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PARTISAN REVIEW
feel the bold design of that novel beginning to take shape in the
author's head. In the brief compass of less than three pages, Mrs .
Chopin described the reaction of a young woman to the news that
her husband has been killed in a railway accident. She is stunned,
but she finds herself responding to the news not with an outburst of
grief but with a whispered "free , free, free!"
She saw a long procession of years to come that would belong to
her absolutely. And she opened and spread her arms out to them
in welcome . There would be no one to live for her during those
coming years; she would live for herself. There would be no
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 . ... What could love, the unsolved
mystery, count for in face of this possession of self-assertion
which she suddenly recognized as the strongest impulse of her
being!
"Free! Body and soul free!" she kept whispering.
Precisely because "The Story of an Hour" is almost entirely
stripped of my distracting details about setting or character, its
meaning is charged with a direct, almost brutal power. The young
wife-cum-widow becomes a disembodied voice, not a person, a voice
rejoicing in the realization that freedom is no longer unthinkable.
Mrs. Chopin did make a conciliatory gesture toward the magazine
editors of the time by bringing the husband through the door in the
last paragraph, whereupon the wife drops dead of "the joy that kills."
But her irony was unmistakable, and the story was rejected as
"unethical" by the editor of the
Century.
It eventually appeared in
Vogue,
whose editors obviously had a very good idea of the snakes
that lurked in their female readers' hearts .
A woman of uncommon urbanity and intelligence, Kate
Chopin was appalled by the straitlaced parochialism of American
literary culture in the dying century. In breeding, temperament,
and taste, she felt much closer to Mme. de StaeI and George Sand
than to any native writers. She smoked cigarettes , liked wine, and
saw no reason to play down what a friend described as "a quality of
sex [in her] that is inexplicable," though her most assiduous
biographer, Per Seyersted, does not mention any love affairs. She
never remarried, but sexuality was hardly inexplicable to Kate
Chopin . She had undoubtedly felt more in her element in the
