International Journal of Integrative Humanism Vol. 12, No. 1, March. 2020 Aesthetic Significance and Biographical Signposting: Kate Chopin’s “The Story of an Hour” and the Release of Patriarchal Grief David Toh Kusi (PhD)1 Amandine Ankainkom Zetang-Jua2 Higher Teacher Training College (ENS) Prince George’s Community College Maryland, Yaoundé USA University of Yaoundé I Email: [email protected] Email: [email protected] Tel: +237677847181 Tel: 0012403603879 Abstract Kate Chopin in “The Story of an Hour” achieves an artistic experience sustained by characters imbued with personal, symbolic, mythical and philosophic realities that are telling of the author’s perception of life and quest for aesthetic self-assertion. As a female writer in the late 19th century American society fraud with patriarchal prejudices on the woman folk, Chopin needed a voice and a style that is unique. By sublimating her experiences in art, she attained her objectives where she establishes ambivalence in her character paintings and subject matter. Even though traces of real- life experiences are discernible in this story, she paints philosophic and controversial characters who are symbolic incarnation of multiple personalities and important figures whose lives like her father, mother and her husband, haunted her for the most part of her life. A psycho-biographical reading of the text, therefore, permits us to perceive “The Story of an Hour” as a signpost to the author’s struggles and psychological expression of her artistic cravings. Key words: Pyscho-biography, signposting, artistic quest, “The Story of an Hour”, patriarchy, woman, freedom. Introduction Kate Chopin’s veiled personalities in her works attracted multiple interpretations by critics who read her works at the backdrop of beliefs in the 19th century that the male writers excelled in writing more than the woman because they eschewed domesticity. Gabrielle Baldwin says Chopin wrote stories of love, marriage and domestic life (often with a Creole flavour), presumably for two reasons; that was what her audience wanted and that was what she knew about. He quotes The Awakening where Chopin succeeds in establishing the patterns of seduction - the temptations, the longings, frustrations and punishments - which the critic, Leslie Fiedler sees as the central concerns of the sentimental novel (qtd. in Baldwin 53). In order to highlight the important place female writers like Kate Chopin occupied in American Literature, Baldwin traces subversive tendencies that have characterised female writers in the American literary landscape from the 19th century. The heroin, Edna Pontellier, in The Awakening, is a controversial figure as depicted by Baldwin and also symbolises such growing detachment from a regulated patriarchal society. Even though from a formalist, deconstructionist or structuralist perspective Baldwin captures the ambivalence in the way Chopin presents her character, Edna, he fails to perceive that in this ambivalent painting, Chopin unravels multiple incarnation of personalities in a single character which she, in “The Story of an Hour”, succeeds to forestall. Chopin’s enigma in character description requires heterogeneous critical insights to determine not only the author’s inner wrangling but the “selfs” she creates in her characters who capture the woes of the persistently searching mind of the late 19th century American woman fraud with frustration, betrayal, and struggle; unrequited love, displacement, emotional distress, illusion, and thwarted romance which reveal the layers of isolation suffered by female protagonists in Chopin’s fiction as depicted by A. J. Scopino, Jr. (237). This is because as Cynthia Griffin Wolff 1 International Journal of Integrative Humanism Vol. 12, No. 1, March. 2020 states, a majority of Chopin’s fictions are set in worlds where stability or permanence is a precarious state; where change is always threatened by the vagaries of impassive fate and by the assaults of potentially ungovernable individual passions, or merely by the inexorable passage of time (Wolff). As a result, Wolf says Chopin construes existence as necessarily uncertain. According to her, to live is to be vulnerable; and the artist who would capture the essence of life will turn his attention to those intimate and timeless moments when the comforting illusion of certainty is unbalanced by those forces that may disrupt and destroy (Wolf). The vagaries of impassive fate and the ungovernable passions mentioned here by Wolf have inadvertently shaped the fate of the woman in the American society. Chopin, like an artist who grows in a very hostile community with numerous prejudices against the woman, sees beyond the boundaries of these limitations and bestows a sense of an ominous presence of the self that is not only symbolic but mythical, and philosophic. In relation to Chopin’s philosophical ideas, Xuemei Wan in Kate “Chopin’s View on Death and Freedom in ‘The Story of an Hour’” concludes with the opinion that Chopin’s philosophical ideas of life and death are clearly reflected in “The Story of Hour”, which have transcended the irreconcilable conflict between life and death. According to him, they echo the philosophical thought of Zhuangzi, ancient Chinese thinker, and Martin Heideggar (170). This confirms his earlier discourse in the same article that in Mrs. Mallard’s psychological state, we could find that her emotional change must be described as the development of an increasingly resistant barrier between the real external world and that world which is most authentic in her experience; the inner world of her fantasies. Though in her deep heart there is an ardent longing for freedom and for female self- assertion, and beneath her reserve lies a strain of romanticism and rebelliousness, Wan says, “she has no chance to release from what she evidently felt as repression or frustration, thereby freeing forces that had lain dormant in her” (168). These forces that had lain dominant in her are what in this article are termed as patriarchal grief which she forcefully sublimates in “The Story of an Hour”. The unresolved mystery in her just as in the inner beings of the traditional American woman are the strongest impulses, passions and conflicts she incarnates in her characters. These shifting tendencies which enhance Chopin’s aesthetic significance and biographical signposting remind us in “The Story of an Hour”, as Wan puts it that all through her life, she must have been constantly shifting to adjust to the loss of her family members such as her father (in 1855), great-grandmother, brother, grandmother, her husband (in 1883), and her mother, and to her changing place in her personal community (Wan 168). Some major critics, who have handled important ideas ranging from societal and patriarchal bondages, racial malaise in the American South, the nostalgia and the numerous paradoxes against which the woman had to survive in the American society in the 19th century which Chopin has enigmatically demonstrated in her works are Karen Simons, Stalina Veeramankai Yoharatnam, Teresa Gibert, Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock, David Z. Wehner, and Iulia Andreea Milică. Loyal to their critical and historical backgrounds, these critics have no doubt captured the resilience, subversive undertones, and the ambiguities that have made Chopin’s narratives artistically grounded in American literary heritage. The critics succeed to project Chopin as the female write who penetrates and dissolves the hidden worlds of the woman and empowers her with ideologies, concrete beliefs, and philosophical self-assertiveness. However, none of them examines Chopin’s works from a psycho-biographical perspective as applied in the “The Story of an Hour” in this article. Therefore, a brief discussion of key terms or theoretical concepts like Psycho-biography, and a brief presentation of the author’s life lay the groundwork for a proper understanding of the discussions and critical perspectives adopted in this article. 2 International Journal of Integrative Humanism Vol. 12, No. 1, March. 2020 Brief discussion of key terms or theoretical concepts Psycho-biography originates from Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic criticism where he developed various models of the human psyche consisting of the conscious and the unconscious (Bressler 125). Freud believed that the unconscious is a dynamic system that not only contains our biographical memories but also stores our suppressed and unresolved conflicts (ibid). When related to artistic creation, Freud had maintained that an author’s chief motivation for writing is to gratify some secrete desire, some forbidden wish that probably developed during the author’s infancy and was immediately suppressed and dumped in the unconscious (Bressler 137). To him, the outward manifestation of this suppressed wish becomes the literary work itself, and that the literary work is indeed the author’s dream or fantasy (ibid). However, Freud believed that the unconscious houses humanity’s two basic instincts characterised as eros, or sexual instinct, later referred to as the libido, and the destructive or the aggressive instinct (Bressler 127). As a result, other psychoanalyst like Carl Gustav Jung, and post- Freudian psychoanalyst like Jacque Lacan, Leon Edel and M. H. Abrams have not only questioned Freud’s models but have added more critical impetus to the understanding of human character, since Freud based all human motivations, whether conscious or unconscious, on sexual drives. Leon Edel, one of the critics, argued