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PARTISAN REVIEW
At nineteen, Kate O'Flaherty was married to Oscar Chopin, a
New Orleans businessman who was the son of a French father and
Creole mother. When Oscar's cotton business collapsed in 1879, he
moved his wife and children to rural Natchitoches (pronounced
Nak-uh-tush) Parish, where he managed his family's plantation on
the Cane River. (In local legend, this was where the original of
Simon Legree had so cruelly mistreated his slaves.) Oscar Chopin
died suddenly, of swamp fever, in 1883, and Kate proved surpris–
ingly competent at managing the plantation for a while after his
death. But before long the young widow decided to move back to her
mother's house in St. Louis with her six children. Oscar Chopin had
left his widow well provided for, and she had considerable help from
her own family; money was never a problem.
Now all of thirty-two, a handsome, restless, and ambitious
woman, she began writing sketches and stories about the Creoles,
the Cajuns, and the blacks she had known in Louisiana. The
Creoles and Cajuns who were to figure so prominently in Mrs.
Chopin's work were of different stock and rank in Louisiana society.
The former were the pure-blooded descendants of French settlers,
an aristocracy apart from the Cajuns, who were lower down on the
social scale, and were descended from the Acadians expelled from
Nova Scotia by the British in the eighteenth century. Sooner than
her literary experience warranted, however, she plunged into a
novel,
At Fault,
which she published at her own expense in 1890. It
deals with a young widow, Therese Lafirme, obviously modelled
on the author, who takes over the running of a huge plantation after
her husband's untimely death. An intelligent, beautiful, indepen–
dent woman-the first of several such in Mrs. Chopin's fic–
tion - Therese still clings to a stern moral view of the sanctity of
marriage, and she forces the man she loves to remarry the dreary
alcoholic he had divorced some years back. Everyone festers in high–
minded misery until the awful wife is conveniently disposed of dur–
ing a violent storm, and the lovers can marry with a clear con–
SClence .
At Fault
has its charming and vivid moments, especially in the
descriptions of the lush landscape of Natchitoches, but the
machinery of the plot creaks and rattles. Mrs. Chopin tried to
demonstrate the destructiveness of her heroine's moral inflexibility,
but the characters remain lifeless pawns. The reception of the book
was on the whole not unkind, though one bluenose reviewer spoke to
the spirit of the age when he refused to use Mrs. Chopin's explicit
