Kate Chopins Short Story The Storm Essay

Kate Chopins Short Story The Storm, Essay, Research Paper

In Kate Chopin’s short story “The Storm”, the narrative surrounds the brief extramarital affair of two individuals, Calixta and Alc e. Many critics do not see the story as a condemnation of infidelity, but rather as an affirmation of human sexuality. This essay argues that “The Storm” may be interpreted as a specific affirmation of feminine sexuality and passion cojoined with a condemnation of its repression by the constraints of society.

If one is to attempt to interpret “The Storm”, it becomes necessary to examine the conditions surrounding the story’s genesis. The story was written in 1898, very shortly after Chopin had completed “The Awakening”, “the boldest treatment so far in American literature of the sensuous, independant woman” (Seyersted 1969, p164). “The Storm” was not published, however, until well after Chopin’s death, doubtless because of the as-yet unparalleled sensuousness of the story and its characters. In his critical biography Kate Chopin, Per Seyersted argues that “The Storm” is objective in its portrayal of human sexuality and that Chopin is “not consciously speaking as a woman, but as an individual” (p169). One must question this assertion, however; it is doubtful that in writing “The Storm” so soon after completing her ‘feminist’ novel, Chopin had “the protest of “The Awakening” off her mind” (p169).

The title of “The Storm”, with its obvious connotations of sexual energy and passion, is of course critical to any interpretation of the narrative. Chopin’s title refers to nature, which is symbolically feminine; the storm can therefore be seen as symbolic of feminine sexuality and passion, and the image of the storm will be returned to again and again throughout the story. At the beginning of the tale, which is divided into five sections, Bobin t and his young son Bibi decide to wait out a rapidly approaching storm at the store. Bobin t’s wife, Calixta, is home alone, tending to the household chores.

The second section begins with Calixta being unaware that a storm is imminent: She sat at a side window sewing furiously on a sewing machine. She was greatly occupied and did not notice the approaching storm. But she felt very warm and often stopped to mop her face on which the perspiration gathered in beads. She unfastened her white sacque at the throat. It began to grow dark, and suddenly realizing the situation she got up hurriedly and went about closing windows and doors.Out on the small front gallery she had hung Bobin t’s Sunday clothes to air and she hastened out to gather them before the rain fell. (Pickering 1992, p209)Calixta’s unbuttoning of her jacket foreshadows the sexual encounter to come, but her actions imply something greater. She is ignorant of the storm’s approach; although she is married and has a child (and is thus somewhat knowledgeable about sexual matters), she is unaware of the sexuality and passion within her. Her sexuality is repressed by the constraints of her marriage and society’s view of women, represented in this passage by the housework and her husband’s Sunday clothes, which also allude to society in the form of the church.

As Calixta is gathering up the laundry, Alc e Laballi re enters the yard, seeking shelter from the coming storm. The reader’s immediate impression of Alc e is that he is a man of the world; this contrasts sharply with the author’s presentation of Bobin t in the first section. He is seen as a simple man, an intellectual equal to his four-year old son: “Bobin t… was accustomed to converse on terms of perfect equality with his little son” (p209). There is a mutual attraction between Calixta and Alc e, and this attraction is not new: “She had not seen him very often since her marriage, and never alone” (p209). Their acquaintance with each other is explained in another Chopin story, “At the ‘Cadian Ball” (1892), but in this earlier story the attraction between Calixta and Alc e is only briefly explored. With Alc e’s arrival comes the beginning of the rain, and he asks to wait out the storm on the front gallery: “May I come and wait on your gallery till the storm is over, Calixta.” he asked.”Come ‘long in, M’sieur Alc e.”His voice and her own startled her as if from a trance, and she seized Bobin t’s vest. Alc e, mounting to the porch, grabbed the trousers and snatched Bibi’s braided jacket that was about to be carried away by a sudden gust of wind. (p209)The apparent difference in formality with which they address each other is important; Alc e addresses Calixta informally, as befits a man addressing a woman, but her response is almost coquettish, somewhere between formality and informality.

The “trance” that Calixta is startled from is her sudden awareness that she is still sexually attracted to Alc e, even though both are constrained by their respective marriage vows. Alc e grabs Bobin t’s pants, symbollically subverting the social and marital constraints that control Calixta. The strength of the ever-increasing storm quickly drives Alc e inside, and it even becomes necessary to put something underneath the door to keep the storm out: “Calixta … rolled up a piece of bagging and Alc e helped her to thrust it beneath the crack” (p210). The imagery here is obviously sexual, but it is important to note that it is Calixta who is the initiator of the ‘thrusting’; Alc e only helps her to keep the storm out, and theref