Kate Chopin' s writing is as driven by setting and place as Hardy's poetry and prose.  Each seem inextricably a part of a region and a way of life.  But both Hardy's  Wessex and Chopin's Louisiana are peopled  by personalities and fates that are both precisely drawn and almost mythic in their qualities.  Individuals yes, but individuals who speak for us all.  Click here to link to a PBS site on the documentary "Kate Chopin: A Re-Awakening."

We´re looking at three stories which address different aspects of Chopin´s time.  The theme of gender relations dominates these stories, but it might be fair to say that Chopin writes of different kinds of slavery. 

"Desiree´s Baby" tells the tragic tale of love gone awry in the carefully segregated and racially complex world of old Louisiana.  Full of irony, the tale recounts the collapse of marriage because of the suspicion (the proof of which is apparently manifested in the birth of the child) of the racial "impurity" of the wife.  Chopin spends some time recounting the mystery of her origins, abandoned as a child and taken in as her own by Madame Valmonde, so when the likeness of the child to a little "quadroon boy" is discovered, Desiree is ruined (180).  Her marriage is over.  The discreet, but pointed warning given to Armand by Desiree´s guardian, Monsieur Valmonde to consider "the girl´s obscure origin" seems to have borne its own inevitable tragic fruit (178).  And, as if inevitable, the quiet, awful, suicide/murder of Desiree and her baby follows "among the reeds and willows that grew thick along the banks of the deep, sluggish bayou" (181).  It is only as Armond, still righteous in his shame and indignation, is burning away all traces of his one-time wife and child as some sort of cancerous blot upon his name that we are told of a letter from his mother who in it expresses her love for her husband, and relief that the  the fact that she "belongs to the race that is cursed with the brand of slavery" has been successfully hidden from her child (181).  The final ironic resonance of the story reveals that perhaps the betrayal of racial impurity in the child was a revelation of the racial origins of the husband, rather than of the wife and is a very modern perception of the bigotry of the age, and the destructive, often abitrary and absurd prejudices of those caught up in it. 

In Chopin´s world, and in her fiction, it is the wife and mother who generally bears the burden of blame, and who is caught in an emblematic slavery: marriage.  Chopin explores just that idea of enslavement in "The Story of an Hour."   Once again, in a text that is highly ironic, we follow Mrs. Mallard as she glimpses freedom and is drawn back again into chains.  The beauty of this story, and of Chopin´s writing in general, is the openness which characterizes her narrative.  It is frank.  It is shocking.  But it is nonetheless subtley drawn.  She loves her husband, the reader is assured, in the very urgency of her grief "She wept at once," with sudden, wild abandonement, in her sister´s arms" while loved ones looked on, fearful for her weak heart (182).  But even so, in the sudden aftermath of grief, it is still possible for her to relish her freedom and not even trouble herself to question whether it were a "monstrous joy that held her" as she contemplated her freedom from marriage (182).

Just like in "Desiree´s Baby," Chopin withdraws from making overt comment about her characters in "The Story of an Hour," and leaves the reader to scrutinize the circumstances of the tragedy when Mrs. Mallard dies  as her husband returns home.  The ambivalent verdict of the doctors is simply that "she had died of heart disease -- of joy that kills" (183).  The nature of the reader´s insight, however, means that we alone are really in a position to make a proper prognosis of this affair of the heart.  Was it unbounded joy, or uncontained despair that broke her heart as, "a feverish triumph in her eyes," she saw her husband walk through the front door (183).

The last of Chopin´s stories, is similarly striking, and is certainly as provocative, in its own way, as either of the other tales.  One of the most striking aspects of  "The Storm" is the ambivalent moral stance of the writer.

She presents us with a curious dilemma: a normal socially conditioned response to Calixta's infidelity with Alcee would be one of disapproval.  But we are not encouraged to disapprove of Calixta. 

She seems to harbor no feelings of guilt about the physical storm that burst inside the house while the actual storm was raging outside, and guilt is one of those  mechanisms by which writers traditionally signal or encourage the disapproval of the reader.  Calixta watches her lover ride away"and she lifted her pretty chin in the air and laughed aloud."

Some readers watch Calixta's deception of Bobinot with very little emotional response.  Is it even a betrayal?  Others are outraged and long to see the moral backlash that the author never gives us.  The only perceivable effect of the storm is that there is more compassion and generosity to go around after than there was before it.  The closing sentence suggests that "the storm passed and everyone was happy."  But is that the whole story?

How should we perceive the events that surround the storm?  Do  we assume that the destructive effects of what happened wait just beyond the close of the stort - or do we make the very dangerous assumption that one may engage in this type of behavior and instead of being punished for it (as characters almost invariably are traditionally), it is merely a blessed release that somehow clears the air?

Decide for yourself how we are to read this ambivalent event.  What patterns are discernible in the three stories by Chopin?  What themes appear repeatedly?  What are the gender relations like?  How does setting affect the characters and the plot?  How much are the stories rooted in their place and time, and how much are they universal?