Rencontres américaines: Encounters between -Ameri- cans and French in ’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 (Creoles and ) 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 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 (1887) and having be- come famous for his drawings of regional characters from the South (cf. Martin 669-70; Noonan 203n23), this Century staff member, equipped with a camera, undertook his very first visit to the region he had depicted in his drawings. As Kemble himself wrote in an article in 1930, “it was high time for me to go and see what the real article looked like. […] After visiting several planta- tions and noting the local color, […] I found that my types were, in most cases, the counterparts of those surrounding me” (32). 412 Florian Freitag

Understanding local color and regionalism as different “cultural visions” of the local that may appear simultaneously and alongside each other in individual texts rather than as strict genre categories according to which individual works can be classified (Lutz 31; cf. also 69), it is precisely in this “interplay of provincial and metropolitan perspectives” that they locate the essence and art of local color (Howard 126).5 Thus Dowdell comments on the “fluid subjectivity” of the narra- tor of Sarah Orne Jewett’s The Country of the Pointed Firs (17), who is depicted as moving back and forth between a metropolitan, local-color perspective and a provincial, regionalist view of life in Dunnet Landing, while Lutz notes that “A Gentleman” is written “from both the inside and the outside” (30): Chopin is writing about the ethics of representation within the context of the competing desires of the magazine audience for “picturesque” depictions of everyday life and the desire of the people represented to be seen in some way that jives with their own self- image. […] [O]nly the literary artist has the kind of perspective necessary to represent what is lost and gained, by all concerned, in the cross-cultural encounter. (30)

Rencontres américaines

Of course, the competing cultural visions of or perspectives on the local articu- lated in “A Gentleman” are by no means limited to the portrayal of Sublet’s and Aunt Dicey’s diametrically opposed approaches to local color. After all, the text criticizes Sublet’s commercially motivated appropriation of the local and hence “lampoon[s] the patronizing, objectifying tendencies of some local-colour writers, photographers, editors and critics” at the very same time that it uses exactly the same strategies to gently satirize Aunt Dicey’s and Evariste’s resistance (Castillo 68). The former comically threatens Sublet’s son to “‘make a picture outen him wid dis heah flati’on’” (Chopin 321); the latter is, at the end of the story, again portrayed as the uncultured lifeform that Sublet sought to stage him as. Not only does Evariste naïvely believe that by simply re-naming the picture, he can actu- ally influence the way it is received by the magazine’s readers,6 he also ‘writes’ the

5 Dowdell, drawing on Fetterley and Pryse’s appropriation of Mary Louise Pratt’s concept of “autoethnography” to explain their understanding of regionalism, suggests using Pratt’s dif- ferentiation between “ethnography” and “autoethnography” to delineate local color’s oscillat- ing between two modes of representing the local (17). Pratt uses autoethnography “to refer to instances in which colonized subjects undertake to represent themselves in ways that engage with the colonizer’s own terms. If ethnographic texts are a means by which Europeans represent to themselves their (usually subjugated) others, autoethnographic texts are those the others con- struct in response to or in dialogue with those metropolitan representations” (Eyes 7). 6 Pryse notes that even at the end of “A Gentleman,” Evariste has absolutely no “power over the interpretation of his own representation. [Readers of Chopin’s story] know, even if [the Cajun] does not, that in [the artist]’s world, in which readers are ‘taught’ to view persons like [the Cajun] stereotypically, the regional character himself does not have the power to change the way he is perceived” (55-56). Whereas Pryse, of course, concludes that this depiction of Evariste’s lack of power contributes to the story’s critique of the local-color genre, my argument here is that the portrayal of Evariste’s naïveté supports a reading of the story as also drawing upon local-color approaches to the region. Rencontres américaines 413 new caption “in a business-like manner” by carefully tracing “on the table-cloth imaginary characters with an imaginary pen; he could not have written the real characters with a real pen—he did not know how” (324). Based on these observa- tions, David Steiling has argued that the story uses “the techniques of the local- color school to deconstruct and transcend the limitations of the local-color writer” (200). But the reverse is true as well: “A Gentleman” also employs a regionalist, resistant approach to the local to reaffirm the techniques of the local-color school. In fact, the story’s regionalist critique of Mr. Sublet and its local-color depiction of Evariste confirm the identification of the former as a “tourist-observer” (Sat- terwhite 72) or as an “avatar of modernity” (Donovan 102) and the association of the latter with a resistant perspective. Ultimately, however, the story commits to neither perspective, instead skillfully playing them off against each other; and it is in the portrayal of the cross-cultural encounter between Aunt Dicey/Evariste and Sublet, between the regional characters and the outsider, that this interplay of provincial and metropolitan perspectives on the local in “A Gentleman” becomes most explicit. Stephanie Palmer examines a particular subcategory of this plot-motif—name- ly, the encounter between regional and metropolitan characters occasioned by the latters’ travel accidents—and comments on the general frequency of encoun- ters between strangers in local-color fiction: “Local color literature devises many methods of bringing together strangers divided by class, race, ethnicity, or gen- der, which range from the motif of the visit between friends, the visit of a travel- ing salesman, or the native returning home, to the tall tale that a native tells a stranger” (20). By portraying encounters such as these, local-color fiction depicts the region as a “contact zone” in Mary Louise Pratt’s sense of the term. In “Arts of the Contact Zone,” Pratt defines contact zones as “social spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power, such as colonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths as they are lived out in many parts of the world today” (584). As the above reading of “A Gentleman” has shown, however, it is not only different cultures, but also differ- ent perspectives on local cultures that “meet, clash, and grapple with each other” in the depiction of these encounters. In Chopin’s short fiction, such a correlation of the depiction of encounters between members of different cultures and between different perspectives on the local most frequently occurs in stories that focus on cross-cultural encoun- ters between Anglo-Americans and French Americans in nineteenth-century . Generally, the portrayal of nineteenth-century Louisianian society in Chopin’s short fiction (according to Seyersted [75], only about thirty of Chopin’s almost one hundred short stories and sketches are set outside of Lousiana) has been described in terms that evoke Pratt’s concept of the contact zone. Whereas other Southern local colorists such as George Washington Cable or Grace King may have focused on particular ethnic or cultural groups in their short fiction (for example, white French Creoles and people of mixed European and African descent in the case of Cable’s Old Creole Days [1879], white French Creoles in King’s Balcony Stories [1893]), Chopin, Helen Taylor correctly notes, thoroughly engages with Louisiana’s mixture of “Catholic / Protestant, Native American / 414 Florian Freitag

French / Spanish / African American / English cultures” and their interactions (147). Indeed, [r]ather than portraying a society made up of racial and ethnic groups existing side by side in airtight compartments, she dared and defied prevailing norms in order to evoke a place and time characterised by conflicts and convergences, by intricate negotiations and shifts of power and disempowerment: a dazzling, kinetic kaleidoscope of human beings. (Castillo 71) Castillo’s comment on “shifts of power and disempowerment” is important inso- far as (asymmetrical) relations of power are an essential component of Pratt’s con- cept of the contact zone. And as Michael Worton reminds us, “Chopin’s fictional world can appear to be a very hierarchical one. Men are the masters of society, the Creoles are superior to the Anglophone Americans, ‘old money’ families look down on ‘new money’ families, the landowners (usually) look after their servants well but live in a world above and apart from them” (114). Worton is one of the very few critics who attempt to locate the socio- of Anglo-Ameri- cans within the multicultural spectrum of Chopin’s fictional Louisiana. Interest- ingly, critics have studied in great detail virtually all of the different ethnic and/ or cultural groups Chopin depicts in her short fiction—except the group of (white) Anglo-Americans.7 In fact, apart from Worton, the only other critic who has com- mented upon the portrayal of Anglo-Americans in Chopin’s short fiction is Per Seyersted. He notes that in contrast to Cable, who “used his short stories and The Grandissimes to dramatize the conflict between the French and the civili- zations, […] Kate Chopin’s juxtapositions of Americans and French-descendants are rare, even in her tales” (81). However, a closer look at Chopin’s short stories and sketches reveals that her juxtapositions of Anglo-Americans and French Creoles and Cajuns are not that rare: a total of sixteen of Chopin’s sto- ries depict more or less direct encounters between Anglo-Americans and French Americans. These were composed throughout her writing career, from “A No- Account Creole” (originally written in 1888) to “The Wood-Choppers” (written in 1901), which suggests that this was a topic that continued to interest Chopin.8 With respect to the correlation of the depictions of cross-cultural encounters and of the interplay between metropolitan and provincial perspectives on the local in

7 This is perhaps best illustrated by Castillo’s article on “‘Race’ and Ethnicity in Kate Cho- pin’s Fiction,” in which she examines “representations of slaves of African origin, free people of colour, Native Americans and French Creoles and Cajuns in Kate Chopin’s fiction” (59). Cas- tillo thus utterly fails to include (white) Anglo-Americans in her analysis, an omission that is all the more regrettable since it implicitly considers ‘whiteness’ and/or ‘Americanness’ as ra- cially and ethnically unmarked. Further examples include Ryu, who focuses on “The Negro as a Serious Subject in Kate Chopin’s Fiction”; Manders, who examines Chopin’s portrayals of “The Wretched Freeman”; Gaudet, who concentrates on Cajuns; Skaggs, who focuses on French Americans (Creoles and Cajuns); and Elfenbein, who (also) discusses Chopin’s white women characters without distinguishing, however, between white French and white Anglo-Americans (cf. 117-57). 8 Of course, Chopin’s two novels At Fault (1890) and The Awakening (1899) also revolve around ‘mixed’ couples (David Hosmer and Thérèse Lafirme in At Fault; Léonce and Edna Pontellier in The Awakening). Rencontres américaines 415

Chopin’s stories, two aspects of the portrayals of Anglo-French encounters are especially significant. First, Chopin’s ‘rencontres américaines’ are indeed cross-cultural encounters in the sense that her stories generally rely neither on race, class, nor geographical ori- gins to differentiate between Anglo-Americans and French Americans, but solely on culture in general and on language in particular. Nineteenth-century assump- tions about frequent ethnic mixing in Louisiana notwithstanding, both Anglo- and especially French Americans are constructed as unambiguously white. Likewise, the category of class is drawn upon to distinguish between French Creoles and Ca- juns rather than between Anglo-Americans and French Americans. With the ex- ception of the ‘’ character Bud Aiken in “In Sabine,” Anglo-Americans in Chopin’s stories are generally businessmen and entrepreneurs,9 have liberal pro- fessions (doctors, lawyers, judges),10 or occupy some sort of ‘official’ post, as does station-master Mr. Hudson in “For Marse Chouchoute,” and thus belong to the middle or upper classes. Chopin’s French Americans are, to be sure, a somewhat more heterogeneous group with respect to class. Bonnie James Shaker argues that Chopin’s oeuvre “consciously produces the Creole and Cajun as distinct ethnic cat- egories of white identity distinguished by their respective bourgeois and hireling/ laboring-class socioeconomic stratification” (xiv).11 With respect to class, then, the texts distinguish between (middle- and upper-class) Anglo-Americans and French Creoles and (lower-class) Cajuns rather than between Anglo- and French Ameri- cans. While these observations initially seem to support Kaplan’s claim that local color effaced “more explosive social conflicts of class, race, and gender made con- tiguous by urban life” by “rendering social difference in terms of region, anchored and bound by separate spaces” (251), all of Chopin’s Anglo- and French American characters—with the exception of Mr. Sublet in “A Gentleman”—are Southern- ers, as, for instance, Euphrasie stresses in the case of Wallace Offdean in “A No- Account Creole” (cf. Chopin 88). There is a certain tendency in Chopin’s stories to employ the categories of gender and age to highlight the differences between Anglo- and French Americans.12 What mainly sets these two groups apart from each other, however, are neither their race, class, nor geographical origins, but their cultures and languages. Ultimately, the stories rely exclusively on naming and di-

9 See, for instance, Wallace Offdean in “A No-Account Creole,” Horace McEnders in “Miss McEnders,” Fred Bartner in “The Return of Alcibiade,” and Mr. Sneckbauer in “The Gentleman from New Orleans.” 10 See, for instance, Morrison and Judge Filips in “The Godmother,” Doctor Campbell in “For Marse Chouchoute,” Doctor John-Luis in “Mamouche,” and Lawyer Paxton in both “Dead Men’s Shoes” and “Madame Célestin’s Divorce.” 11 Referring to Chopin’s fiction in general, Skaggs suggests that “[f]or practical purposes the reader must simply assume that the rich are Creoles; the poor, , unless they are otherwise identified” (72). On the use of the term ‘Cajun’ in the nineteenth century in general, cf. Klingler 94. 12 All of Chopin’s Anglo-Americans are middle-aged and—with the exception of Miss McEnders in the eponymous story and Millie Bénoîte in “The Gentleman from New Orleans”— male. Likewise, Chopin’s texts often evoke the type of the elderly French Creole woman; see, for example, Tante Elodie in “The Godmother,” Mme Carantelle in “A No-Account Creole,” and Mme Carambeau in “A Matter of Prejudice.” 416 Florian Freitag rect speech to indicate that a character is of Anglo-American or French American descent: Anglo-American characters usually bear English names and speak Stan- dard (or, as with the soldier in “The Locket,” vernacular) English, whereas French Americans bear French names and speak Standard or Creole French (in the case of Creoles) and/or (in the case of Cajuns).13 Second, while the ‘rencontres américaines’ thus appear to be encounters be- tween two distinct but equally regional cultures (Southern Anglo-Americans and Southern French Americans), the stories nevertheless draw on the paradigmatic case of “A Gentleman” by consistently associating Anglo-Americans with the metropolitan, outsider’s perspective and French Americans with the provincial, insider’s perspective on the local. Hence, geographical origins notwithstanding, the encounters between local Anglo-Americans and local French Americans are regularly portrayed as encounters between ‘tourist-observers’ and regional char- acters. One might simply argue that as they share their cultural affiliation with local-color fiction’s intended readership, the group of Anglo-Americans, if any, could be rather easily cast into the role of the outsiders. Yet the pairing of Anglo- and French Americans is, of course, a conspicuous one, as it resonates with the historical roles of these two groups after the . Following the acquisition of Louisiana by the in 1803 and the territory’s change in status from French colony to part of the United States, the former French colonizers suddenly found themselves in the role of the colonized, with the influx of ‘foreign’ Anglo-Americans threatening to irrevocably alter, if not destroy, the distinctive French American culture. However, Southern local- color writing from the second half of the nineteenth century tended to depict this conflict neither as one between colonizers and colonized nor as one between two culturally different groups of national citizens, but rather as one between Anglo- American national citizens and French American regional citizens. Thus Stefanie Foote has shown how Cable’s The Grandissimes (1880) “regionalizes its [French American] characters, describing them as if they were local-color characters and thus representing potentially problematic political differences as cultural dif- ferences. [The Grandissimes] thus turn[s] on the successful conversion of […] a French Creole into a Louisianian” (16).14 Chopin’s stories, too, present encoun- ters between Anglo-Americans and French Americans as encounters between cultural outsiders and insiders by associating each cultural group with a specific (metropolitan or provincial) perspective on the local: whereas the Anglo-Ameri- cans, despite their Southern geographical origins, are regularly portrayed as hav-

13 Note that Chopin sometimes also renders Standard or Creole French as (cf. Toth 224), not without, however, using auctorial comments such as “the girl cried in French” (from “The Wood-Choppers” 675) to indicate the fact that the narrator is translating into Eng- lish. Chopin uses this strategy to great effect especially at the end of “La Belle Zoraïde” (308). 14 Similarly, Jennifer Rae Greeson has shown how the Louisiana chapters of Edward King’s The Great South (1875; based on a series of articles commissioned by Josiah Gilbert Holland for Scribner’s Monthly) “pointedly diverge from his derivative appropriation of Victorian imperial travel-writing” that dominates the rest of The Great South in order to imply “that US control of the territory since 1803 has involved the opposite of ‘foreign domination’—has involved Louisi- ana’s domestic American liberation” (506). Rencontres américaines 417 ing internalized a metropolitan perspective and approach the local ‘as if from the outside,’ the French Americans consistently resist these insiders’ ‘outsider’s per- spectives.’ What is especially striking, however, is how most of the texts (again, as in “A Gentleman”) manage to keep a careful balance between metropolitan and provincial, local-color and regionalist perspectives and continuously play them off against each other.

(Un)balanced Perspectives

Such a careful balance is not maintained in all of Chopin’s stories about en- counters between Anglo- and French Americans. While some ‘rencontres améri- caines’ do juxtapose Anglo-Americans’ metropolitan and French Americans’ resistant perspectives on the local, they nevertheless tend to privilege or to com- mit to one of the two points of view. Thus, for instance, “Miss McEnders” cor- relates the encounter between the Anglo-American social reform activist Geor- gie McEnders and her seamstress, the French American Mlle Salambre, with the clash between the former’s patronizing attitude towards Mlle Salambre’s private life and the latter’s resistance to Georgie McEnders’s moral judgments. However, the exposure of the Anglo-American’s strategy of constructing herself as morally superior to the French American, while confirming her portrayal as a ‘metropoli- tan’ character, is not, as in “A Gentleman,” counterbalanced by a gently satirized portrait of the French American. Instead, the text intensifies its critique of Miss McEnders by revealing the fact that it is Georgie McEnders, her family, and her fiancé Meredith Holt—and not the ‘loose-mannered’ Mlle Salambre—who are in dire need of moral and social reform.15 Likewise, “The Lilies” also fails to counterbalance its critique of Anglo- American Mr. Billy’s lack of manners and his patronizing attitude towards French American Marie Louise Angèle16 with, for example, a comical or satirized depic- tion of the latter. Cultural affiliation is by no means the only thing that separates Mr. Billy and Marie Louise: while Mr. Billy lives in a “big house” and employs servants as well as farmhands (Chopin 196), for Marie Louise and her mother there is “no question of repaying Mr. Billy with money; [they] had none” (195). By giving the Anglo-American a huge bouquet of lilies to compensate for the dam- ages caused by the Angèles’ calf, Marie Louise not only attempts to act within her limited economic possibilities but also resists Mr. Billy’s conceptualization of neighborly relations in exclusively economical terms. The story further deepens its critique of the Anglo-American by exposing Mr. Billy’s general commercial outlook on life: not only “had [he] been making cotton and corn for so many years” that “he had forgotten there were such things as lilies in the world” (197), he had not realized that his dinner was almost inedible (197-98) or that his behav-

15 Toth speculates that the text’s harsh cynicism and satire were spurred by a real-life antipa- thy that turns “Miss McEnders” into a ‘short story à clé’ (291-93). 16 The Angèles are nowhere in the story unambiguously identified as either Cajuns or French Creoles. The Angèles are definitely not rich, which may suggest that they are Cajuns, but their poverty may also be due to the fact that Madame Angèle appears to be a widow. 418 Florian Freitag ior towards Madame Angèle was completely unacceptable for a gentleman (see the contrast between his first and his second visits to the Angèles). As in “Miss McEnders,” this regionalist critique of the Anglo-American is left to stand un- disturbed. For all her poverty and youth, Marie Louise is depicted as a perfectly well-mannered and refined lady, who “politely, but decidedly” tells Mr. Billy that the is undercooked and that the jam is burned (198). And even the somewhat contrived ending of “The Lilies,” which shows a reformed Mr. Billy getting dressed up to pay his neighbors a conciliatory visit in keeping with the spirit of the holidays, merely softens but does not fully counterbalance the story’s critique of Mr. Billy. “In Sabine” is another of Chopin’s stories that ultimately commits to a resis- tant, regionalist perspective. In contrast to Anglo-American (“Texan”) Bud Ai- ken’s patronizing attitude towards and brutal mistreatment of his Cajun wife, is the wife’s resistance to this emotional abuse and domestic violence—a resistance in which she is crucially assisted by the Creole Grégoire Santien. Grégoire’s act of vigilantism can, of course, be compared to his earlier murder of Joçint, de- scribed in Chopin’s At Fault. But where the novel provides a balanced assessment of Grégoire’s frontier justice, juxtaposing the local population’s approval and the Anglo-American Melicent’s disapproval of the murder (cf. Chopin 824 and 828, respectively), the short story fully justifies Santien’s resistance by depicting Aiken as an abusive, lawless, and cruel drunkard and quintessential ‘white trash.’ Skaggs has noted parallels between “In Sabine” and “A Visit to Avoyelles” (cf. 41), but at least in regard to their perspectives on the local the two stories are rather dia- metrically opposed: while “A Visit” offers a metropolitan, local-color perspective on the marriage of a poor but loving Cajun couple, “In Sabine” resists such ro- manticizing and thus privileges a regionalist, insider’s perspective on an Anglo- American’s violent mistreatment of his wife. Two more stories—“For Marse Chouchoute” and “The Godmother”—also fail to maintain a careful balance between metropolitan and regionalist perspectives, but here the privileged perspective is the metropolitan rather than the regional- ist. In both stories, Anglo-Americans, as well as their outsider’s perspective on the local, at first appear to play but a minor role. In “For Marse Chouchoute,” for instance, the only Anglo-American character apart from Doctor Campbell is Mr. Hudson, who, as the station-master, represents the railroad company with its rigid timetables. It is precisely by resisting the strict regulation of time by the railroad schedules and by violating the U.S. postal service’s company rules, however, that the Creole Armand Verchette (or “Chouchoute,” as he is called by his friends) indirectly causes the death of Wash, his faithful African American servant and friend. The beginning of “For Marse Chouchoute” offers a regionalist perspective of Armand, commenting that no one in the little French village “could help loving him” or “ever felt much like blaming him” for “the unlucky trick of forgetfulness” with which “he was born” (Chopin 105). In contrast, the tragic ending of the story, which depicts the dying Wash still worrying about his friend and master’s fate (“‘[W]ho–gwine–watch Marse–Chouchoute?’” 110), fully commits to a metropoli- tan perspective of Armand not only as a shiftless and irresponsible character—he had, after all, left his post of duty merely in order to attend a dance (105-06)—but Rencontres américaines 419 also as a potentially dangerous person and one who is out of place in a modern world where such impulsivity as his must be checked by railroad schedules. Likewise, “The Godmother” features no living Anglo-American characters, although it seems significant that Everson, the man killed by Gabriel, was presum- ably an Anglo-American. After Gabriel confesses the murder to Tante Elodie, she immediately asks him whether the victim was “a negro” (Chopin 601), implying that killing a black person might have less serious consequences. One may also assume that she might be even more concerned about the murder if the man had not been a stranger from Conshotta,17 because the reader learns at the beginning of the story that Tante Elodie is “a very conservative person. ‘The Normal’ [school] seemed to her an unpardonable innovation, with its teachers from Minnesota, from Iowa, from God-knows-where, bringing strange ways and manners to the old town” (598). And one essential part of these “strange ways and manners” is, of course, the law, completely disregarded by Tante Elodie and represented in the story by Morrison, at whose office Gabriel initially reads law, and by Judge Filips—both Anglo-Ameri- cans (610). Just as Chouchoute’s disregard for timetables and company rules ends in disaster, Tante Elodie’s disrespect for the law turns out to be disastrous, too: Gabriel abandons his studies, turns into a drunkard, and later dies in a riding accident, while Elodie herself ends up with only the stars “to keep her company” (614). Hence, while the character of Tante Elodie, in order to protect her godson, may approach the law from a resistant perspective (as she approaches everything associated with Anglo-America), the eponymous short story rather privileges a metropolitan per- spective, one according to which such regionalist deviance cannot be tolerated. As mentioned above, however, and like “A Gentleman,” the majority of Cho- pin’s stories about ‘rencontres américaines’ maintain a careful balance between metropolitan and provincial perspectives. Here, too, Anglo-American characters and their outsider’s point of view appear to play but marginal roles in some sto- ries. In fact they are of crucial importance for the texts’ balance as they serve as countervailing forces to the French American characters and their regional- ist perspectives. “The Locket,” for example, set during and after the Civil War, alludes to rather uneasy relationships between French and Anglo-Americans as illustrated by a conversation between Confederate soldiers around a campfire. Nick, an Anglo-American soldier, comments on an object Edmond, his French American comrade, is wearing around his neck: “Taint no gal’s picture,” offered the man at the fire. […] “That’s a charm; some kind of hoodoo business that one o’ them priests gave him to keep him out o’ trouble. I know them Cath’lics. That’s how come Frenchy got permoted an never got a scratch sence he’s been in the ranks. Hey French! aint I right?” (Chopin 560) Nick’s deprecating remarks about religious and specifically French Catholic supersti- tion counterbalance Edmond’s faith in the object. The second part of the story, while showing how “‘miracles might happen’” and thus seemingly affirming Edmond’s perspective (564), is narrated in such an unrealistic and dream-like manner— for example, Octavie feels “as if she had passed into a stage of existence which was […]

17 Possibly an allusion to the town of Coushatta in the Red River Parish of eastern Louisi- ana, about forty miles from Cloutierville, where Chopin lived from 1879 to 1884. 420 Florian Freitag more poignant and real than life” (564)—that one may actually wonder whether the lovers’ reunion is anything but a mourning fiancée’s or a dying soldier’s fantasy. “The Maid of Saint Phillippe,” Chopin’s only attempt at writing historical fic- tion, also deals with war and its repercussions. The story is set in and partly told from the perspective of a small French settlement east of the Mississippi short- ly after the area had been ceded to England following the ; Anglo-Americans make only a dim appearance on the horizon as a wave of settlers slowly taking possession of the formerly French territory: “‘They have crossed the great mountains and are coming from the east’” (117). However, the regionalist perspective of the French American inhabitants of Saint Phillippe, who view the Anglo-Americans as foreign invaders, is counterbalanced by the story’s metropolitan portrayal of the French as regional characters who are ulti- mately unable and unwilling to offer a response other than retreat from the rising demographic and political force of the Anglo-Americans. The balanced perspective of Chopin’s ‘rencontres américaines’ becomes even more explicit in those stories where, as in “A Gentleman,” Anglo- and French Americans and their respective views are directly confronted with each other. “A No-Account Creole,” “The Gentleman from New Orleans,” “A Matter of Preju- dice,” “The Wood-Choppers,” and “Mme Célestin’s Divorce” all place such di- rect confrontations in the context of romantic relationships between Anglo- and French Americans. Thus the heated encounter between Euphrasie’s rivals—the Anglo-American Wallace Offdean and Placide Santien, the “no-account Creole” of the eponymous story—juxtaposes Santien’s regionalist dismissal of Offdean as a “‘d---- Yankee’” and Offdean’s metropolitan view of himself as a morally superior person (Chopin 88), who is both called upon and able to teach the Creole “how to love a woman” (101). Likewise, the story plays off its local-color depiction of French Creoles as a declining economic force in postbellum Louisiana and as a cultural group mired in its old-fashioned codes of honor and prejudices against its resistant portrayal of Santien’s ability to reform. At the beginning of the story, Offdean, rep- resenting the Santiens’ New Orleans creditors Harding & Offdean, not only takes control of the management of the estate, but ultimately decides to buy the planta- tion (97), thus demonstrating his economic superiority over the French American who “tried to keep a desultory foothold upon the land which had been his and his forefathers’” (82). In fact, all of the French Americans in the story are portrayed as quintessential local-color characters, possibly quaint but ultimately “anachronis- tic” and indeed out of place in the new South (Ewell 56): Santien needs to be taught that in a modern, civilized society one must control both passions and instincts and not resort to acts of vigilantism, as he attempts to do and as his brother Grégoire does in At Fault and “In Sabine.” The Creole Mme Carantelle is also out of place in the new South, described as a “delightfully conservative old lady who had not ‘crossed Canal Street’ for many years” (Chopin 92).18 This metropolitan view of the French Americans is counterbalanced, however, by the portrayal of Placide’s

18 Canal Street has been widely assumed to have formed the dividing line between New Orleans’s Creole and American populations. Joseph G. Tregle Jr. argues, however, that this “impression in truth, rests less on fact than on the mistaken acceptance of the municipality boundary line as a population demarcation” (156). Rencontres américaines 421 highly dignified exit from the story, which shows that he has learned his lesson well and, hence, refuses to depict regional characters as static and unchanging. Not only does he, as Euphrasie puts it, save her from sin (102), he also saves her reputation by telling everyone that it was she who dismissed him. Similarly, in “The Gentleman from New Orleans,” French American Thomas (Buddie) Bénoîte must learn that his prejudices against Anglo-Americans (and more specifically, against his Anglo-American in-laws) form an obstacle to the hap- piness of his wife Millie. The learning process is not directly initiated or triggered by an Anglo-American in this story as it is in “A No-Account Creole,” but rather by Sophronie and the mistaken identity of the “gentleman from New Orleans” to which sufficient space is devoted to give the story an overall comic and light-hearted tone. It perfectly fits this tone that in this story violence is merely imagined and the roles are reversed: rather than threatening the Anglo-American with a pistol as Placide does, Buddie “felt like placing a pistol in Mr. Parkins’ hand and requesting that gentleman to use him as a target” (Chopin 637). Nevertheless, Buddie, like Placide, still needs to learn how to love a (his) woman; ultimately he, too, learns his lesson well. “The Wood-Choppers” repeats this theme with inversed gender roles, for here it is the French American Léontine who needs to overcome her reservations toward strangers and against the Anglo-American concept of neighborliness in order to learn how to love a man, namely, the Anglo-American George Willet. The story is particularly interesting because, from the very start, Léontine’s nar- row, regionalist view of Anglo-Americans and their customs is played off not only against Willet’s metropolitan point of view (according to which such gentlemanly deeds as chopping wood for a strange lady should be perfectly acceptable for a Creole). Léontine’s point of view is also contrasted with that of her mother, who, quite in contrast to most other elderly French American women in Chopin’s short fiction, has no reservations whatsoever against Willet and considers him “a gentle- man and a man of noble heart” and even “a noble soul” (Chopin 678).19 Not so Mme Carambeau in “A Matter of Prejudice”: like Mme Carantelle in “A No-Account Creole,” this elderly Creole “had not been in the American quar- ter [of New Orleans] since the town had taken on this new and splendid growth” (Chopin 287).20 Yet like Placide, Buddie, and Léontine, she is ultimately able to reform. For the sake of her granddaughter, Carambeau overcomes not only her self-imposed isolation and insularity as symbolized by her “fortress-like” (Ewell 96) French Quarter mansion with its “impenetrable board fence” (Chopin 282), but also conquers her prejudices against Anglo-Americans in general as well as her reservations about her Anglo-American daughter-in-law in particular. Social and linguistic understanding go hand in hand here, for by the end of the story it is by no means, as Seyersted suggests, only the “old Française [who] decides to learn English” (81); Carambeau also intends to teach her granddaughter to speak

19 Tiffany Duet’s argument that Willet imposes a traditional female gender role on Léon- tine, by contrast, fails to take into account the specific intercultural dynamics of Chopin’s ‘ren- contres américaines’ (cf. Duet 58). 20 Crossing—or not crossing—(imaginative) geographical boundaries is an important motif in Chopin’s short fiction, not only in urban, but also in rural contexts; see, for instance, “Beyond the Bayou.” 422 Florian Freitag

French, thus inducing a process of reciprocal learning. While “A Matter of Preju- dice” criticizes the Creole’s narrow, regionalist view of Anglo-Americans (see the comical description of Carambeau’s highly ceremonial visits to her son’s home and to one of the ‘American’ churches), it counterbalances this critique by stress- ing her ability to change and to even poke fun at herself: “‘I have no prejudices,’” she maintains at the end of the story, “‘I am not like my son. Henri was always a stubborn boy. Heaven only knows how he came by such a character!’” (288). “Madame Célestin’s Divorce,” finally, depicts a French American attempting (like Evariste in “A Gentleman”) to resist the patronizing, metropolitan attitudes of an Anglo-American who (like Mr. Sublet) professes to be an expert in his field. Unlike the local-color artist, however, who is interested in drawing the Cajun’s picture for both artistic and commercial reasons, the nature of Lawyer Paxton’s interest in pleading Madame Célestin’s case is of much less a professional than a private nature. Indeed, although he may suggest “in his deliberate, calculating, lawyer-tone” that she file for divorce from her husband (Chopin 276), his heart beats “in a strangely irregular manner” when he approaches her house (278); he clearly wishes Madame Célestin to be free for himself. But while he manages to dispel her cultural inhibitions about the concept of divorce—she is willing to defy her Creole friends and family as well as the —he is utterly powerless against the French American woman’s emotions and passion: whether or not Monsieur Célestin may actually keep his promise of turning “‘ova a new leaf’” (279), the “unusually rosy” glow of Madame Célestin’s face gives away the true secret of her marriage. And yet, “Madame Célestin’s Divorce” is neither a story about “marital breakdown,” as Alice Hall Petry suggests (8), nor one about the “primitive passions” that Chopin, in her review of Crumbling Idols, insists are of so much importance to a writer (693). Instead, the story is about the careful balance between patronizing, metropolitan, and resistant, provincial attitudes to- ward the local, between Lawyer Paxton’s progressive and seemingly rational atti- tude and Madame Célestin’s rather impulsive approach to the Célestin marriage, and also (again, as in “A Gentleman”) between the narrator’s critique of Paxton’s disrespect and the gentle satirizing of the French American woman’s naïveté. In “Dead Men’s Shoes” Paxton again fails to convince his client to follow his pro- fessional counsel. Ironically, however, Gilma Germain’s decision to waive his right to his inheritance from “le vieux Gamiche” is based neither on Creole temper and impulsivity (as in “Madame Célestin’s Divorce”) nor on his sympathy for Gamiche’s poor relatives who have taken possession of the latter’s plantation immediately after his death; Gilma’s decision is based solely on his refusal to follow Paxton’s advice to step into the eponymous “dead men’s shoes” (Chopin 424). Rather than stride “down the beaten footpath” of this ultimately “intoxicating but depressing dream” (420, 425), Gilma chooses the American Dream and rides, like a typical Western hero, into a future of his own making. “Dead Men’s Shoes” thus skillfully plays off Paxton’s patronizing attitude against Gilma’s resistant approach toward the latter’s future, counterbalancing a critique of the irrationality of turning down a financially secure life with the celebration of the desire to make it on one’s own. The title character of “Mamouche” had already appeared in “The Lilies,” where he had inadvertently initiated the cross-cultural encounter between Mr. Rencontres américaines 423

Billy and Marie Louise Angèle. But where “The Lilies” privileges a French American’s regionalist perspective, “Mamouche” maintains a delicate balance between the Anglo-American21 Doctor John-Luis’s patronizing approach and the little Cajun scalawag’s resistant attitudes. Like Mamzelle Aurélie at the end of “Regret,” Doctor John-Luis realizes that he needs a young companion to provide special meaning not only in his unfulfilled present and future life, but above all to his past: “[The boy] seemed to be the incarnation of unspoken hopes; the real- ization of vague and fitful memories of the past” (Chopin 274). At the same time, John-Luis considers Mamouche in serious need of a ‘civilizing’ education and in- tends to train him “to work, to study, to lead a decent, honest life” (272)—in short, to recreate the boy in his own image. Mamouche, however, refuses to be exploited either as a source of fulfillment for John-Luis’s life or as a measuring rod against which the Anglo-American may construct himself as culturally superior. The two reach an agreement at the end of the story, but this conclusion again plays off a lo- cal-color portrayal of Mamouche’s ‘naïve’ concepts of religion and sin—rendered even more culturally ‘other’ by being told in the vernacular of John-Luis’s African American servant—against a critique of John-Luis’s inability to see anything in the boy but a living reminder of a lost love. Like “Mamouche,” “The Return of Alcibiade” plays upon and repeats specific motifs and elements from “The Lilies,” but also offers a careful balance between metropolitan, local-color and regionalist, resistant perspectives. Like the planter in “The Lilies,” the commission merchant in “The Return” is so obsessed with his business that he intends to spend Christmas on a business trip. And just as Mr. Billy is amazed and eventually charmed by Marie Louise’s gift of lilies, Fred Bart- ner is “distracted with admiration” (Chopin 253), probably for Esmée Ba herself, but especially for her unshakable faith and trust in the Blessed Virgin and in the fact that God will provide. What Bartner initially considers both unreasonably naïve and even dishonest—for him, “truthfulness was a habit as well as a prin- ciple” (251)—eventually allows old Jean Ba to see his last wish fulfilled and to die in peace. And while the text thus criticizes Bartner’s (initial) metropolitan per- spective on Esmée’s idea of truthfulness and her religious faith, it simultaneously writes off the plantation and its inhabitants into the timeless region of local col- or.22 It is only after he has left the sensual, dream-like world of the old estate, with its delicious food and smells of magnolias and roses, and returns to the ‘outside’ world of railroads, business, and commerce, with its sounds of the “shrill whistles of steam cotton-gins,” that Bartner realizes he “had n’t thought” of the fact that he “lost” an entire day (254).

21 Carr identifies Doctor John-Luis as a Creole (55). Sometimes it is not only the ethnic (see especially “Désirée’s Baby,” but also “Ozème’s Holiday”), but also the cultural affiliation of Chopin’s characters that appear somewhat ambiguous. 22 Of course, one may argue that Jean Ba’s death clearly marks the passage of time and thus locates even the Creole plantation within the realm of temporality. Correlated as it is with the setting of the sun (253-54), however, death is portrayed here as but one point in the eternal and timeless cycle of day and night and life and death. 424 Florian Freitag

Conclusion

“The Return of Alcibiade” is the only story of those analyzed here that uses the motif of the travel accident to initiate or motivate a cross-cultural encoun- ter between Anglo- and French Americans. As noted earlier, Stephanie Palmer identified this motif as one of local-color literature’s “many methods of bringing together strangers divided by class, race, ethnicity, or gender” (20). Interestingly, Palmer does not include “geographical origins” on her list; one of her main argu- ments is that in critical discourse about local color, “the word ‘region’ is often used” when some other category such as “class” would be more appropriate (9). And indeed, with respect to their Southern geographical origins—Fred Bartner is from New Orleans and the Bas live near Cloutierville in upper Louisiana (Chopin 249)—the Anglo- and French Americans in “The Return” are not strangers. All of Chopin’s ‘rencontres américaines,’ in fact, portray encounters between indi- viduals who may be divided by ethno-cultural affiliation as well as, occasionally, by gender, age, and class (although the latter categories are not conclusive), but are also united by their geographical origins: they are all native Southerners. The only exception here is Mr. Sublet from “A Gentleman from Bayou Têche,” who is probably from the North. Nevertheless, like “A Gentleman,” Chopin’s stories consistently associate Anglo-Americans (despite their Southern origins) with a metropolitan, local-color perspective, whereas French Americans—Cajuns and Creoles—are typically associated with a resistant, regionalist perspective. More specifically then, the ‘rencontres américaines’ juxtapose Southern Anglo-Ameri- can agents of metropolitanism with Southern French American agents of region- alism and thus employ the category of cultural affiliation rather than categories of race, class, gender, age, or geographical origins to demarcate the dividing line between local colorists and regionalists. Moreover, the stories confirm this as- sociation of Anglo- and French Americans with diametrically opposed points of view by continuously playing off regionalist critiques of Anglo-Americans against metropolitan depictions of French Americans, sometimes privileging one point of view, but more often skillfully balancing the two perspectives. As Tom Lutz has noted, both Kaplan’s and Brodhead’s description of local col- or as a literature of metropolitan cultural imperialism and Fetterley and Pryse’s readings of local color as a literature of regional resistance fall short as explana- tions “not because both are wrong, but because both are equally incomplete. […] [E]ach gets at precisely half the full picture” (27-28). In order to get the ‘full pic- ture’ of Chopin’s ‘rencontres américaines’ and, hence, to fully understand the art of her local color the critic must put the two halves together.

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