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Cans and French Americans in Kate Chopin's Short Stories

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Cans and French Americans in Kate Chopin's Short Stories Rencontres américaines: Encounters between Anglo-Ameri- cans and French Americans in Kate Chopin’s Short Stories Florian Freitag ABSTRACT This article uses a revisionist approach to American local-color fiction—one that combines historicist or ideological hegemonic readings of local color as imperialistic with feminist, coun- terhegemonic analyses of the genre as a literature of resistance—to examine the depiction of Anglo-American characters in Kate Chopin’s short fiction in general and of their encounters with French Americans (Creoles and Cajuns) in particular. I argue that Chopin’s stories rely solely on the category of cultural affiliation (as opposed to a combination of the categories of race, class, gender, age, and geographical origin) to distinguish between Anglo- and French Americans and thus construct members of both cultural groups as regional characters. How- ever, the texts nevertheless consistently associate Anglo-Americans with metropolitan, hege- monic, and French Americans with provincial, resistant perspectives. This categorization of Anglo-Americans as agents of cultural imperialism and of French Americans as resistant pro- vincials is further confirmed by the texts’ regionalist critiques of Anglo-Americans and their local-color depictions of French Americans, which are continuously played off against and most often also balance each other. “A Gentleman of Bayou Têche” Perhaps one of the most interesting pieces of Kate Chopin’s short fiction is “A Gentleman of Bayou Têche,” written in 1893 and first published in Chopin’s collection Bayou Folk (1894). In this story a Cajun man initially refuses to let an artist who is “looking for bits of ‘local color’” draw his picture for fear of being ridiculed (319), but eventually agrees when he is allowed to name the picture. In Cosmopolitan Vistas, Tom Lutz correctly notes that this story “is about art more than it is about Cajuns, and about literary art in particular” (30). Lutz is one of sev- eral critics—among them Coby Dowdell, June Howard, and Emily Satterwhite— who in the mid-2000s attempted to overcome the then prevalent critical divide between, on the one hand, ideological or historicist hegemonic readings of local- color fiction as imperialistic, and, on the other hand, feminist, counterhegemonic analyses of the genre as a literature of resistance.1 The former strand of local- 1 See Lutz 26, 69; Dowdell 224; Howard 126; Satterwhite 61; Palmer 161n12; Hardwig 12-13. Another, even more recent critical approach to local-color fiction is concerned with re-situating local color in its periodical context and relating the texts to the articles, advertisements, and il- lustrative material that accompanied and surrounded them in nineteenth-century periodicals. For examples of this approach that focus on Southern local color, see Noonan, Hardwig, and Freitag. 410 Florian Freitag color criticism can be traced back to Amy Kaplan’s chapter on “Region, Nation, and Empire” in the 1991 Columbia History of the American Novel and to Richard Brodhead’s 1993 Cultures of Letters. Both Kaplan and Brodhead discard local color’s self-assigned role as registering and archiving American regional customs and dialects before they are completely and irrevocably swept away by a rising modern order.2 Instead, they argue, the cultural work performed by nineteenth- century regional fiction consisted of helping its intended urban middle-class read- ership to solidify itself “as an imagined community” (Kaplan 251) by “tell[ing] local cultures into a history of their supersession by a modern order now risen to national dominance” (Brodhead 121), thus offering these readers “images of rural ‘others’” for consumption as “both a nostalgic point of origin and a measure of cosmopolitan development” (Kaplan 251). Finding analogies between tourism and anthropology (both emerging as a mass industry and a science, respectively, during the Gilded Age) and local-color fiction, Kaplan and Brodhead maintain that regionalism met its urban readers’ “desire” (Kaplan 252) and “social need” (Brodhead 120) for cultural hegemony by producing and commodifying deviant cultures as regional. This particular reading of local color concurs with the depiction of the local colorist’s approach to art in “A Gentleman of Bayou Têche.” Indeed, the artist, Mr. Sublet, appears to be neither interested in portraying life on the Hallet planta- tion in its fullness nor does he, as the narrator asserts, merely scan the scene for “bits of ‘local color’” (Chopin 319) which he can then single out for representation; instead, he actively stages and produces the local, telling the Cajun Evariste pre- cisely what to wear for the drawing session, and then commodifies it by offering Evariste “a couple of silver dollars” (319) for allowing him to draw his picture. Tellingly, Sublet asks Evariste, as the latter later reports to his daughter, to appear at the session “‘like I come out de swamp’” (319-20). Sublet thus locates the Cajun at an evolutionary “point of origin,” constructing him as a primordial lifeform or a remnant from an earlier evolutionary stage when life had just moved out of the water and onto the land. While Sublet also lets Evariste know that he wishes to publish the drawing in, again in Evariste’s words, “‘one fine Mag‘ ’zine’” (319), Chopin’s text, apart from the speculations by Aunt Dicey, nowhere hints at how the drawing might be received by the readers of the “fine” magazine and what possible cultural work the picture might accomplish with respect to these readers. However, the story does indicate that Sublet uses his particular artistic attitude towards cultural and ethnic or racial difference to consolidate himself and his fellow artists as an “imagined community”: just as his father attempts to use Eva- riste to stage the ‘local,’ Sublet’s son, who accompanies him on the trip, seeks to convince an African American laundress at the plantation (the aforementioned Aunt Dicey) to pose for a photograph standing next to her ironing-board and wearing her everyday work dress (320-21). Sublet, then, has already perpetuated his conception of (local-color) art as well as his self-conception as a (local-color) artist, passing it on to a new generation of aspiring artists. 2 See, for example, the introductory passages from Harriett Beecher Stowe’s Oldtown Folks and Mary Murfree’s In the Tennessee Mountains (qtd. in Brodhead 120). Rencontres américaines 411 Aunt Dicey, however, resolutely refuses to be photographed unless she wears her “‘noo calker dress’” and her “‘bonnit’” (321).3 In their 2003 Writing Out of Place, Judith Fetterley and Marjorie Pryse use the story’s depiction of Aunt Dicey’s resistance to support their specifically feminist and counterhegemonic reading of some works of local color. Drawing on their own gender-segregated differentiation between (mostly male-authored) local color and (exclusively fe- male-authored) “American Women Regionalism”—a distinction which they first established in their 1992 anthology American Women Regionalists 1850-1910 and then continued to build upon in numerous articles—Fetterley and Pryse criticize Kaplan and Brodhead for “assum[ing] that regionalist writers align themselves with urban and middle-class writers over and against their purportedly nonliter- ate and nonliterary regional subjects” and for focusing on “the complicity of the literary in the political and ideological work of nation and empire” (225, 233). In contrast, Fetterley and Pryse argue that the texts belonging to the tradition they identify as American Women Regionalism are written “as if from the inside” of the region and narrate instances of regional resistance to exploitation and cultural imperialism (115; cf. also 240-41). By exposing Sublet’s and his son’s strategies of staging and commodifying the local, and by depicting Aunt Dicey’s objection to “the boy’s assumption that she and her ironing board exist as subjects for ‘local color,’” they conclude that “A Gentleman” functions as a regionalist “narrative of resistance” (241).4 Critics such as Lutz, Dowdell, Howard, and Satterwhite, in turn, have compli- cated Fetterley and Pryse’s trenchant critique of Brodhead and Kaplan by refusing to relegate individual works of local color to the simple dichotomy of hegemonic local-color texts that look at the region from an urban, middle-class, metropolitan perspective and regionalist narratives of resistance written “as if from the inside.” 3 Evariste, too, immediately proposes to Sublet to “‘make [him]se’f fine’” for the drawing session (319). Dicey and Evariste do not generally object to staging themselves for the occasion, but they do refuse the particular arrangement proposed by Sublet and his son (cf. Fetterley and Pryse 242). 4 Read from such a regionalist, counterhegemonic point of view, “A Gentleman” may also appear as Chopin’s attempt to dissociate herself as an author from the local-color movement or, indeed, as a veiled critique of famous local-color illustrator E. W. Kemble. As has been noted by many critics, Chopin “refused to be considered a local colorist and resented being compared to [George Washington] Cable and Grace King” (Seyersted 83), an attitude which she expressed most clearly in her review of Hamlin Garland’s Crumbling Idols (cf. Chopin 693-94), published in the same year as Bayou Folk. By including “A Gentleman” in this collection—which ap- peared, after all, a mere two years after Garland’s similarly titled Prairie Folks—and placing it rather prominently as the second-to-last piece of the collection, Chopin may have wanted to signal to readers and critics that hers is a short fiction that goes beyond mere local color. At the same time, Chopin might have used the story to poke fun at local-color artists such as Kemble. In 1888, after having illustrated Thomas Nelson Page’s In Ole Virginia (1887) and having be- come famous for his drawings of regional characters from the South (cf.
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