The short fiction work of turn-of-the-century author Kate Chopin regularly deals with the recurring themes of womanhood, agency and identity, usually telling stories of women trapped in stifling lives due to the patriarchal expectations placed on them to live a certain way. Through these explorations of gender roles, particularly through marriage and motherhood, Chopin uses these central themes to explore the imbalances found between men and women in terms of power and agency. At all turns, the protagonists of Chopin’s stories must make unconventional, taboo decisions to reject the white, male-dominated judgments and expectations placed on them. Two of Chopin’s short stories, “Desiree’s Baby” and “The Story of an Hour,” use the literary elements of style, irony and symbolism to elucidate the fleeting and ephemeral nature of human emotion and relationships, as well as the frustration women feel at being trapped in lifeless situations not of their own making, and hoping to find a way out.
Overall, both works can be read through a feminist lens to demonstrate the ways in which women were subjugated in the world of 19th-century aristocratic American society. Louise Mallard, the protagonist of “The Story of an Hour,” is a kept woman treated with tremendous vulnerability, despite her own desire to use the alleged death of her husband to live a freer life. Chopin speaks through her characters to complain about the limited agency women are given in society due to low expectations: “There would be no powerful will bending hers in that blind persistence with which men and women believe they have a right to impose a private will upon a fellow-creature” (Chopin 352). The titular Desiree of “Desiree’s Baby,” meanwhile, must constantly defend herself against accusations that she is partly-black, which compounds her existing lack of agency as a woman with the cultural stigma of being black - something heavily frowned upon in upper-crust Louisiana society. The unspoken tension of Armand’s accusations make her “miserable enough to die,” much like Louise, making her yet another tragic victim of the imperious demands of men within patriarchal society (Chopin 243).
Chopin’s Style and Assumptions
Kate Chopin’s florid, malleable writing style is a fundamental element of what makes both “Desiree’s Baby” and “The Story of an Hour” work as elegant works of feminist critique. Overall, Chopin utilizes many elements of Gothic and fairy-tale storytelling to set up the world of both stories, setting up simple characters and their journeys in an ornate, upper-class world that is ultimately shown to be empty and unfulfilling because of societal pressures and norms. Evaluating Chopin’s use of semantics in both stories, she uses inference quite well to elaborate on the ways in which cultural assumptions are placed on (and performed by) the main characters (Mayer 94).
In “The Story of an Hour,” Chopin informs the audience in the first second that the husband of protagonist Louise Mallard has died, her friend Richards inferring that he “had been in the newspaper office when intelligence of the railroad disaster was received, with Brently Mallard’s name leading the list of ‘killed’ (Chopin 352). However, the overall thrust of the story is that, upon hearing that her husband has died, Louise begins to at once mourn hysterically and, eventually, begin feeling a lightness in her heart about the potential for living life outside of her lifeless, loveless marriage (Jamil 217). As all characters are mixed up about the truth, and make assumptions based on what they hope to be true, Chopin’s style maximizes the poetry of her writing style to maximize these assumptions – Louise thinks optimistically about her life without her husband, while her friends and neighbors confuse her altered state with tremendous grief and sadness (Liu & Wang 20). Chopin’s style contributes to this by speaking obliquely about the truth of these assumptions, letting the reader live in them with the characters for the moment so they themselves can be satisfied with them.
Irony
Chopin’s style is also dependent on a number of shocking reveals and revelations, which come to serve as ironic endings that surprise and turn the audience’s own assumptions on their heads, as well as point out the ultimate rightness of the protagonists’ feminist perspective. In “The Story of an Hour,” Louise’s aforementioned heart condition ends up killing her; calling it “the joy that kills” works ironically to imply that her terror at seeing that her husband has not been killed has instead killed her, in defiance of patriarchal expectations over how a wife should act about her husband (Mayer 95). Rather than getting to live the life of freedom that she yearned for, Louise is tragically killed by the presence of the man whose death she relished.
In “Desiree’s Baby,” the ancestry of the main character, an orphaned woman who gives birth to a mixed-race child, is called into question in a quintessentially fairy-tale fashion. The love story between Desiree and Armond Aubigney is a classic tale of love at first sight, but Chopin turns this fantastic story on its head by offering a dour, gritty setting and ending, as befitting Chopin’s own Gothic style. The darkness of the story and its setting is cemented at every corner, with Armand’s plantation giving Madam V shivers, making it “a sad looking place, which for many years had not known the gentle presence of a mistress” (Chopin 243). Armand himself is a classically brooding Gothic character, as he asserts at all points that he is in the right and that Desiree should obey him at all turns. These Gothic twists on the traditional fairy tale structure is a fundamental component of Chopin’s style in this particular story, and contributes greatly to the perception that the women in patriarchal society are beset on all sides by oppressive men and atmospheres (Fluck 152).
This kind of ironic juxtaposition between assumption and truth is also the center of “Desiree’s Baby,” in which Desiree’s beau Armand and the rest of society presumes that Desiree’s half-black baby is due to Desiree’s presumed black ancestry, which she denies. Armand, ostensibly the romantic fairy-tale prince of the story, quickly rejects her: “he no longer loved her, because of the unconscious injury she had brought upon his home and his name” by giving him a black baby (Chopin 244). It is only after losing Desiree and the baby, however, that it is revealed that Armand was the one who had half-black ancestry on his mother’s side. This creates an ironic twist on the presumed responsibility of Desiree for the blackness of their child – a subject which brings her considerable criticism and social pressure from the rest of the patriarchal white society around her.
In both this and “The Story of an Hour,” these ironic misunderstandings lead to the death or disappearance of the main character – Louise dies because her hysterical excitement at her husband’s demise is undercut by his sudden reappearance, and Desiree makes the choice to walk off into the bayou with her child, symbolically rejecting the patriarchal world that will not believe her story or accept her in less-than-ideal circumstances. In this respect, Chopin uses this irony to point out that the ordinary cultural assumptions patriarchal society places on them (that Louise should be beside herself with grief, or that Desiree is blamed for their mixed-race baby) are not only disastrous, but ultimately proven incorrect.
Symbolism
As a fundamental part of Chopin’s Gothic style, symbols are a common tool to convey theme and mood. The stone pillar in which Desiree is found is the gateway to a plantation, symbolically linking her with the legacy of racism and prejudice, and also makes her representative of the overall injustice and discrimination beset on minorities as a result of white hegemonic racism (Wolff 125). The bayou that Desiree and her baby disappear in stands in for the area’s Creole heritage, and of her rejecting the first-world aristocracy that Armand represents. As a result, Armand uses fire to literally and symbolically purge Desiree from his life, also showing the trend of white male erasure of women’s and minorities’ agency.
Symbols are used frequently throughout “The Story of an Hour,” as well, despite being a little more naturalistic in style. The room in which Louise Mallard mopes and mourns her husband is symbolic of the stifling nature of her life, particularly with him; as she thinks more about a life without him, Louise starts to imagine traveling and living her own life, escaping that same room. The neighbors and friends of Louise also work symbolically to represent the cultural expectations placed on Louise as a widow; her sister Josephine spies on her “kneeling before the closed door with her lips to the keyhole,” the keyhole standing in for the constant gaze of society on Louise in her time of grief (Chopin 354). Louise herself is also “afflicted with a heart trouble,” which both explains her eventual death of “heart disease – of joy that kills,” but also of her less-than-perfect marriage to her husband (Chopin 352, 354). Louise’s affliction of the heart is heavily symbolic, the heart being strongly associated with love and passion, while it rises and grows due to a belief that the man she is supposed to love is no longer there.
Conclusion
Through the use of irony, style and symbolism, Kate Chopin utilizes tremendous literary style to elucidate on the themes of patriarchal oppression and subjugation of women and minorities, as well as the subversive desires of these women to escape and overcome these societal situations. Desiree in “Desiree’s Baby” is shown to be a woman who transgressively rejects the race-based discrimination and prejudice she feels is being placed on her and her baby. Louise Mallard of “Story of an Hour” similarly takes the opportunity to use her husband’s perceived death to contemplate the freedom that would come from living a life outside of his control and authority. At both turns, the women of Chopin’s stories are shown to be ironically justified or punished for their decisions, with many different aspects and events symbolizing the struggles they must face as part of their experiences as subjugated 19th-century women. Judging from the darkly subversive and rebellious actions of both Desiree and Louise Mallard in the works of Kate Chopin, the author absolutely abhorred the patriarchal systems that kept women from having total freedom, and though the most powerful gesture was to reject that system altogether – even if it meant her life and happiness.
Works Cited
Chopin, Kate. “Desiree’s Baby.” Literature and Ourselves: A Thematic Introduction for Readers
and Writers. By: Gloria Mason Henderson, Bill Day, and Sandra Stevenson Waller. 5th edition. New York: Pearson Education Inc., 2006. 328-332.
Chopin, Kate. “The Story of an Hour.” Vogue, 1894.
Fluck, Winfried. "Tentative Transgressions: Kate Chopin's Fiction as a Mode of Symbolic
Action." Studies in American Fiction 10.2 (1982): 151-171.
Jamil, Selina S. “Emotions in ‘The Story of an Hour’.” Explicator (2009): 215-220.
Liu, Z., & Wang, N. “The Epiphany of Women’s Consciousness: A Reading of Kate Chopin’s
The Story of an Hour.” Journal of Northeastern University (Social Science) 6 (2004): 020.
Mayer, Gary H. "A Matter of behavior: a semantic analysis of five Kate Chopin stories." ETC: A
Review of General Semantics 67.1 (2010): 94-100.
Wolff, Cynthia Griffin. "Kate Chopin and the fiction of limits:" Desiree's Baby"." The Southern
Literary Journal (1978): 123-133.
