Teresa Requena Pelegrí

Enjoyment with No Guilt: Sexual Deviance in Kate Chopin’s  ‘A Lady of Bayou St. John’ and ‘The Storm’

Kate Chopin finished writing “The Storm” on July 18, 1989, while she was awaiting the publication of The Awakening.  The story conforms one her most explicit treatment of female sexual desire in the character of Calixta, a wife and a mother who has an adulterous sexual encounter with a former lover during the course of a storm. The accidental reunion of the lovers and the old memories give way to a bold move to the bedroom, “a part of the house rarely mentioned by American authors of the time” (Seyersted 165) where the sexual arousal is followed by sexual intercourse. In this way, the story traces the meeting, the arousal, the move to the bedroom, the sexual act, and closes with the two lovers going back to their lives. With a last line that rounds up all the characters’ moods -“so the storm passed and every one was happy” (931)- order is apparently restored and once more, Chopin has chosen to depict a deviant mother and wife who -like Edna before her- undergoes a sexual epiphany, “an unambigously positive release of illicit female desire” (DeKoven 221), while her husband and children are away.

The representation of female sexual desire constituted a recurrent theme in other Chopin’s texts that, apart form The Awakening, also posit female characters experiencing either an up-to-then unknown sexual attraction or an illicit pull that is directed towards a socially condemned object of desire. Like Madame Delisle, who is sexually awakened by a man who is not her husband in “A Lady at Bayou St. John” (1893); like Mildred Ormed, who is aroused by a man that belongs to a different social class in “A Shameful Affair” (1893), Calixta performs an unlawful act according to nineteenth century standards.

            The wide range of unconventional female characters that populate Chopin’s fiction and their utter attack on nineteenth century decorum seemed to be largely unnoticed by a generation of critics who mainly identified her as a local colorist for many decades. Her stories, however, shy away from what she perceived as the restricted subjects of regional writing or the female local colorists’ obsession with the past (Showalter 70-71). Actually, those stories that are most directly concerned with the expression of physical desire do not fit neatly into a local colour definition, since many do not show any specific location (Beer 41).

            Chopin’s radical redefinition of what it meant to be a woman of the fin de siècle is the theme that I intend to address in this essay in the context of different stories which treat, in different degrees, deviant female white characters belonging to different social classes whose behaviour demonstrate the persistence of desire, sexual passion and the constraints brought about by marriage in women’s lives. Chopin’s daring portrayal of alternative female roles and characters and her often explicit incorporation of female sexuality and desire as a defining trait in character—either as a controlled or ungovernable passion, but nevertheless a given—is what definitely set her apart from her contemporaries and, as Showalter has argued, made her go “boldly beyond the work of her precursors in writing about women’s longing for sexual and personal emancipation” (65). Thus, Chopin’s awareness of a sheer distance from conventional female literary models led her to learn the way to self-censorship if she wanted to accommodate both the publishers’ demands and her desire to have her stories published, 

[Chopin] did discover that she could publish stories hinting at sexual matters, for instance, but only if she placed her characters in quaint locales, and if she veiled, through vague words, what they actually did. She could write about male violence, but only if she coupled it with female self-sacrifice. And she could not sell stories in which women turned the tables, and won. (Toth 142)

            While Toth is right in pointing at the necessary disguising technique that Chopin needed to develop –a writing for eagle-eyed readers, as Melville famously expressed it– in order to present unconventional characters and behaviours, “The Storm” constitutes a clear instance of Chopin’s progressive move towards a far more unequivocal language about sex that shows no qualms about describing female bodily parts and particularly, in mentioning twice Calixta’s white breasts and the sensuality of her body as seen by Alcée,

Her lips were as red and moist as pomegranate seed. Her white neck and a glimpse of her full, firm bosom disturbed him powerfully. As she glanced up at him the fear in her liquid blue eyes had given place to a drowsy gleam that unconsciously betrayed a sensuous desire . . . . Now—well, now—her lips seemed in a manner free to be tasted, as well as her round, white throat and her whiter breasts . . . . (929)

The transgressive and lyrical sensuality of the passage is softened by the repetition of the adjective “white” that also recurs in other instances of the text to refer to Calixta’s body together with the blue angelical eyes of the lover, which imply a purity and innocence in the act. The color imagery, however, of the lips, the moisture signifying sexual arousal, and the voluptuous forms of her body leave no doubt about the nature of their passion. Chopin may be nowhere as bold in naming socially invisible female bodily parts such as breasts and making them evident erotic objects as she is in “The Storm”.

Chopin’s overt description of the female body carries on further implications.  Actually, she goes a step beyond when she relates the two lovers’ encounters in terms that identify sex as a pleasant act. Nowhere in the text is this more evident than in Chopin’s writing of the actual penetration, “when he touched her breasts they gave themselves up in quivering ecstasy, inviting his lips. Her mouth was a fountain of delight. And when he possessed her, they seemed to swoon together at the very borderland of life’s mystery” (my italics; Chopin 929). Chopin was well aware of the daring subject she was exploring since she wrote the story in her diary for what seems to have been her private enjoyment and not for publication (Seyersted 165; Toth 205). Indeed, as in other stories that Chopin wrote in the same period, Calixta refuses to comply to socially established codes of behavior by not only choosing to have an adulterous sexual encounter with a former lover -and thus controlling her sexuality- but by refusing to feel any kind of regret or guilt at the joy she feels once the real and the metaphorical storms are over. In this way, Calixta’s actions question traditional views of powerless female characters whose bodies and lives stand at the mercy of the male character’s actions.

The absence of guilt in “The Storm” and the lack of moral comment of the narrating voice on the actions problematize the presentation of Chopin’s deviant characters to a nineteenth-century audience. The utter joy at the action conscientiously performed constitute clear counter discourses to the pull forces that intended to cage women into their socially traditional domestic sphere at the end of the century. As Barbara Welter famously demonstrated in her article “The Cult of True Womanhood: 1820-1860”, part of the strategy to bring women back to their traditional roles was to deem the absence of the qualities that conformed True Womanhood as proof of being unnatural and unfeminine women. Moreover, in depicting characters who recognize and accept their socially deviant sexual desire Chopin was offering an alternative view on the ongoing pathologization of female desire and sexuality in Victorian America. In opposition to the sexual and social backlash that aimed at bringing women back into their proper domestic roles, Chopin demonstrated the persistence of desire, sexual passion and the constraints still brought about by marriage in women’s lives.

Chopin’s deviant characters, however, do not constitute her only radical achievement. The explicit incorporation of female sexuality and desire as a defining trait in character—either as a controlled or ungovernable passion, but always a given presence— with the corresponding lack of guilt conforms Chopin’s singular contribution to a vision on female sexuality that advanced twentieth-century formulations. In this sense, Calixta’s prerogative of giving full reign to her desire stands in sharp contrast to the deep transformation as regards attitudes towards sex and female sexuality in late Victorian America when the second half of the nineteenth century witnessed a progressive movement towards staunch conservative positions among male doctors. While at the beginning of the century views on female sexuality had been progressive in considering that women were capable of multiple orgasms and female frigidity was defined as pathological, such a vision changed when a True Woman was typified as sexually frigid. Sex in respectable society and in relation to female nature only performed a reproductive function. Thus, the backlash in sexual ideology as regards women served the purposes of a male establishment that strived to reassert order in the face of the impending social and economic emancipation for middle and upper-class women of the fin de siècle. As Smith-Rosenberg has explained, “the male medical vision of women’s physiology and sexuality served to reinforce a conservative view of women’s social and domestic roles” (23), in this way ensuring that women remained caged in a traditional domestic role as wives and, most important, as mothers.

The pathologization of female sexuality responded to incipient visions that posited sex as a healthy activity disengaged from reproduction and, therefore, the perpetuation of the race. The deep social anxiety that such changing thesis brought about sprang from the declining fertility rates among white marriages that had been steadily taking place since the beginning of the century. Despite correlations of such a decline with urbanization or industrialization it was clear that the reduction in offspring evidenced a greater intervention on the part of women in the control of their fertility with the use of contraceptives, abstinence or abortion as widespread practices among white middle-class women (Freedman 197). In this regard, as part of the reactionary backlash against women’s social and sexual emancipation, the Comstock Laws were passed in 1873 making it illegal to send any information on birth control through the mail in the United States.

In such a conservative context as regards sexual matters, Chopin wrote “The Storm” and other stories about adultery, sexual yearnings for men other than husbands, miscegenation, mothers who sensually admire her bodies or even women who kiss. Chopin thus created characters aware of their bodies as sensual and sexual entities, who, far from falling into the passionless female typified by the medical establishment, gave full reign to sexual passion and engaged in more advanced feminist discourses that presented motherhood as a voluntary experience for women. Although Chopin never actively participated in the women’s rights movement, “The Storm” formulates a fundamental feminist premise, which is the right of women to control their own bodies and sexuality.

Chopin’s determination in thus contradicting the social fabric found a springboard in her own departure from social conventions at several points in her life as well as in the literary influence of Guy de Maupassant, who was considered a highly decadent and amoral French writer in the late nineteenth century. In 1894, Chopin began translating some of Maupassant’s stories into English and his writings may have furnished a model to tackle controversial topics. As Toth has argued, “…Maupassant wrote about adult subjects that were not common, or even permitted, to American writers: not only suicide and madness, but also adultery, treated amorally and rarely punished. He was ironic and sophisticated, and his stories often ended with shocking twists” (123) , or in clear refusal to provide closure for her characters.

The refusal to provide closure for female characters appears tangentially in an early story, “A Lady of Bayou St. John” (1893). Published as part of the collection Bayou Folk (1894), focuses on a failed marriage and a young wife’s yearning to change her life by engaging in an adulterous relationship with another man. The story features a married Southern belle, Madame Delisle, who is wooed by a man, Sépincourt, while her husband is away fighting in the Civil War. Her lover, described as “a Frenchman who lived near by” shares with the young Madame Delisle an oblivion to the strife that is devastating the country, thus enacting a quite conventional story of love in times of war. Presenting a predictable plot in the first part of the story, in which Madame Delisle initially rejects Sépincourt’s advances but she eventually falls prey to his suggestion that they leave and go to Paris, together Chopin has the elopement of the two lovers hindered by the husband’s death. After learning about it, Madame Delisle plays the contrite widow, which leads her to frustrate her lover’s plans. She decides to stay in the house and live on her dead husband’s memories all her life.

Far from providing the insightful descriptions of female awakening and development that Chopin is capable of in stories such as “The Story of an Hour,” Madame Delisle changes from an initial girlish infatuation with Sépincourt to accept the decision to leave for Paris without any further description on the part of the narrative voice. Such a sentimental plot and archetypical characters seem to be too obvious for Chopin’s craft, especially when we take into account that other  stories that appeared in the same collection openly dealt with controversial topics such as domestic violence or male batterers (as in “Désirée’s Baby,” “In Sabine,”  or “Madame Célestin’s Divorce,” for instance).

A possible clue is the fact that Chopin tricks the reader into following a plot with a conventional ending in which Madame Delisle self-censors her adulterous infatuation, thus offering a righteous moral ending. However, endings may not be the right place to look for conclusions or significance in Chopin’s work (Beer 63).

Although Chopin seems to conform to conventional dictates in having her protagonist live her long life as a grieving widow forever faithful to the dead husband, Chopin also shows her most unconventional side in the opening paragraphs of the story, where she provides hints as to the sensuality and possible sexual dissatisfaction of the young Madame Delisle.  Thus, the wife’s autoeroticism is foregrounded at the beginning when she narcissistically admires the sensuality of her body, “Madame was very beautiful. So beautiful, that she found much diversion in sitting for hours before the mirror, contemplating her own loveliness; admiring the brilliancy of her golden hair, the sweet languor of her blue eyes, the graceful contours of her figure, and the peach-like bloom of her flesh. She was very young” (325). Her youth and her sensuality seems to find no sexual match within the confines of her marriage, since “the days and the nights were very lonely for Madame Delisle” (325). Thus, her sensual nature and her husband’s absence pave the ground for justifying a romantic relationship. Her youth and girlish nature are transformed as a result of her physical encounter–the story does not intrigue that the two lovers go beyond kissing—with Sépincourt. It is as a result of his proposal to go to Paris together and thus leave her husband that Madame Delisle truly “becomes a woman,” she does not want to listen to the stories that her Mammy tells her every night: not as a result of her marriage:

That night, for the first time, Madame did not want to hear Manna-Loulou’s stories, and she blew out the wax candle that till now had burned nightly in her sleeping-room, under its tall, crystal globe. She had suddenly become a woman capable of love or sacrifice. She would not hear Manna-Loulou’s stories. She wanted to be alone, to tremble and to weep. (326)

Like many other female characters in Chopin’s fiction, Madame Delisle is thus awakened by her wooer, not by her husband, which provides a poignant comment on marriage as a way to infantilize women and places marital sex in clear shortcomings. Thus, Madame Delisle’s awakening “as a woman” and the letter she receives from Sépincourt in which he apologizes for having openly expressed his feelings towards her dictate her decision to leave for Paris with him. Significantly, the voice of the narrator points at the wife’s gullible nature at this point: “men have written just such letters before, but Madame did not know it” (327).

However, what seemed to be a sentimental story about adultery is totally transformed by Chopin’s use of an unexpected event, what the narrator terms as “chance” (327). In a typical Chopin manner, the momentum of the story is thus brought to a halt with the news of the husband’s death. Prefiguring the same climax that will famously open “The Story of an Hour,” Chopin here does not offer any insight onto the female character’s thoughts but instead, readers learn about her final decision to abandon any plans she had with her lover and become the perfect faithful widow she was not as a wife. As she tells Sépincourt, “can you not see that now my heart, my soul, my thought-my very life, must belong to another? It could not be different. . . My husband has never been so living to me a he is now” (328). Hereafter, her life is spent manacled to the dead husband’s memories, on which the narrator ironically comments what seems to be the perfect futility of her behaviour in terms of self-sulfillment, “Madame still lives on Bayou St. John. She is rather an old lady now, a very pretty old lady, against whose long years of widowhood there has never been a breath of reproach” (329).

The story thus announces the topics Chopin will make more evident in other texts –female sensuality and extramarital sexual yearning for men as a means of awakening to life. Under the pretence of a quite conventional ending in which the widow sacrifices sexual passion, youth, and beauty for her social reputation and morality, “A Lady of Bayou St. John” prefigures the adulterous relation and representation of female desire that shocked American audiences in 1899 with the publication of The Awakening.

Although “The Storm” does not end with a “shocking twist” in Maupassant’s fashion the three concluding sections of the text provide a sequel to the storming sexual act that has taken place in the bedroom. These furnish us with the effects the act has had for everybody directly or indirectly involved in the act, that is the two lovers and their respective families. If section two is clearly dauntless in its explicit portrayal of the sexual act and the sexual desire the lovers feel for each other, the three sequels that respectively give voice to Calixta and his family, Alcéé and his wife Clarisse, magnify the central theme of the celebration of female sexual desire by showing that far from feeling guilty, the two lovers capitalize their sexual encounter in order to make their respective marriages happier.

This is certainly the provocative Chopin, who renders adultery a fortunate lapse within the confines of monotonous marriage. After testing their respective passion, Calixta and Alcée find renewed reasons to be kind to their partners. Thus, Chopin’s coda to the climax of the text resembles Edna’s affair with Arobin in The Awakening, which as Elaine Showalter has argued, shows Chopin’s prerogative that desire can exist independently of love, since that affair only generates in Edna a stronger love for Robert (78). In the same context that Edna Pontellier will find herself in The Awakening, the last section in “The Storm” shows Clarissa’s need to break free from a marriage that constricts her freedom and makes her sexually unhappy, “the first free breath since her marriage seemed to restore the pleasant liberty of her maiden days. Devoted as she was to her husband, their intimate conjugal life was something which she was more than willing to forego for a while” (931). Chopin, though, does not provide further information on Clarisse and instead chooses to end her tale with the line “so the storm passed and every one was happy” (931), which seems to me that contains the double level of meaning that Chopin so characteristically handles in her texts. On the one hand, the surface -happiness because Calixta’s husband expects a reprisal for the delay, happiness because Clarisse has had an opportunity to forget about the constrictions of marriage- and on the other hand, the deep meaning -Calixta and Alcée’s newly-found joy in their sexual encounter. Particularly in the case of Calixta, and also Clarissa to a lesser extent, “The Storm” presents female subjects in process that revolt against monolithic definitions of womanhood. As Janet Beer’s has argued,  “all Chopin’s unhappily married women are in revolt against endings, against the idea of them as finished or completed in the act of marriage. Her stories are full of women who have been misunderstood or misread as entirely known and therefore closed” (44-45).

“A Lady at Bayou St. John” and “The Storm” are a good example of Chopin’s revolutionary attitudes towards female sexuality and the will to craft her heroines in a “quarrel with Victorian culture chiefly through sexual means—by heightening sexual consciousness, candor, and expression” (Linda Dowling qtd in Showalter 69). What is more, by creating characters who express their sexual desires and who do not resist a sexual affair with socially forbidden partners -because of race, sex or class- Chopin was intervening in nineteenth-century sexual ideology by suggesting that sex had more than a reproductive function, it was an erotic act. Thus, Chopin’s daring portrayal of alternative female roles, her courageous depiction of sexual desire and its felicitous consequences  paved the way for later generations of writers while figuring significantly alone in the literary scenario of late Victorian America. As Showalter has argued, Chopin went “boldly beyond the work of her precursors in writing about women’s longing for sexual and personal emancipation” (65). In this sense, Chopin’s scholar and biographer Emily Toth is right in suggesting that “Kate Chopin anticipated so much: daytime dramas, women’s pictures, The Feminine Mystique, open marriages, women’s liberation, talk shows, Mars vs. Venus, self-help and consciousness raising. But in 1899, she was a lonely pioneer” (xix).

Her work clearly opened the way for a language of disclosure on female sexuality that belonged in the tradition inaugurated by Whitman in Leaves of Grass. The pleasure at deviance, a trait so much shared by the two writers also finds a parallel imagery in their use of water as a cleansing and purifying element. As Whitman’s persona in “Song of Myself” bathes naked in the river, the two lovers’ reunion in “The Storm” is sanctified by the pouring of clean rainwater, an apt image to signify the passion unleashed inside the characters and the purity of the act that brings no guilt whatsoever onto them.