible through its un-English emphasis and a certain carefulness and deliberation. Edna’s husband spoke English with no accent whatever. The Ratignolles understood each other perfectly. If ever the fusion of two human

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beings into one has been accomplished on this sphere it was surely in their union. (CW 938)

Their English is perhaps used for Edna’s sake, but their complete communication still depresses Edna when she leaves, as she realizes that her friend, though seemingly happy, inhabits “that colorless existence which never uplifted its possessor beyond the region of blind contentment, in which no movement of anguish ever visited her soul, in which she would never have the taste of life’s delirium” (CW 938). Monsieur Ratignolle observes Edna’s countenance to be “looking not so well as at Grand Isle” (CW 938)—a register maybe of her emotional response to his and his wife’s contentment with their manner of living, since Edna leaves depleted and not refreshed after reconnecting with them in New Orleans. Two chapters later (in Chapter XX), Edna ventures further this time, heading to Bienville Street, which runs from Lake Ponchartrain through the French Quarter to the middle of the city, to look up Mademoiselle Reisz, who in fact does not live there. She continues to think of Robert, impelled by his memory, and continues to seek the companionship of friends she knew on Grand Isle—all of which is an extension of seeking herself in the exterior world beyond her Esplanade Street home. Instead, she winds up visiting Robert Lebrun’s mother and brother, who live on Chartres Street, downstream on the Mississippi River from the French Quarter. Their home is a monument to the Civil War, as it “from the outside looked like a prison, with iron bars before the door and lower windows. The iron bars were a relic of the old régime, and no one had ever thought of dislodging them,” but like several residents Chopin describes, this home also has a garden (CW 941); even the old régime, the northern occupation, could not disrupt the union between nature and city life in New Orleans. Edna meets Robert’s mother and brother Victor, whom she has known from Grand Isle; the meeting offers readers another perspective on Edna’s condition. Whereas Monsieur Ratignolle sees Edna as not so “well” looking as she was on vacation, here at the Lebruns’ home, her hosts exclaim how well indeed she looks: “How handsome Mrs. Pontellier looked!” said Madame Lebrun to her son. “Ravishing!” he admitted. “The city atmosphere has improved her. Some way she doesn’t seem like the same woman.” (CW 943)

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And in fact, Edna is not the same woman—which is why when she visits the conventional, domestic Ratignolle household, Monsieur Ratignolle cannot recognize Edna’s growing independence as a positive development. By the time she visits the Lebruns in the city, she now has had weeks to continue her trajectory; the journey further to their home leaves her “tired from her long trap” (CW 942). This venture out parallels her triumphant swim at Grand Isle, when she finally overcomes her “dread” in the water after trying to learn to swim all summerlong and successfully navigates the water: A feeling of exultation overtook her, as if some power of significant import had been given her to control the working of her body and her soul. She grew daring and reckless, overestimating her strength. She wanted to swim far out, where no woman had swum before. (CW 908)

Of course, Edna is not exactly feeling “exulted” once she arrives at the Lebruns, but her visit marks a similar testing-out of her physical limits, walking out in the street, further than she has before, rendering her tired from her exertion, as well as further advanced in her journey to self-­ awareness and autonomy. Both scenes in fact have earlier links to a memory Edna shares with Adèle on Grand Isle that summer, when she describes a scene in a field when she was a child. The memory anticipates her later swim: “The hot wind beating in my face made me think—without any connection that I can trace—of a summer day in Kentucky, of a meadow that seemed as big as the ocean to the very little girl walking through the grass, which was higher than her waist. She threw out her arms as if swimming when she walked, beating the tall grass as one strikes out in the water… .” “Where were you going that day in Kentucky, walking through the grass?” “I don’t remember now. I was just walking diagonally across a big field. My sun-bonnet obstructed the view. I could see only the stretch of green before me, and I felt as if I must walk on forever, without coming to the end of it.” (CW 896)

Edna’s childhood memory resurfaces at the moment she contemplates the sea in front of Madame Ratignolle and herself. The scene in the meadow she recalls parallels her successful venture out into the sea a few weeks later, and both moments echo in her later constitutionals on the streets of New Orleans. Emily Toth has called The Awakening a bildungsroman, “a

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novel of education” (“Kate Chopin, Edna Pontellier” 124). In multiple instances, stemming from those noted above, Chopin shows her reader how Edna is developing and coming into consciousness of her “position in the universe”—the most tangible way to do that is through physical experience. Thus, the trajectory of Edna’s awakening develops with her excursions out into the relative unknown, testing out the boundaries of the self in the physical world. The city, which Toth also notes is where the “forbidden fruit” appears in the novel (“Kate Chopin, Edna Pontellier” 124), crystalizes Edna’s awareness of who she is, as she tests out her new awareness and new sense of independence that she cultivated on Grand Isle. Therefore, Edna’s apparent wellness, seen through the eyes of Madame Lebrun and her son Victor, reflects her growing sense of independence—not unlike the freedom and exultation she feels in the meadow as a child and later in the sea as an adult. Toth makes a keen observation about Edna, noting that she “does not seem to have been particularly interested in her adopted city. Although she is a Kentucky Presbyterian who also lived on a Mississippi plantation, she seems to have had very little curiosity about the unique ways of New Orleans that intrigued her creator” (“Kate Chopin, Edna Pontellier” 125). This may be true, but the city offers Edna a landscape in which to exercise the more crucial exploration of the self. For whether Edna is a girl in Kentucky or a woman in New Orleans, she will never be free unless she tests the limits of “that colorless existence which never uplifted its possessor beyond the region of blind contentment” (CW 938). Edna appears to be driven by her memories of Robert and seeks communications from him through their common connections who reside in New Orleans. When she first looks outside her window, she “seeks herself” (CW 934), but her early sojourns around the city are mischaracterized: Edna seeks evidence of Robert’s presence as she knew him on Grand Isle, perhaps more specifically, she seeks the feeling she had when she was with him then. Redirecting Edna’s quest, Madame Lebrun sends her to Mademoiselle Reisz’s home, which appears to be on the Mississippi River, and likely still in the same neighborhood of Bayou St. John. As Chopin indicates, “From her windows could be seen the crescent of the river, the masts of ships and the big chimneys of the Mississippi steamers” (CW 934). The two women greet each other with both warmth and distance— Mademoiselle Reisz stating that she doubted Edna would ever visit, despite her promises to, and Edna admitting she wasn’t sure she liked Mademoiselle Reisz or not, both interactions seemingly pleasing to the

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women for their mutual candidness. Immediately, Robert’s communications with Mademoiselle Reisz arise in their conversation, with Edna asking to see his letters. Until now, this is the closest Edna comes to having contact with Robert in the city, and her reading of letters not addressed to her but in which she is mentioned, is hardly gratifying to her, as she leaves in tears and asks to return in the near future (CW 944–947). Edna’s request to return follows an admission that indicates the further manifestation of her new consciousness, one that has developed since Grand Isle and one that is characterized by her release from linear time. In Bayou St. John, in the presence of Mademoiselle Reisz, who by turns sympathizes and gently chastises her, Edna articulates the essence of her awakening by asserting: “Time doesn’t concern me” (CW 945). Later, Mr. Pontellier links Edna’s travels around New Orleans with her present state of mind as well as her disregard for time. He complains to their family doctor, Doctor Mandelet: “She has abandoned her Tuesdays at home, has thrown over all her acquaintances, and goes tramping about by herself, moping in the street-cars, getting in after dark” (CW 948). Edna’s steps, both literal and physical, toward her independence occur on the streets of New Orleans, as well as on its street cars. These steps impact not only her role as a wife, but as a daughter as well.

Alone in the City Conventions of society and domestic life diminish in importance, and Edna expands her sense of movement and possibility further into the space of New Orleans when we see her father visit. There is no indication that Edna and her father had been particularly close, but his presence draws her near to him, even enabling her to bring him to a soirée musicale at the Ratignolles’ home and the horse races in the city. In the context of Madame Ratignolle flirting “in the most captivating and naïve manner”—in other words, without any untoward intention, the narrator indicates that unknown men on the city streets occasionally catch Edna’s eye and “disturbed her” (CW 951). Later, at the horse races Edna and her father enjoy a lively time betting and meet Mrs. Mortimer Merriman and Mrs. James Highcamp, who attend with Alcée Arobin—whom Edna soon becomes involved with. The brief description of Edna’s notice of men besides her husband indicates her ability to transgress the traditional lines of fidelity. Doctor Mandelet, who joins Edna and her father and husband for dinner that evening, recalls his own past experiences at Lecompte, which Koloski

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has noted was an area in mid-Louisiana known for the quality of its horses but was also the name of a horse that had won the 1854 races in New Orleans (A Historian’s 113). Ewell explains too that when Alcée Arobin brings Edna out for a quiet, intimate ride, he takes her to Shell Road, which traced the New Basin Canal, linking Canal Street’s end to the lake, a space that “was renowned as a good place to test one’s horses—as Alcée does: ‘His horses were full of mettle, and even a little unmanageable. [Edna] liked the rapid gait at which they spun along, and the quick sharp sound of the horses’ hoofs on the hard road’ (CW 988)” (“Placing the City”). Her father’s visit marks two key elements in Edna’s narrative trajectory. One, the reader is told she notices other men, setting the stage for her involvement with Alcée Arobin, and two, when her father leaves New Orleans, she is glad to be alone, since her children also go to visit their paternal grandmother and Léonce heads to New York on business. Her mother-in-law brings the children to Iberville to protect them from becoming “wholly ‘children of the pavement’” in New Orleans and ensuring that they would “know the country, with its streams, its fields, its woods, its freedom” (CW 955). Edna’s desire to be alone—and ironically to exercise her own freedom—supersedes all other conventions, even as she appears emotional. Notably, Edna vehemently declines to attend her sister’s wedding, a move Léonce considers an “incomprehensible action”— and one that inspires her father to advise him: “Authority, coercion are what is needed. Put your foot down good and hard; the only way to manage a wife” (CW 954). Her husband does not heed his father-in-law’s advice, suspecting that his coercion may have hastened “his own wife into her grave” (CW 954). Regardless, once her family has left the house on Esplanade Street, “a radiant peace settled upon her when she at last found herself alone” (CW 954). Edna’s desire to be alone derives from multiple factors, including the depressions she becomes prone to once her interior life begins to change and she wishes for more autonomy. After her family leaves New Orleans, her home suddenly appears as if it is a new space and she walks around inside and outside, as she sighs “relief” and an “unfamiliar but very delicious” feeling (CW 955). That evening is the first the reader sees of Edna eating alone, and her aloneness is a paradox of her inhabitance of the city, where she is surrounded by people all the time:

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On rainy or melancholy days Edna went out and sought the society of the friends she had made at Grand Isle. Or else she stayed indoors and nursed a mood with which she was becoming too familiar for her comfort and peace of mind. It was not despair; but it seemed to her as if life were passing by, leaving its promise broken and unfulfilled. Yet there were other days when she listened, was led on and deceived by fresh promises which her youth held out to her. (CW 956)

The remainder of the time Edna spends in New Orleans is characterized by her further “trying out” ways of being alone, alternating with ways of being among people she chooses. Arobin continues to take her to races, where “[h]e was a familiar figure,” as he also was at “the opera, the fashionable clubs.” Edna is both lured by the possibility of fulfillment as well as discouraged by its elusiveness. Her pursuit of communications from Robert becomes obscured by the time she spends engaging new people and activities in the city; the reader no longer is privy to her inner desire to communicate with him. Arobin is charmed by her when he meets her at the races with her father, and at his insistence, Mrs. Highcamp invites Edna to the Jockey Club (actually the New Louisiana Jockey Club, which Koloski notes was established in 1871 as a social club for affluent residents [A Historian’s 117]). Her awakening, as it were, is focused entirely on her own liberation. As noted earlier by Toth, Edna is noticeably uncurious about her city, and she appears to be minimally aware of other residents. Chopin offers readers little opportunity for reflection on racial or class issues, which were fraught and in constant states of change. As Taylor points out, Chopin “took a thoroughly orthodox [white] southern” perspective on racial relationships. Bonnie James Shaker takes a more critical stance on Chopin’s representations of race in her work; she calls out late twentieth-century Chopin scholars for conflating the author’s perspective on gender and her presumed perspective on race and class: … this narrative of transcendence has been extended to Chopin’s racial politics, so that Chopin’s progressive position on gender has been applied to her representations of race and ethnicity as well. Chopin’s local color tales are often spoken of as being sympathetic to the plight of Louisiana people of color, especially female African Americans, Creoles, and Cajuns, and she is celebrated for her willingness to expose the injustices these people suffer and to champion their triumphs. Except that in Chopin’s fiction, Creoles and Cajuns are white. I am therefore suspicious of readings that do not take into

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account the ways in which Chopin’s gender and class representations work together distinctly to construct race and/or produce ethnic identity. To read Chopin’s articulations of identity categories as operating independently of one another leaves us asking, “Was Chopin a feminist or was she not?” when we try to reconcile such contradictions as Lolotte’s conventional femininity in “A Rude Awakening” with Edna’s unorthodox female self in The Awakening, as well as “Was Chopin a racist or was she not?” when we discover sympathetic and racist impulses operating simultaneously in “Loka” and “Beyond the Bayou”. (3)

Shaker does not reconcile the conflicting representations of race—or gender or class, for that matter—except to point out that despite the value placed upon Chopin’s work for its apparent mimesis, her stories in fact “mediate” the complexities of Louisiana’s social and racial hierarchies for the northern reading market, as typical of many local color writers of the time. For certainly Chopin was aware of the hierarchies, even if she was not overtly critical of them. Ryan Crider suggests that clarifying the issue of race in Chopin’s novel is complicated by her “depiction of New Orleans’s multitude of socially recognized, if not socially liberated, multiracial groups. The simmering fuse of race, and the city’s elaborate racial hierarchy, is most evident in Chopin’s treatment of her mixed-race female characters” (35). Therefore, multiple characters of color identified by the southern “one drop” race laws appear in The Awakening mostly as servants, with vague descriptions of character and marked by their racial makeup as delineated by law, such as “mulatto,” “quadroon,” “octoroon,” and “griffe” (Crider 36). Chopin passively appears to accept white supremacist positions on race, as she “negotiated a political position on race relations that historians have come to identify as ‘conservative’” (Shaker 26). Shaker’s analysis of Chopin’s racism may account for why Edna moves through the streets of New Orleans with little to no recognition of the many Black people she was sure to see on her daily expeditions. It certainly is not because they were not there, but Chopin may not have seen them as central to a white woman’s attempts to liberate herself within the same social and racial hierarchical structures. Insofar as she is able to move about the streets, Edna’s awakening is enacted on the streets of New Orleans as much as it is in her unconscious mind. One night, after Arobin brings her home to Esplanade Street on a street car, she dreams “of Mr. Highcamp playing the piano at the entrance of a music store on Canal Street, while his wife was saying to Alcée Arobin,

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as they boarded an Esplanade Street car: ‘What a pity that so much talent has been neglected! but I must go’” (CW 958). The dream reflects echoes of Edna’s waking life. Her new city acquaintances populate her dream as they engage elements of her increasing autonomy: her visits around New Orleans, a Canal Street store, an Esplanade Streetcar. Edna’s dream further reflects her growing disinterest in calling on society friends to join her and Arobin, and she muses that not even any of her Grand Isle friends would want to go either: Madame Ratignolle rarely leaves her home, save for a walk around the block with her husband; Mademoiselle Reisz would have rejected the invitation; and Madame Lebrun was not an appealing option. The contrast between Edna and particularly her Grand Isle acquaintances sharply defines the contours around her mobility within the city. This mobility parallels her paradoxical desire to be alone in New Orleans, as Edna next announces her move to the “pigeon house”—out of her home on Esplanade Street, though near to it—and her resolution to “never again to belong to another than herself” (CW 963). Ironically— and as it turns out disappointingly—Edna decides to hold a dinner among her acquaintances as a send-off from her husband’s home. By this time, she and Arobin are established lovers, a relationship that is not wholly satisfying, though it stirs her desire (CW 967). This same disappointment characterizes her send-off dinner, which is attended by Monsieur Ratignolle (Adèle being close to delivery of their fourth child and unable to come), Alcée Arobin, Mrs. Highcamp, Victor Lebrun, Mrs. Merriman, Mr. Gouvernail (whom we also see in “Athénaïse”), Miss Mayblunt, Mr. Merriman, and Mademoiselle Reisz. Even as Edna appears as “the regal woman” at the fine dinner, the narrator explains: But as she sat there amid her guests, she felt the old ennui overtaking her; the hopelessness which so often assailed her, which came upon her like an obsession, like something extraneous, independent of volition. It was something which announced itself; a chill breath that seemed to issue from some vast cavern wherein discords wailed. There came over her the acute longing which always summoned into her spiritual vision the presence of the beloved one, overpowering her at once with a sense of the unattainable. (CW 972)

The party ends with Edna dismissing her guests, disturbed by Victor’s singing, which aggravates her feelings of despair, as well as her persistent loneliness. She moves in and out of missing her children, sometimes

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desperately missing them but then not (CW 977–978). Her developing quest for aloneness in the city does not deliver the satisfaction or sense of wholeness she desires.

Robert Robert returns to New Orleans, and their first encounter is at best disappointing to her because he does not seek Edna out immediately. They both admit their longing for each other, and soon she feels hopeful Robert will understand the depths of her feelings for him. In her mind, as she convinces herself that they will get past Robert’s “reserve,” she imagines him moving through New Orleans the next day: She pictured him going to his business that morning. She even saw how he was dressed; how he walked down one street, and turned the corner of another; saw him bending over his desk, talking to people who entered the office, going to his lunch, and perhaps watching for her on the street. (CW 987)

In effect, Edna pictures Robert moving freely around New Orleans, as she has begun to do so herself. She imagines, in other words, he is as free as she has become, choosing to go where she wishes, give herself, as it were, to whom she wishes. Finally, their paths cross at a small restaurant that was pleasantly quiet and “too modest to attract the attention of people of fashion” (CW 989). This was a restaurant run by a “mulatresse” that she frequently stopped at when she walked around the city, spending time there alone with a book, the reader is told. When Robert happens to find Edna there, she tells him that she “almost live[s] here” (CW 989). Their conversation and shared meal enable Edna to briefly imagine a future for Robert and her; he later comes to her home, where Edna confronts him on his apparent indifference while away in Mexico. The direction of this exchange leads her to kiss him, but then to chastise him, asserting her independence in the face of his admission of his desire to make her his wife: You have been a very, very foolish boy, wasting your time dreaming of impossible things when you speak of Mr. Pontellier setting me free! I am no longer one of Mr. Pontellier’s possessions to dispose of or not. I give myself where I choose. If he were to say, ‘Here, Robert, take her and be happy; she is yours,’ I should laugh at you both. (CW 992)

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Edna’s assertion draws the blood from Robert’s face, and soon after he disappears from her life, following a request that night for her to attend Madame Ratignolle’s delivery of her fourth child. The experience of watching the delivery leads her to reiterate to Doctor Mandelet that time no longer has meaning: “They years that are gone seem like dreams—if one might go on sleeping and dreaming—but to wake up and find—oh! well! perhaps it is better to wake up after all, even to suffer, rather than to remain a dupe to illusions all one’s life” (CW 996). This sentiment is confirmed when she returns home to find that Robert has not waited for her but has indeed left for good. Until now, Robert has been the central focus of Edna’s thoughts; she pursues his memory throughout New Orleans. And with each venture out into the city, Edna becomes more independent, more aware of herself, so that by the time they meet again, when she gets him to admit his love for her and she kisses him, “Edna seems to have achieved the ultimate freedom of the city” (Ewell, “Placing the City”). However, this freedom is both temporary and illusory, as Taylor reminds us: Despite being celebrated as a feminine city, Parisian-style “Queen of the Mississippi,” New Orleans remained a perilous site for women in public space. A white woman’s sexuality, her racial and biological destiny, meant that to be on the streets was, however indirectly, to be of the streets. Edna gained the freedom of the city for a while. Recognizing the limits of that freedom in terms of her race, class, and gender, she left town rather than going meekly home, and swam to her death.

In other words, any freedoms she exercised in New Orleans will not ultimately free her from the biological, familial role of mother—the final relationship she must extricate herself from.

Return to Grand Isle Edna’s city life culminates in her return to Grand Isle at the end of the novel, where she succumbs to the sea and the ultimate timelessness of death. She acknowledges to herself that Robert will come and go from her life, as have Léonce and Alcée Arobin, that what she seeks is not found in a relationship outside of herself, despite her searching for signs of Robert throughout New Orleans. Her children, as well, appear “like antagonists who had overcome her; who had overpowered and sought to drag her into the soul’s slavery for the rest of her days” (CW 999). Edna

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relinquishes the hold all of these relationships have on her life and swims out to the sea, reliving the first successful swim from the prior summer. Her endeavor collapses all sense of time, as memory overlays the present: “She did not look back now, but went on and on, thinking of the blue-­ green meadow that she had traversed when a little child, believing that it had no beginning and no end” (CW 1000). Finally, Edna swims out until she can no longer sustain herself and she succumbs to childhood memories, as they are rendered in the present and past tenses: “the barking of an old dog that was chained to a sycamore tree. The spurs of the calvary officer clanged as he walked across the porch. There was the hum of bees, and the musky odor of pinks filled the air” (CW 1000). Edna’s awakening, as it were, delivers her back to the point of origin—Grand Isle—where time and space release her: memories of New Orleans are as present as memories of her childhood. Given the anticipation of the hurricane that would later—in real life— destroy Grand Isle, and how it informs the novel’s sense of timelessness, Edna’s cyclical return to the resort and her endless swim at the end of The Awakening emphasize both the hopelessness of Edna’s self-awareness and desire for contentment, autonomy, and love, as much as it does not draw a definitive line under the novel. Ewell has argued that Edna’s final arrival on Grand Isle “is a movement beyond the city altogether, for the reason that … Edna does not linger on the land: instead, she plunges into the sea, conceding to its depths the only real fluidity for women, their only possible transgression. Unfortunately, the ocean, “never ceasing, whispering, clamoring, murmuring, inviting the soul to wander in abysses of solitude” (CW 999) can in the end provide no place to appreciate this new perspective, no place at all to stand, only the “soft, close embrace” of death. (“Placing the City”)

Ewell makes a compelling point; however, Chopin does not appear to make such a strong distinction between city and country, New Orleans and Grand Isle. New Orleans is not like other cities that exist in binaries with country landscapes. Unlike many cities, New Orleans developed out of the plantations of early settlers, the land parcels later shaping the boundaries of the city and the streets within it. Chopin develops Edna’s sense of “timelessness” in both spaces, blurring the boundaries of space through the dissolution of time. Castro notes Grand Isle offers characters “a

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measure of liberation from time and mortality by deconstructing the progress of linear time” (72). She supports this claim with similar narrative elements noted above, such as Léonce’s Saturday newspapers read on Sundays and the blurry hours on Chênière Caminada Edna spends drifting in sleep. Castro points out a key element in the novel: since Chopin does not set the novel in a specific moment in time, Grand Isle—and thus the story itself—is detached from historical time (72). Jessica Bridget George similarly argues about the way Chopin uses space: Chopin challenges the representational limits of place, participating in what Hsuan L. Hsu calls the “production of space” by experimenting with spatiotemporal scale. For example, by revealing how a storm or a flood can create and then douse an entire world in a matter of minutes, Chopin materializes places which otherwise appear as fantasy—places which exist only temporarily in the perpetually changing landscapes of the Louisiana coastline. (29)

Grand Isle, from the beginning of the novel, is always a construction, an extension, as it were of Chopin’s imagined New Orleans. Elements of Lafcadio Hearn’s 1888 Chita: a Memory of Last Island are found in Edna’s story. Hearn, who transitioned from reporter to author, drew from actual accounts of a 1856 Hurricane that destroyed L’Île Dernière (“Last Island”) which had been close to the coast of Louisiana and killed two-hundred people. Told in three parts, the novel narrates the story of the only survivor of the storm, a New Orleans girl who was rescued by a couple and later returned to her native New Orleans. However, the girl cannot tolerate city life and eventually runs away, back to an existence in nature. Hearn’s story had a sensational element to it, as the vastly altered landscape serves as a metaphor for the relationship between Chita and her lost father. As one contemporary reviewer notes: Their relationship, what’s left of it, parallels the precarious beauty of the Louisiana coast, found and lost by visitors and dwellers alike, and whose ethereal and temporal nature provokes a greater love, or ought to, precisely because it is transient. Yet the extinction of an island also serves as a warning: without care, even the most serene beauty may be savored only for a short time. (Annesi)

Hearn’s novel offers a lens for viewing Chopin’s use of Grand Isle in The Awakening. Like Chita, Edna is displaced: time and place no longer offer her a sense of her position in the universe. Ewell notes that in New Orleans

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Edna continues her “sense of unfamiliarity, of displacement” (“Placing the City”). Even though Grand Isle appears to offer a respite from New Orleans life, the resort is never separate from the city. The timelessness that Castro describes, that Edna begins to experience and witness on Grand Isle, becomes manifest for her in New Orleans, where she begins to lives as if she too is out of time. So it is no wonder that she returns to Grand Isle at the end of the novel; there are no longer boundaries of space and time for Edna. Instead, her new awareness of her “position in the universe” is rooted in her mobility through space and time, which she first engages on Grand Isle, particularly when she swims, and continues when she ventures out into the city streets of New Orleans. It is only in the city that she comes to terms fully with her discontentment, that she recognizes the complete futility of her situation, that even as she may go where she wishes and “give herself” to whom she pleases, she in fact has nowhere to go. The disastrous hurricane of 1893 was always waiting for Edna, whether she was swimming in the sea at Grand Isle or walking the streets of New Orleans: there was only the promise of destruction.

Space Edna Pontellier’s experience in New Orleans brings into fine relief the paradoxes and freedoms Kate Chopin saw in the city. The Awakening is the culmination of the short stories’ multiple reflections of this spectacular southern city, fraught as it was with continual motion and dynamism. The study of Chopin’s city stories reveals the complexities of New Orleans— from its colonial and plantation origins to the darkness of its slave market hub to the complex racial caste system that spoke to an insular society in which all of its inhabitants were connected by trade or by family. New Orleans’s longevity as the Queen of the Mississippi was in part fueled by its vibrant economy, unparalleled in the South, its trade and financial institutions exceeding even the volume of New York at one time. To go to the city, for Chopin’s characters, was to immerse themselves in the fullness of life itself. How might a woman know who she was—to know her “position in the universe”? Go to New Orleans, Chopin tells us; that is where you’ll find out what you are made of, where you belong. Not St. Louis or Paris or New York—cities Chopin herself knew. Go to New Orleans, with its busy-ness, its culture, its defiance, its Frenchness, and most important, its timelessness. None of Chopin’s characters get lost in New Orleans, despite the dangers women faced there. With the exception

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of the young murder victim in “Doctor Chevalier’s Lie,” none of Chopin’s female characters arrive in the city and walk its streets as prostitutes. Liza, in “The Going Away of Liza,” is definitely shaken by her mysterious ­experience in the city, but she lives to return home to the safety of her marriage. Chopin’s other characters inhabit the city, testing its limits as well as their own. Edna Pontellier is an anomaly in fact among Chopin’s female New Orleans characters. Searching for love, contentment, and autonomy, she found that she could have none of these things. For her, unlike Liza, there is no safe place to return to, unless we count her suicide at sea. New Orleans delivered what she needed, though: complete independence and the courage to evade the only two people who had a biological as well as social hold on her: Edna’s two small sons. In her independence, she shed both place and time, removing herself altogether from the confines of society, perhaps until another time.

Works Cited

“11 Words for Festive Occasions.” Merriam-Webster Dictionary, 2023, https:// www.merriam-­webster.com/words-­at-­play/word-­history-­festive-­gatherings/ gaudy#:~:text=Gaudy%20is%20ultimately%20from%20Latin%20 gaudium%2C%20meaning%20%22joy%2C%22,gaudy%20eventually%20 came%20to%20refer%20to%20any%20ornament. Annesi, Adele. Review of “‘Chita: a Memory of Last Island,’ by Lafcadio Hearn (Edited by Delia LaBarre).’” Southern Literary Review, 8 Jan. 2020, https:// southernlitreview.com/reviews/chita-­a-­memory-­of-­last-­island-­by-­lafcadio-­ hearn-­edited-­by-­delia-­labarre.htm, accessed 20 April 2023. “Antebellum Louisiana III: Urban Life.” The Cabildo: Two Centuries of Louisiana History, Louisiana State Museum Online Exhibits, 2018, https://crt.state. la.us/louisiana-­s tate-­m useum/online-­e xhibits/the-­c abildo/antebellum-­ louisiana-­urban-­life/index. Asher, Sally. Hope & New Orleans: A History of Crescent City Street Names. History Press, 2011. Baldassarre, Antonio, “Music, Painting, and Domestic Life: Hortense de Beauharnais in Arenenberg,” Music and Art, vol. 23, no. 1/2, Spring–Fall 1998, pp.  49–61. https://www.jstor.org/stable/41561903, accessed 30 November 2022. Bender, Bert. “Kate Chopin’s Quarrel with Darwin before The Awakening.” Journal of American Studies, vol. 26, no. 2, 1992, pp. 185–204. Benfey, Christopher. Degas in New Orleans: Encounters in the Creole World of Kate Chopin and George Washington Cable. U of California P, 1997.

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Index

A Adèle Ratignolles, 52, 79, 136, 143–145, 147, 151, 153 American literature, vii, 73 American Quarter, 10, 20, 33, 35–38, 40, 42, 43, 45, 47, 50, 54, 55, 76 Anderson, Sherwood, 1 Antebellum period, 2 Armstrong, Louis, 2, 15 Arner, Robert, 89 At Fault, 17, 22, 25, 34, 35, 48, 73, 132 “Athénaïse,” 2, 21, 57, 67–81, 94, 108, 122, 132, 151 Audubon Park, 34 Autonomy, vii, 2, 20–22, 57–82, 92, 107, 109, 118, 119, 122, 137, 139, 145, 148, 151, 154, 157 Awakened men, 65, 116 The Awakening, vii–x, 2, 17–20, 22, 25, 33, 39, 49, 51, 52, 58, 61, 63, 72, 74, 76, 79, 84, 131–157

B Bayou St. John, 21, 109–130, 139, 146, 147 Bildungsroman, 145 Black Codes, 72 Bloomer, Amelia, 59 Bloomers, 59 Bonner, Thomas, 22, 34, 138 Butler, General Benjamin F., 11, 12, 37, 92 C Cabildo, the, 33, 97 Cable, Washington, 16, 31, 37 “At the Cadian Ball,” 100 Camp Street, 33, 36 Canada, 111 Canals, 11, 111, 113, 123 Canal Street, 34, 88, 94, 99, 102, 133, 148, 150, 151 Caribbean, the, 4, 11, 16, 83

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 H. Ostman, Kate Chopin and the City, American Literature Readings in the 21st Century, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-44300-8

169

170 

INDEX

Caste, 2, 5, 10, 13, 71, 113, 134, 156 Catholicism, 102, 127, 130 “Cavanelle,” 20, 26, 44–55, 92 Charleville, Madame Victoire Verdon, 25 “Charlie,” 2, 21, 57–68, 79–81, 132 Chartres Street, 33, 90–93, 102, 144 Chênière Caminada, 51, 140, 155 Chicago, 15, 122 Chita: a Memory of Last Island, 16, 155 Chopin, Oscar, viii, 18, 19, 27 Civil War, x, 3, 7, 11, 12, 14, 20, 21, 34–37, 41, 42, 50, 71, 83, 85, 87, 88, 92–97, 100, 106, 107, 109, 110, 113–115, 118, 123, 124, 129, 144 Commerce, 21, 33, 34, 83–108, 123 Commission merchant, 39–44, 55, 84, 94–96, 101 Confederate, 3 Congo Square, 14, 15, 113, 120, 127 Consciousness, 136, 137, 139, 146, 147 Conspicuous consumption, 61, 66, 77, 80 Cotton, 9, 36, 83, 87, 95, 136, 137 Courier des États Unis, 90, 93 Creole, 7, 8, 10, 13, 16–18, 28, 36, 45–47, 65, 73, 105, 111, 112, 118, 120, 121, 134, 135, 149 Crescent City, 1, 2, 5 D de Maupassant, Guy, 25, 28, 54 de Tocqueville, Alexis, 1 Degas, Edgar, 2, 117, 118 “Désirée’s Baby,” 125 Dix, Dorothy, 17 “Doctor Chevalier’s Lie,” 84, 100, 105–108, 157

A Doll’s House, 138 Dream, 9, 20, 38, 116, 135, 150, 151, 153 E Economic exchange, 63 Edna Pontellier, vii–x, 2, 18, 19, 22, 23, 33, 49, 52, 53, 58, 61–64, 74, 79, 131–157 1883 Cotton Centennial, 34 English (language), 10, 16, 28, 33, 36–38, 45, 51, 54, 93, 143, 144 Esplanade Street, 17, 62, 94, 132, 133, 135, 141, 142, 144, 148, 150, 151 Ewell, Barbara, 19, 20, 22, 27, 34, 36, 37, 42, 43, 63, 77, 85, 98, 99, 118, 127, 138, 140, 148, 153–155 F Faris, Eliza, 25 Fashion, 50, 59–61, 86, 152 Faubourg Marigny, 14, 47 Faubourg Tremé, 14 Feminist, ix, x, 23, 59, 137, 138, 150 Flatboats, 83 Former slave, 72, 97, 130 443 Magazine Street, 18 France, 4, 7, 8, 15, 25, 29, 30, 33, 49, 71, 114, 118, 125, 129 Freedmen, 11, 13 Free women of color, 71 French Cathedral (St. Louis Cathedral), 31–33 French (language), x, 3, 7–9, 15, 16, 25, 28, 32, 36, 38, 42–45, 47, 54, 92, 118, 143 French Opera house, 50, 51

 INDEX 

French Quarter, 4, 5, 9, 14, 18, 20, 29, 31–33, 36, 43–45, 47, 55, 71, 74, 76, 91, 110–112, 126, 132, 133, 136, 141, 143, 144 G Garden District, 36, 45 Gayarré, Charles, 16 Germany, viii, 11 Girod Street, 33 “The Going Away of Liza,” 77, 102, 105, 157 Goodchildren Street, 44, 45, 47, 53, 54 Gouvernail, 68, 71, 75–82, 106, 151 Grand Isle, vii, ix, 2, 16, 19, 131–141, 143–147, 149, 151, 153–157 H Haughery, Margaret, 37 Hearn, Lafcadio, 1, 16, 155 Hortense de Beauharnais, 29–31 Hurricane, 8, 140, 141, 154–156 Hurston, Zora Neale, vii, 1 I Ibsen, Henrik, 138 Identity, 1, 4, 8, 72, 104, 112, 132, 135, 137, 142, 150 Immigration, 3 “In and Out of Old Natichtoches,” 104, 107 Ireland, 11 Irish Channel, 11, 14 J Jackson Square, 33 James, Henry, 28

171

Jazz, 15 Jim Crow laws, 3, 15 K Kentucky, 132, 145, 146 King, Grace, 16, 17, 49, 122 King Louis IX, 33 Koloski, Bernard, 28, 29, 76, 77, 79, 98, 99, 106, 136–138, 147, 149 Krewes, 64, 67 L L’Abeille de la Nouvelle-Orléans, 92 “La Belle Zoraïde,” 2, 21, 22, 109, 110, 114, 119–124, 129, 130, 139 Labor, 4, 8, 10, 11, 41, 96, 120 “A Lady of Bayou St. John,” 21, 22, 109, 110, 114, 119, 121, 122, 124, 129, 130, 139 Lafitte Avenue, 111 Last Island, 155 Latin America, 11 Laveau, Marie, 18, 46, 127, 128 Lebrun, Robert, 134–136, 144 LeMoyne, Jean Baptiste, 111 Levees, 5, 8, 65, 88 The Lily, 59 Local color, 17, 19, 23, 26, 27, 72, 149, 150 Louise Mallard, 142–143 Louisiana Purchase, 4, 33, 112 M “Ma’ame Pélagie,” 107 Mardi Gras, 63, 64, 97, 98, 105 Marriage, 7, 13, 35, 38, 43, 63, 67, 70, 72, 74, 77, 78, 80, 81, 84, 91, 116, 117, 119, 122, 128–130, 134, 135, 157

172 

INDEX

Marriage market, 62, 63 “A Matter of Prejudice,” 2, 20, 26, 28–40, 42–45, 47, 48, 54, 55 Memory, 17, 27, 74, 75, 80, 116–118, 122–124, 144–146, 153, 154 Mercier, Alfred, 16 Mississippi River, x, 3–5, 21, 29, 33, 36, 47, 83, 104, 106, 109–111, 144, 146 Modernity, 3, 16, 20, 26, 29, 35, 37, 38, 42 Motherhood, 35, 74, 78, 117, 129, 138, 139 N Natchitoches Parish, viii, 2, 18, 101 Nationalism, 3, 30 “Nég Creol,” 21, 109, 110, 114, 123–130, 139 New Orleans & Carrollton Railroad, 34 New Orleans Crescent, 15 Newspaper, 16, 21, 59, 84, 90–93, 103, 104, 113, 127, 128, 136 New Woman, 3 New York (City), viii, x, 11, 15, 16, 50, 96, 148, 156 A Night in Acadie, 44, 90, 124 “A No-Account Creole,” 43, 84, 94–100, 102, 104, 107 Northern occupation, 12, 144 North, the, 8, 11, 31, 48, 84 Nun, 90 O Octoroon, 47, 122, 150 O’Flaherty, Thomas, 25 Opera, x, 16, 27, 44, 49–51, 61, 149

P “A Pair of Silk Stockings,” 21, 83–90, 92, 107, 132 Petticoats, 59 Place-du-Bois, 35, 48 Place du Cirque, 14, 113 Plantation, 1, 5–9, 17, 21, 22, 26, 35, 40, 43, 47, 54, 57, 58, 60, 66, 67, 73, 75, 78–80, 82, 84, 94–102, 104, 105, 107, 108, 112, 132, 146, 154, 156 Plaza d’Armas, 14 Postbellum period, 17 Post-Reconstruction, 97, 99, 100, 102 Poydras Street, 36, 106 Presbytere, the, 33 Presbyterian, 134 Priest, 13, 45, 90, 91, 129 Prytania Streetcar, 44, 45, 53–54 Purgatory Mary, 129 Q Quebec, 111 R Railroad, 9, 11, 34, 35, 41, 49, 96 Rebellion, 7, 12, 21, 57 Reconstruction, 17, 31, 68, 96, 118, 128 Red River plantation, 94, 98, 99 Reisz (Mademoiselle), 144, 146, 147, 151 Religion, ix, 3, 39, 139 Resistance, 3, 11, 12, 31, 32, 34, 35, 39, 42, 79 “A Respectable Woman,” 21, 57, 67, 76, 78–82 “The Return of Alcibiade,” 20, 26, 39–44, 54, 55, 84

 INDEX 

173

Rex parade, 63 Rouquette, Adrien, 16

Stuart, Ruth McEnery, 17, 122 Suffragist, 59, 60

S St. Charles Avenue, 33, 35–38 St. Charles Streetcar Line, 34 St. Louis (Missouri), viii, 2, 4, 18, 22, 25, 27, 35, 48, 51, 52, 76, 87, 131, 132, 140, 156 St. Louis Academy of the Sacred Heart, 25 St. Louis Cathedral (French Cathedral), 31–33 St. Patrick’s Cathedral, 32, 33, 35 St. Paul, 126, 127 St. Peter, 127 Santien plantation, 94–96, 98 Science, 3 Sea, vii, ix, 33, 145, 146, 153, 154, 156, 157 Segregation, 11, 15 Self-awareness, 62, 132, 137, 139 Selflessness, 85 “A Sentimental Soul,” 21, 72, 84, 90–93, 107 Sewers, 11 Slavery, 8–10, 14, 31, 42, 74, 107, 128, 130, 153 Sleep, 41, 68, 115, 119, 120, 129, 155 South, 1, 2, 10, 11, 13, 17, 31, 37, 41, 84, 96, 99, 156 Spain, 4, 9, 25 Spanish Fort, 112 Stanton, Elizabeth Cady, 59 Steamboats, 9, 83, 111 “The Storm,” 100 “The Story of an Hour,” 85, 142 Streetcar, viii, x, 14, 20, 34–36, 44, 45, 48, 49, 54, 112, 147, 151

T Theater (or theatre), 9, 36, 49–51, 86, 89, 113 Thérèse Lafirme, 34 Third Ward, 14 Toth, Emily, x, 17, 18, 23, 46, 51, 87, 89, 106, 119, 122, 132, 133, 136, 138, 145, 146, 149 Trade, 4, 8–10, 34, 36, 44, 62, 106, 110, 156 Trouserlets, 59, 60 209 Louisiana Avenue, 18 Two Tales, 99, 100 U Union soldiers, 7, 11, 12 Universe, vii, viii, 22, 131–157 V Veblen, Thorstein, 61 Vogue, 85–89, 105, 114, 119, 142 Voodoo, 6, 18, 45, 46, 54, 127, 128 W White supremacy, 3, 128 Whitman, Walt, 1, 15, 16, 80 Wifehood, 110 Wilde, Oscar, 1 Williams, Tennessee, 1 Women’s health, 59 World War I, 15 Y Youth’s Companion, 28