Critical Essay on Kate Chopin's Short Stories

Introduction

Kate Chopin's short stories are some of the earliest masterpieces of the feminist writing, yet the issues that are raised and scrutinized in them are still of immediate importance. Even though women in their fight for their rights and equality have achieved a lot since 1894 when "The Story of an Hour" was first published, the sentiments expressed in these two short stories are still only too easily recognizable today. Kate Chopin still can take her readers by surprise with an unexpected subversion of a familiar stereotype portrayed in an ironic key, but also touch their hearts with profound, deeply felt compassion and understanding of the female inner struggle. Through employing a rich palette of stylistic devices and symbols Chopin builds a vivid contrast between the natural and the social, the emancipated and the suppressed, the genuine and the due in order to reveal the oppressive nature of marriage and the universal value of freedom.

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Chopin's "The Story of an Hour" consistently and imaginatively subverts a well-established stereotype of the married life as a pinnacle of female happiness. Louise, the main character, is expected to grieve the death of her dear husband, yet she suddenly and surprisingly revived by the prospect of living a new, self-sufficient life free from the stifling love of her husband. The irony of the situation cannot but shock the readers and open an active discussion. The contrast Chopin is trying to construct is best seen in the original title of the story "The Dream of an Hour" (changed later to "The Story of an Hour") where the key word "a dream" is a striking opposite of the dull, gray and monotonous daily routine. This dream that Louise is beginning to live is outlined through the juxtaposition of the suppressive atmosphere of Louise's parlour with the "broken sentences; veiled hints that revealed in half concealing" (Chopin, 2017) of the careful and tender friends, bearing the sad message, and a delightful portrayal of domestic comfort: "open window, a comfortable, roomy armchair" (Chopin, 2017) in Louise's room as well as the nature right outside her window. Writing about "the tops of trees that were all aquiver with the new spring life", "the delicious breath of rain", "the notes of a distant song which some one was singing" and "countless sparrows twittering in the eaves" (Chopin, 2017), Chopin engages the senses of her readers to allow them experience Louise's dream of freedom. In such a way, she makes the juxtaposition of married life and freedom more vivid, even tangible.

In order to make the contrast more powerful Chopin employs bright metaphors. Louise's grief is represented as a storm, a mighty force that shakes the character up: "When the storm of grief had spent itself she went away to her room alone" (Chopin, 2017). This metaphor builds a bridge to another short story under consideration, "The Storm," where the same natural force is used to convey the strength and liberating effect of passion. Exhaustion is compared to a ghost a ghost that is haunting Louise: "Into this she sank, pressed down by a physical exhaustion that haunted her body and seemed to reach into her soul" (Chopin, 2017). Finally, when the woman yields to striving for personal happiness and independence, the author uses personification to show how wild these dreams seem both to the character and many of her readers: "Her fancy was running riot along those days ahead of her" (Chopin, 2017). The metaphors used by Chopin help her create a realistic and true-to-life portrait of the character's emotional and spiritual transformation.

Contrast and surprise define the plot of the story too. The first sentence of the first paragraph ("Knowing that Mrs. Mallard was afflicted with a heart trouble, great care was taken to break to her as gently as possible the news of her husband's death" (Chopin, 2017)) creates particular expectations of how the plot will develop. But the last paragraph upsets these expectations: Mr. Mallard is alive while Mrs. Mallard dies of heart disease. With the help of this ironic plot twist Chopin manages to veil the significance of Louise's climactic revelation. In "Unveiling Kate Chopin" Emily Toth explains: "Kate Chopin ... had to have her heroine die. A story in which an unhappy wife is suddenly widowed, becomes rich, and lives happily ever after . . . would have been much too radical, far too threatening in the 1890s" (Toth, 1999, p. 10). This ending performs at least two other important functions. First, it shows how powerful and engrossing the spiritual change that Louise has experienced has been. It leaves no place for putting up with the past. Secondly, it fosters alternative interpretations. For instance, Mark Cunningham tries to prove that Louise dies from the psychological pressure she has endured: a lonely emancipated woman simply had no place in the contemporary society (Cunningham, 2004, pp. 48-55). Lawrence Berkove surmises that the protagonist, an immature and shallow egotist, receives death as a symbolic atonement (Berkove, 2000, pp. 152-55). This wide interpretative palette is a sign of a profound richness in meaning and nuance that Kate Chopin's short story exhibits in the way it interprets such a controversial and topical issue.

"The Storm" by Kate Chopin is also built around a contrast - a juxtaposition of the natural and the social, the passionate and the domestic. The parallel between human emotions and natural forces allows the writer to conduct a many-sided, persuasive and intriguing exploration of the way in which passion binds two people more profoundly than one can expect: "The generous abundance of her passion, without guile or trickery, was like a white flame which penetrated and found response in depths of his own sensuous nature that had never yet been reached" (Chopin, 2016), but also the way in which strong emotions can have a liberating and purifying effect upon the human psyche and relationships with others. Through opposition of the storm with its destructive yet mesmerizing force and the household chores that Calixta is taking care of Chopin manages to convey the contrast between the strong and powerful emotions the character is trying to suppress, her genuine, natural self as a passionate woman, and the 'tamed,' docile life she is leading as a housewife. Just like in "The Story of an Hour," Chopin uses the sharp contrast between the domestic and the natural to elucidate the complex psychological process a female psyche undergoes when realizing and acknowledging its independent inner needs, its striving for freedom and self-sufficiency. But if in "The Story of an Hour" Louise's emancipation that she experiences after her husband's death is shown like a flown blooming in slow motion, as a gradual yet constant appeal "through the sounds, the scents, the color" (Chopin, 2017) of the natural world beyond the confines of the stifling oppressive atmosphere of her home, in "The Storm" liberation comes unexpectedly and powerfully, though certainly prepared by the pressure that was building up in Calixta's marriage which could be felt evn by her little son who "thought it was going to rain" (Chopin, 2016). The outbreak of emotion if not interrupted the way it happened in "The Story of an Hour." It helps the heroine let her dissatisfaction, fatigue and disappointment with the reality of married life out and thus makes her feel a happier, more harmonious person again. She is revitalized to go on with her married life: "So the storm passed and every one was happy" (Chopin, 2016), concludes Kate Chopin in an earnest and yet slightly ironic tone.

Conclusion

Chopin's short stories are an intricate literary experiment within which through the use of symbols, metaphors, irony and peculiar plot twists the author manages to contrast the social and the natural, to explore the problem of the corrupting influence of dependence and oppression upon female inner life and relationships in a marriage.

Reference

Berkove, L. I. (2000). Fatal Self-Assertion in Kate Chopin's 'The Story of an Hour'. American Literary Realism, 32, 152-158.

Chopin, Kate. "The Storm". Americanliterature.com, 2016, https://americanliterature.com/author /kate-chopin/short-story/the-storm.

Chopin, Kate. "The Story of an Hour." KateChopin.org, 2017, www.katechopin.org/story-hour/. Accessed 15 Feb. 2017.

Cunningham, M. (2004). The Autonomous Female Self and the Death of Louise Mallard in Kate Chopin's 'Story of an Hour'. English Language Notes, 42, 48-55.

Toth, E. (1999). Unveiling Kate Chopin. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.