Pargol Borojerdi
Kate Chopin’s short stories “The Story of an Hour” and “The Storm” both explore women’s experiences that were subversive for the time they were written (in 1894 and 1898, respectively). Ecofeminist themes underlie both stories. Nature is used as a mirror and metaphor for the wildness of authentic, free-flowing feminine emotion. Chopin’s use of internal focalization serves as a vehicle for the exploration of her characters’ inner worlds and responses to the patriarchal expectations and constructions of femininity of the time. This paper will examine both stories through a feminist and radical ecofeminist lens.
“The Story of an Hour” begins with its protagonist, Louise Mallard, about to receive the bad news of her husband’s sudden death. Great care must be taken in sharing this news because Louise is afflicted by heart trouble, immediately foreshadowing later events. The story begins as it ends; via the limitations of Louise’s body, despite her young age. Louise’s sister Josephine breaks the news to Louise using, Chopin writes, “veiled hints” that “revealed in half concealing.” (1) Josephine speaks this way both out of consideration for Louise’s physical health but also because direct, masculine confrontational conversation is likely not a skill Josephine’s developed as a high class lady. Chopin’s description, however, makes Josephine sound almost coy. Josephine’s role as go-between for Richard, who received the news of Mr. Mallard’s death, is more typical of her gender role as well. Josephine is a tool used to soften rather than hammer, sharpen, or fix, a messenger, reliant on others to give her a purpose and a link to the external world.
Richards’s relationship to the two sisters and Mr. Mallard is never explained. He just appears on the page and is assumed to the reader to be familiar, trustworthy, and of important, though his only credibility is being a man. He has gotten the news from the newspaper office, but the reader never learns why he was in the newspaper office. Richards receives a second telegram, though what it says or if it was even a direct telegram meant for Richards, is also never revealed. At the story’s end, he is of course mistaken, but his actions have set the sad events of the story in motion.
The narrator tells the reader that Louise reacts somewhat unusually to the news of her husband’s death, with the effect being that Louise appears to be comparing her inner experience to that of an internalized expectation of emotionality. She is not paralyzed or unable to accept the truth. Instead, she seems to be overcome with violent feelings. Chopin writes of Louise’s weeping that it comes, “at once, with sudden, wild abandonment,” and whether society would perceive this ability to whether “the storm of grief” so immediately as a strength or a shameful display of emotionality is up for debate. (1) Perhaps her emotions are what is wild, and perhaps by allowing them to flow freely through her, she abandons not her senses, but society’s constriction of women and their emotions.
As the storm of her emotions passes, Louise is so spent that she describes her exhaustion as “haunting” her and reaching into her soul. (1) It is the second time that Louise is explicitly at the mercy of her body. She loses herself to her emotions, and yet, perhaps she’s right where she needs to be as she’s held through these emotions, by the maternal embrace of a roomy armchair in front of an open window, where she experiences a forbidden freedom for the first time.
Outside of the house, the world is “aquiver” with new spring life. She senses movement, energy and the “delicious breath of rain” in the air. (2) This language is sensual, poetic, and feminine. Amidst nature, Louise hears a street peddler, the first human disruption. At the risk of overanalyzing, an ecofeminist might consider the peddler’s cries an apt metaphor for the disturbance of nature by man. Women, like nature, are written as delicious, sensual, alive – and then there is the interruption of a human voice, of a person doing business. It contrasts with the “notes of distant song” someone is singing, and the “countless” sparrows twittering. (Chopin, “The Story of an Hour,” 1) It is almost as if Louise is experiencing the natural world as a united, flowing entity, or a chorus in perfect harmony at this moment. Nature is not threatening, but instead “delicious,” and illuminating a brighter future with clear skies like the ones outside her window. The patches of blue sky that peek through the clouds represent the hope she feels beginning to grow inside of her. Her husband is dead, and finally a new path for her future has emerged, and it is one where she can live for herself. Though she still cries in small sobs “As a child that cries itself to sleep continues to sob in its dreams,” she settles into herself, and her grief seems to be mingled with gratitude, hope, and even grief for herself. After all, she had resigned herself to an unhappy life and marriage. Louise’s comparison of herself crying with a child that cries in its sleep is stirring and an apt metaphor. In her marriage and in this life, a part of her continues to be unhappy and cry out for more, even though she tries to keep it repressed.
Louise describes herself as “powerless” against the force of her feeling – “as powerless as her two white slender hands would have been.” (2) The comparison between her delicate, submissive physical body and the force of her emotion seems to highlight the weakening effects of repression on both her body and soul. She experiences herself as too “weak” to continue living a life of repression, though her reconnecting to herself in the room by herself is actually exceptionally brave. She is finally through with the repression and denial. The taste of freedom warms her, and is described viscerally, as Chopin writes, “The vacant stare and the look of terror and the look of terror that had followed it went from her eyes. They stayed keen and bright. Her pulse beat fast, and the coursing blood warmed and relaxed every inch of her skin.” (2) The physical effects of freedom are similar to those of arousal, and it’s fitting; her passion and connection to life is awakening.
Her body becomes like nature – vibrating with life, a fast beating pulse, bright eyes…and her terror is gone. She just feels, doesn’t question if it’s a “monstrous” joy to be happy to be free, as though she’s so given over to it that this usual “checking” and repression of feelings by labelling them monstrous, bad, and to be destroyed or repressed, just doesn’t happen. (2) And according to our narrator, her perception is too “clear and exalted” to allow the repression to take over. (2) The use of the word exalted here is an interesting choice, suggesting almost a divinity. This new perception sees that suggestion as “trivial.” To doubt this joy she feels would be a distraction. (2)
Louise “abandons” herself – perhaps the constructed version of herself – and repeats the word “free” to herself like a new mantra. She is stricken with the insight that her husband, though loving and kind, has freed her with his death. With him gone, she believes she can live for herself, though this hope is quashed by the reappearance of Mr. Mallard at the end of the story. As she sits and contemplates her future with growing excitement, she seems to bypass in her mind – or maybe overcome – the reality of the world around her. As a widow, she might not have to answer to her husband, her community will not suddenly disappear along with him, and it is likely that she will still have to experience, writes Chopin, “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.” (2) The reality of the patriarchal world Louise lives exists outside of this room and this joyous moment, which hers alone, even as she concedes that “her fancy was running riot along those days ahead of her.
Louise’s marriage is not ideal. Before her husband’s death, “she had thought with a shudder that life might be long.” (Chopin, “The Story of an Hour,” 2) There is little written in the text about him or even her feelings towards him, though some is revealed on page two, when Chopin writes, “And yet she had loved him – sometimes. Often she had not.” (2) Though Louise acknowledges that her husband “had never looked save with love upon her,” the source of real happiness and purpose is made clear again as she muses, “What could love, the unsolved mystery, count for in the face of this possession of self-assertion which she suddenly recognized as the strongest impulse of her being!” (2)
In Beginning Theory: An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory, author Peter Barry quotes from Marks and de Courtivron, “Women must write through their bodies…” and while he goes on to write that they must invent “impregnable language” – an interesting choice of words, when mentioning women’s bodies – and that they must “cut through, get beyond the ultimate reserve-discourse…” (8) Louise, in her moment of freedom alone in her room, lives through her body and her senses. She contemplates the world as a place newly available to her, full of life and sound that she takes in through her sentences, here, in what Virginia Woolf might have imagined for her as a room of her own, were she to be a writer. It is telling that she experiences all of this through the open window, which serves as a compelling metaphor – her husband’s death has opened the portal to a new world for her.
Josephine intrudes on Louise’s epiphany as she shouts to her through the keyhole. The door between them represents the barrier between Louise’s former life with Mr. Mallard and this one she will embark upon once she leaves the room. And when Louise emerges, Josephine unknowingly delivers her sister to her death. It is of interest that Josephine, another woman, is the one to bring Louise out of the space she has created for herself out of her comfortable solitude. Josephine brings Louise back to reality when she brings her down the stairs, to Richards, to normalcy, and to her untimely death caused by the unwelcome appearance of her very living husband. Her body, already in a vulnerable state, is weakened by the intensity of her emotions. The reader is left with the strong sense of tragedy that Louise had lived her entire life with – the tragedy of a free, beautiful life unlived.
In Chopin’s short story “The Storm,” nature similarly reflects the experiences and inner worlds of characters. Though storms are often destructive in nature, this storm allows Calixta a lusty reprieve from her daily life as a housewife and mother of a four year old. Alcee, her lover, is so sated by sex with Calixta that he writes his wife Clarisse. Chopin writes of the letter that it was “full of tender solicitude” where he experiences himself as generous by telling his wife to stay longer on her trip and enjoy himself. (Chopin, “The Storm,” 6) Clarisse is relieved to be allowed to keep enjoying herself. Chopin writes, “And the first free breath since her marriage seemed to restore the pleasant liberty of her maiden days.” (6) The obvious irony is that Calixta also experiences the pleasant liberty of her maiden days, and she does so during a passionate affair with Calixta’s husband. Chopin shows us two women who experience freedom in different ways, writing their motivations and feelings with careful consideration, and without judgment.
None of this would be possible without the Shakespearean tempest that springs everyone into action, forcing Alcee and Calixta together while keeping Calixta’s husband Bobinot and her child Bibi trapped in a store, none the wiser. Calixta, nervous and overwhelmed, has not spent time alone with Alcee, in the five years that she has been married. The storm is a gift to Calixta, allowing her to experience real joy and desire, but also to Clarisse, who is allowed more freedom from her husband following his tryst. Its intensity stirs him to make his move, and the story shifts to his perspective of her, which is heavily focused on her appearance and sensuality.
Alcee is obviously appreciative of her physique and her lips, he describes as “red and moist as pomegranate seeds,” her “white neck and…full, firm bosom” and “liquid” eyes that “unconsciously betrayed a sensuous desire.” (Chopin, “The Storm,” 4) Alcee’s fantasy is that he can see Calixta’s true self, into her unconscious motivations, and like all women, she unconsciously desires sex. This perception of women as wanting sex all the time is commonly seen in rape culture. As they engage in sex, Alcee continues his comparisons of Calixta to nature, describing her fresh as like “a creamy lily that the sun invites to contribute its breath and perfume to the undying life of the world.” (Chopin, “The Storm,” 4) Whether these thoughts belong to the narrator or to Alcee himself are less clear. Alcee’s education level is never revealed to us, though he is prone to cliché descriptions of femininity. What is clear, however, is that Alcee views Calixta as generously passionate, as “a revelation,” and yet he is stirred to these descriptions because Calixta is beautiful and sex with him, fulfilling two major obligations women owe men in a patriarchal society. (4)
Prior to her marriage, Alcee experienced Calixta as “inviolate; a passionate creature whose very defenselessness had made her defense.” (Chopin, “The Storm,” 64) To “save her,” by which he means, to save the both of them from pregnancy and Calixta’s reputation from ruin, he had run off before they consummated their union. However, now that Calixta is married and a mother, Alcee views her differently, as he thinks “Now – well, now – her lips seemed to be in a manner free to be tasted…” (Chopin, “The Storm,” 4) The reader is left to wonder whether Alcee feels that Calixta is now freer and more open to him because she has grown into her femininity as a wife and mother. Perhaps it is to her female duties that he attributes her generosity, which he reads from her body. Her breasts, symbols of femininity and fertility, “gave themselves up in quivering ecstasy, inviting his lips.” (Chopin, “The Storm,” 5) Calixta likely also offers up her breasts to Bibi when she breastfed him. Calixta completes her transformation from mother to lover, but as society traditionally views women as nurturers and givers, Calixta remains a giver. Calixta being a married woman could be the perfect cover for Alcee should Calista become pregnant. Alcee could also maybe more easily abandon a potential child knowing that it would have two parents, presuming Bobinot never suspects anything.
Radical ecofeminism “embraces the idea that women are inherently closer to nature biologically, spiritually, and emotionally.” (Purdue Owl) Calixta and the storm share a common wildness and fervor. Calixta has the power to experience joy in sex and is such a force of nature that she brings Alcee to find “depths of his own sensuous nature that had never yet been reached….they seemed to swoon together at the very borderland of life’s mystery” (Chopin, “The Storm,” 5) Alcee experiences the divine through union with a woman, not on his own, because woman are more in tune with the natural world, and perhaps even with God. The storm also seems to have more agency than the typical pastoral land, owned and worked over by men, as it foils plans, sets affairs in motion, and effectively traps Bobinot, a man, in the experience of providing unpaid childcare, a female occupation, to his son without any control over when he will be free again.
In both of these stories, nature represents a kind of freedom, and parallels the female characters’ emotions. To Louise, freedom beckons to her in the form of birdsong, clean air, and trees from her window that are almost vibrating with vivacity. Calixta’s sexuality is released as she experiences the freedom of expression of her sexuality as well as the freedom of having chosen this partner of her own volition and for no greater societal role, but just for her own pleasure. She even laughs throughout the storm in Alcee’s arms. Her sexuality is also represented by this storm, so natural and strong that it cannot be contained within a loveless, unsatisfying marriage.
While Chopin’s stories are brief, her focus on female longings and desires give modern readers a glimpse into how women were perceived at the end of the 19th century, by the world and by themselves. Chopin does not minimize or trivialize her female characters but instead breathes life into them and gives voice to their longings and desires. Her characters are passionate and when they are most in tune with themselves, the natural world in her stories reflects this. Chopin was an early ecofeminist without knowing it, and the complexity of her characters’ femininity challenged the rigidity of femininity within our patriarchal world.
Works Cited
Barry, Peter. Beginning Theory: An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory, 4th ed., Manchester University Press, 2017.
Chopin, Kate. “The Story of an Hour.” SP2016 ~ ENGL-2070-911 ~ American Literature II, NC State E-Learning , 2016, https://ncstate.instructure.com/courses/1718797/files/79704772.
Chopin, Kate. “‘The Storm,” Kate Chopin.” HCCS Learning Web, Houston Community College, 2016, https://learning.hccs.edu/faculty/adam.castaneda2/engl1301-2/course-readings/the-storm-kate-chopin/view.
Purdue Writing Lab. “Ecocriticism // Purdue Writing Lab.” Purdue Writing Lab, Purdue University, https://owl.purdue.edu/owl/subject_specific_writing/writing_in_literature/literary_theory_and_schools_of_criticism/ecocriticism.html.
About the Author
Pargol Borojerdi is a UWW student working towards receiving her Bachelor’s in either Comparative Literature or Psychology Studies. She currently works as a Project Coordinator at Harvard School of Public Health and lives in an art-laden creepy Victorian in Providence, Rhode Island with her small calico cat, Riri. Pargol was a student in Comp Lit 121: International Short Story, taught by Juan Carlos Cabrera Pons.
