Kate Chopin's at Fault: the Usefulness of Louisiana French for the Imagination
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WINFRIED FLUCK Kate Chopin's AtFault: The Usefulness of Louisiana French for the Imagination In a recent essay on The Awakening, Elaine Showalter describes three major stages of American women's literature in the 19th century - the domestic novel, local color fiction, and the so-called "New Woman fiction" - in order to link Kate Chopin's outstanding book with a tradition of women's writing. However, the final conclusion of her useful contextualization is that there exists no significant continuity between these traditions and Chopin's novel so that The Awakening stands apart as a "solitary book".1 Since Showalter is exclusively interested in a female tradition, she leaves out the literary movement in which the domestic and local color traditions were carried on, trans formed, as well as enriched, namely, the realistic novel of the period. Kate Chopin, as is well known, was strongly influenced by writers like Maupassant, Flaubert, and other realists. Realism, I suggest, is there fore one of the "missing links" that helps to explain her major work. The other is Chopin's own early writing which is closely tied to the three literary traditions outlined by Showalter and thus demonstrates a continuity in the development of her work that is often obscured. Such a denial of continuity is a logical result, one may argue, of the main function which the rediscovery of Chopin's work has come to serve in current cultural debates: The emphasis on continuities would undermine the pleasing myth of a radical break and would therefore question Chopin's usefulness as a role model for a radical counter tradition. As a consequence, discussions of Chopin's major work, The Awakening, focus again and again on the question whether the book can be considered a truly radical novel, especially in view of its ambivalent ending. Recently, such doubts about Chopin's radicalism have in creased under the influence of poststructuralism's critique of repre sentation. Thus, Michael T. Gilmore points out that Chopin's feminist narrative marks a turn toward the anti-naturalist, self-referential agenda of modernism as a liberating mode of behavior in life and art. Yet neither Edna nor Chopin achieves such liberation and not simply because of the heroine's suicide. Both women remain trapped in habits of thought they oppose, conceptual systems that prove so pertinacious thatlhey saturate the very act of opposition2 247 WINFRIED FLUCK KATE CHOPIN'S AT FAULT Is it possible, one would like to know, to escape such complicity? standing not only the course Chopin pursued in her writing but also How can one liberate oneself entirely from existing "habits of the problems she ran into. thoughts", since liberation necessarily implies reference to the pheno One of the reasons why literary criticism has not been able to do menon from which one wants to disengage oneself? In view of this much with At Fault may be that, generically speaking, the novel paradox, it seems more plausible to assume that literary texts (as, combines elements of all three of the traditions Showalter mentions. In indeed, all acts of world making) are always and inevitably negotia its setting as well as in its description of plantation life, the novel is tions with given ways of making sense of the world. I have tried to clearly a specimen of local color fiction; in its "moral" project, the provide an example of such ongoing negotiations by tracing the "trans education of a male to moral discipline and thus to a higher state of gressive impulse" through various phases of Chopin's literary pro civilization, the novel is still working within the tradition of the do duction, thus linking The Awakening with a whole body of short fiction mestic novel; and yet, in its amazingly explicit suggestions of other from which it is usually separated or with which it is at any rate not possibilities of female behavior, it also shows first hints of a 'New 3 meaningfully connected. What I want to do in this complementary Woman'-perspective.5 Although these three generic levels clearly over essay is to provide another case study for a view of fiction as a form of lap in the text and cannot always be neatly separated, they nevertheless cultural negotiation by drawing on Kate Chopin's first novel, At Fault constitute three different, often contradictory, perspectives and should (1890), which is one of her earliest literary works, written after her be kept apart in a discussion of the novel. The uneasy coexistence of husband and her mother had died and after she had taken up writing these levels provides one important explanation for the continuing fiction. As Per Seyersted and others have pointed out, Chopin sub difficulties critics have had with At Fault. Because of the text's mitted the novel for publication but was unable to find a publisher and tentative, undecided mixture of several generic codes, readers had to publish it privately. Not until the edition of her collected works obviously cannot easily determine what attitude to take toward it. by Seyersted in 1969 was it widely accessible.4 This provides another Most of the early aspects of the novel point in the direction of local chapter in a, by now, familiar story of neglect of her work, but while color fiction. At Fault begins with the description of a Louisiana the balance has been adjusted with regards to many of her other works, plantation owned and run by Therese Lafirme, who has undergone a At Fault has found relatively little attention. The reason is not hard to fate many of Chopin's heroines experience, namely, the recent death of guess: Compared with The Awakening and most of her other work, her husband. As in most other instances of this kind in Chopin's work, Chopin's first novel appears rather conventional, both in terms of although presented here in a more subdued and "conventional" subject matter and literary form. The book has, in other words, little or manner, this enforced separation is not only conceived as loss, but also no usefulness for the purpose of radical self-definition. What it can do, as the opening up of new possibilities - a point of departure that links however, is to illustrate in an interesting way a negotiation between the novel with later texts and identifies it as an early version of a dominant cultural values and genre patterns, on the one hand, and a constellation and conflict to which Chopin returned time and again. wish for individual self-assertion on the other, which Chopin pursued This scenario of a "new-found-freedom" and the ensuing problem of throughout her literary career. At the same time, At Fault can illu how to use it, is, however, still presented in a fictionally much more minate the difficulties Chopin encountered at the beginning of this disguised form than in later texts by Chopin. The main difference lies search - difficulties which made ever new renegotiations necessary for in the heroine Therese Lafirme, a thirty-five-year old Creole woman. which fiction provided a welcome space of experimentation. In this As mistress of Place-du-Bois she is, from the start, placed in a position exploration by means of fiction, Louisiana French played a crucial role. to enjoy her independence and to assert it almost as a side-effect of her Thus a discussion of Chopin's first novel can also help us specify the professional tasks. Thus, her behavior has not yet any elements of uses and complex function which the signifier "French" plays in her programmatic self-assertion, because the novel has put her in a position work. A clarification of the role of this "French" element, most often of (social and moral) mastery from the start. Neither is her inde represented by Creole culture in her early work, is crucial for under- pendence still untried and untested when the novel opens, nor are 248 249 WINFRIED FLUCK KATE CHOPIN'S AT FAULT there any obstacles that she has to overcome in asserting her inde Her roots in Creole culture provide Therese with a broader and more pendence. Quite on the contrary, the novel, in its beginning, unfolds as liberal understanding of life and thus serve as an important ingredient a pleasant daydream scenario of mastery. of her superiority. Therese's activities are all designed to present the image of a "com The Yankee Hosmer, on the other hand, is stiff, silent, and, at least plete woman who knows who she is, what she wants, and where she when we first meet him, engrossed in work to such an extent that he belongs". (Skaggs, 75) What divides Edna Pontellier in The Awakening is has to be tactfully initiated into the forgotten pleasures of life by still almost effortlessly united in Therese. Whereas Edna's identity is Therese. This pattern is repeated in the contrast between Therese and split into "that outward existence which conforms, the inward life Hosmer's sister Melicent as well as his fonner wife Fanny. When Fanny which questions" (Chopin, 893), Therese does not have to make any enters the alien world of Creole culture, she shrinks from this world painful decisions because the novel has put her in a position in which and retreats to her own private realm of perverted pleasure, her she seems to be able to get everything she wants. If the book is not to alcoholism. The superficial society girl Melicent, on the other hand, be suffocated by the perfect daydream quality of this fantasy of a indulges in the attractions of the new realm, until she is almost over "perfect" woman, however, something has to happen that will chal whelmed by its intensity and depth of feeling.