PEARL K. BELL
241
word "drinking" and settled instead for the respectable euphemism
"habit of taking stimulants ." But the book soon sank out of sight, and
it is interesting today mainly as one of the earliest American novels
to deal approvingly with the risque subject of divorce despite , as
Mrs . Chopin sharply noted, "the exacting and ignorant rule
of ... moral conventionalities ."
Discouraged by the failure of
At Fault,
Kate Chopin destroyed
her second novel and began to concentrate on the lively stories about
Louisiana that were soon published in the
Atlantic,
the
Century,
and
Vogue.
Her entire career as a writer was packed into a single,
astonishingly prolific decade in which, in addition to three novels,
she tossed off some hundred stories, many of them collected in
Bayou
Folk
(1894) and
A Night in Acadie
(1897). The range of these stories is
wide , but it is the mettlesome directness she brought to "forbidden"
subjects that now seems so impressive: miscegenation, rocky mar–
riages , rebellious women , even a physically explicit account, in "The
Storm," of a casually adulterous romp that ends with neither guilt
nor divine retribution, only the savored afterglow of idle pleasure.
Because Mrs . Chopin's stories grew out of her intimate
familiarity with the people and customs of New Orleans and rural
Louisiana, and she conveys the music of the Cajun and Creole
dialects so convincingly, she was regarded by most of her readers as
just another local-color writer- a late blooming of the post-Civil
War rage for a kind ofliterary anthropology of regional folkways, in
which the dialects and customs of the American provinces were sen–
timentally depicted as quaint and comic, like hillbillies on television.
But Kate Chopin had no interest in such condescending uses of the
past, and she resented being identified with such local-color
storytellers as George Washington Cable, who also wrote about
Louisiana . In the best of her stories the regional peculiarities provide
the enriching texture, but her true interest lay beyond that, in the
human drama . Though she sometimes reached too quickly for tricky
Maupassant-like endings, and often relied on the dubious ease of
coincidence-she did, after all, want to be published-in the best of
her stories she confronted the taboos about sex and marriage with a
clear-eyed candor that few writers ofthe time , male or female , dared
to attempt.
Kate Chopin's work contains a smoldering abundance of
restless , unhappy wives (and some fretful , dissatisified husbands,
POUT
lagniappe),
and in one startling tale, "The Story of an Hour,"
written a few years before her masterpiece,
The Awakening,
one can
