Bayou Folk and a Night in Acadie
Contents
INTRODUCTION
SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
A NOTE ON THE TEXT
BAYOU FOLK
A No-Account Creole
In and Out of Old Natchitoches
In Sabine
A Very Fine Fiddle
Beyond the Bayou
Old Aunt Peggy
The Return of Alcibiade
A Rude Awakening
The Bênitous’ Slave
Désirée’s Baby
A Turkey Hunt
Madame Célestin’s Divorce
Love on the Bon-Dieu
Loka
Boulôt and Boulotte
For Marse Chouchoute
A Visit to Avoyelles
A Wizard from Gettysburg
Ma’ame Pélagie
At the ’Cadian Ball
La Belle Zoraïde
A Gentleman of Bayou Têche
A Lady of Bayou St. John
A NIGHT IN ACADIE
A Night in Acadie
Athénaïse
After the Winter
Polydore
Regret
A Matter of Prejudice
Caline
A Dresden Lady in Dixie
Nég Créol
The Lilies
Azélie
Mamouche
A Sentimental Soul
Dead Men’s Shoes
At Chênière Caminada
Odalie Misses Mass
Cavanelle
Tante Cat’rinette
A Respectable Woman
Ripe Figs
Ozème’s Holiday
EXPLANATORY NOTES
PENGUIN BOOKS
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First published 1894
Published as electronic edition 2005
Copyright © Kate Chopin, 2002
All rights reserved
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Making or distributing electronic copies of this book constitutes copyright infringement and could subject the infringer to civil and/or criminal liability, where applicable. No part of this book may be reproduced by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher.
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ISBN 978-1-1011-9986-2 in Adobe eReader format
BAYOU FOLK
AND
A NIGHT IN ACADIE
* * *
KATE CHOPIN
EDITED WITH AN
INTRODUCTION AND NOTES BY
BERNARD KOLOSKI
PENGUIN BOOKS
INTRODUCTION
Kate Chopin spent the decade before she published The Awakening writing some ninety short stories, many of which she published in national and regional magazines. In 1894 she gathered together twenty-three of those stories in a collection she called Bayou Folk, and in 1897 she chose twenty-one others for a collection titled A Night in Acadie. The books were well received by reviewers, who lauded them as charming, delicate portraits of Creole and Acadian life, and often compared them to works of the French realist Guy de Maupassant.
Chopin’s Bayou Folk publisher had encouraged her to write a novel, arguing it might be more popular than another collection of stories. Yet when The Awakening appeared in 1899, most reviewers found it disturbing and flawed—disagreeable, unhealthy, vulgar, morbid. Although they praised the artistry of the novel, they condemned the choice of subject matter, especially Edna Pontellier’s adultery and suicide. Chopin’s reputation was tarnished. Her third collection of stories, to be called A Vocation and a Voice, was not published in her lifetime.
Chopin wrote a few more short stories before she died in 1904, but people became excited about her work again only in the 1970s when they rediscovered The Awakening and made it among the most often read and best loved of classic American books. Today there is renewed interest in the stories Chopin wrote before her great novel. Bayou Folk and A Night in Acadie are the two books Kate Chopin’s contemporaries most likely knew her by.
The books are celebrations of people in their communities, whether they are inhabitants of New Orleans or of the rural areas of Louisiana, mostly in the 1870s and 1880s. Chopin’s characters are Creoles, Acadians, and “Americans,” people of color and of mixed blood, Native Americans and immigrants, adults and children, the educated and the illiterate, the rich and the poor. The stories are strikingly varied from one another and from Chopin’s famous novel. Some (like “Madame Célestin’s Divorce” or “A Respectable Woman”) focus on women’s issues—on the restrictions women face in seeking self-fulfillment—but many do not. Some (like “Athénaïse” or “Regret”) deal with an awakening by someone—often a woman—to something, but many do not. Chopin centers stories on men (“Mamouche,” “Ozème’s Holiday”) and children (“A Turkey Hunt,” “Boulôt and Boulotte”) as well as on women. She writes about ethnic distinctions, class, race, money, divorce, religion, sex, and, more than anything else, social possibilities.
Most of the strongest stories depict people striving to establish better lives in their communities at a time of traumatic social change. The Civil War is over but its devastation is evident everywhere. Poverty is the norm, illiteracy is common, and the potential for violence is often palpable. Slavery has been abolished but most African Americans struggle to survive. The once-dominant Creoles have lost their economic—if not their social—power and sometimes work the fields alongside lower-class Acadians and blacks. Many young people are dissatisfied, attracted to newly arrived outsiders who by their very presence suggest fresh options. The ruined economy and social order are embodied in decaying plantation mansions with crumbling porticos.
Yet the stories are mostly bright, animated, full of hope because Chopin’s energetic, resilient characters sense possibility in the midst of hardship. They manage to cope, using whatever strategies or tactics they have available. Many of them function as both insiders and outsiders in their communities, intuitively grasping (though rarely intellectually comprehending) the changes going on around them. They recognize opportunities and reach for them. They pass quietly back and forth across the social boundaries that define appropriate behavior by race, class, gender, or generation. It is not coincidental that the child in “Mamouche” tears down fences, that La Folle in “Beyond the Bayou” crosses a terrifying border to save the life of a child, or that the woman in “Madame Célestin’s Divorce” hides behind her picket fence while negotiating with a man of a higher social class. It is not surprising that so many children in the stories have learned from adults to be resourceful, to fend for themselves. Characters in the stories appropriate values from others, gaining for themselves and their families experience that helps them build more fulfilling lives.
Chopin brings to the stories a complex perspective that reflects her background. She grew up bilingual and bicultural in St. Louis. Her mother had come from French stock, and French was spoken in her extended family in the 1850s, though her father was Irish (her maiden name was O’Flaherty). As she visited friends and relatives, she learned that there were deep differences between the two communities in folkways and values. Her ability to funct
ion in both groups served her well when she married Oscar Chopin in 1870 and lived with him in French- and English-speaking communities in New Orleans and Natchitoches Parish in northwestern Louisiana. After Oscar’s death, she moved with her children back to St. Louis, where she wrote all her fiction and where she died at the age of fifty-four. In both St. Louis and Louisiana, she lived among comparatively prosperous, sophisticated, and well-read people.
Chopin composed the stories in Bayou Folk and A Night in Acadie between 1891 and 1896. It was an ideal time to write short stories. By that time three thousand or four thousand magazines and Sunday newspaper supplements were being published in the United States, and many of them included fiction. Earlier in the century, all magazines and newspapers had been regional, but by 1890 some were national, and at least twenty had circulations of more than a hundred thousand copies. Technological changes in printing and photoengraving had lowered the cost of publication for both popular and high-quality magazines, and an international copyright agreement in 1891 forced magazines to seek American writers because they could no longer so easily pirate British ones. Competition among magazines was fierce. Kate Chopin never earned her keep through her writing—she lived primarily from her real estate holdings—but she was a successful professional writer who made money with her work.
Writing short stories in the 1890s brought prestige as well as money. The short story genre had been established in the United States by Edgar Allan Poe and others earlier in the nineteenth century, and in the 1880s literary critic Brander Matthews had persuaded influential readers that the genre deserved the same respect and attention accorded to the novel. The short story became immensely popular. Readers especially liked realistic fiction and local color fiction. Kate Chopin had firsthand knowledge of a group of people in Louisiana whom American readers found interesting to read about, so her stories were well received.
Realists and local color writers pictured ordinary people living ordinary lives. The larger-than-life characters of earlier romantic writers, the Natty Bumppos and Captain Ahabs and Hester Prynnes, had demanded novels, often long novels, to hold them, but by the 1890s such characters were less in vogue, despite an occasional Isabel Archer. Realistic writers here and abroad were influenced by the work of Sigmund Freud, Charles Darwin, and Karl Marx. They understood people as molded by psychological, biological, economic, and other forces, as striving in the unremarkable events of their everyday lives to fashion decent possibilities for themselves. Short stories, Chopin learned, were perfect for capturing moments in the lives of such people, people like those her readers would meet if they went to Louisiana.
The Bayou Folk and A Night in Acadie stories show the influence of the realists—and of other writers. Kate Chopin had read widely, from Aeschylus and Shakespeare to Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henrik Ibsen, Algernon Swinburne, and Walt Whitman. She knew the sentimental fiction that prospered in America throughout the nineteenth century. She studied the work of American realistic writers Sarah Orne Jewett, Mary Wilkins Freeman, Ruth McEnery Stuart, Hamlin Garland, and others. But she was most deeply affected by French realists—especially Guy de Maupassant and Émile Zola.
Chopin read Maupassant in his original French and loved his unadorned phrasing, his frugal use of detail, his irony, and his determination to tell the truth as he saw it. “Here was a man,” she writes, “who had escaped from tradition and authority, who had entered into himself and looked out upon life through his own being and with his own eyes; and who, in a direct and simple way, told us what he saw. When a man does this, he gives us the best that he can.” She adds, “I read his stories and marvelled at them. Here was life, not fiction.”
Zola too she read in French. Although a review she wrote in 1894 is critical of one of his novels, she speaks well of his work in general and admires what he had accomplished throughout his career.
I once heard a devotee of impressionism admit, in looking at a picture by Monet, that, while he himself had never seen in nature the peculiar yellows and reds therein depicted, he was convinced that Monet had painted them because he saw them and because they were true. With something of a kindred faith in the sincerity of Mons. Zola’s work, I am yet not at all times ready to admit its truth, which is only equivalent to saying that our points of view differ, that truth rests upon a shifting basis and is apt to be kaleidoscopic.
Chopin stressed the importance of a writer reaching for the truth. She sought in her stories to depict the “shifting basis” of the truth of life in Louisiana as she knew it during the fourteen years she lived there. And when she assembled her stories into collections she worked to capture in each book the feel of a kaleidoscope, the sense that each story was distinct in itself but composed of the same little pieces of life that made up all the other stories.
As they are arranged in the two books, the stories in Bayou Folk or A Night in Acadie almost seem to comprise a novel. They share a geographic space, with most set in New Orleans or in Natchitoches Parish, although characters have ties to many parishes (counties, as they would be called in other states): Caddo, Sabine, Avoyelles, Assumption, Lafourche, and others. Moreover, the characters who live in this imaginative world know one another, marry one another, are related to one another, or work together. The Duplan family, mentioned in the first story in Bayou Folk, reappears in a later story and then again in A Night in Acadie. Members of the Santien family—Placide, Hector, and Grégoire—and the Laballière family—Alphonse, Alcée, Didier, and their mother—figure in several Bayou Folk stories. A journalist named Gouvernail plays a major part in two Night in Acadie stories (and later appears in The Awakening). Many other characters are common to both books.
Motifs and images also recur: houses and outsiders and boundaries are present in both collections, as are poverty, violence, race, and sex. A ’Cadian ball is a field for choosing marriage partners in both books. The cross-referencing, the links in content and form, unify the stories in Bayou Folk and the ones in A Night in Acadie, and they unify the two books as well. The stories that open each collection are especially integrated, full of interconnections—with other stories in the same book and stories in the other book.
Chopin’s planned third book of stories, A Vocation and a Voice, was not published until 1991. With only two or three stories set in Louisiana, it is not a continuation of the earlier collections. Those Bayou Folk and A Night in Acadie themes and motifs that appear are distorted and darker, and the sense of balance found in A Night in Acadie is missing. A Vocation and a Voice is a fascinating book, but the stories Chopin planned for it are of a different order from those of her earlier two collections.
Many of the best stories in Bayou Folk are about young people seeking good marriage partners and better lives for themselves. The opening story stresses a young couple’s determination to balance a culturally rich life with a personally rewarding one. The woman, eighteen-year-old Euphrasie Manton, cannot tell what, exactly, it is she yearns for, any more than The Awakening’s Edna Pontellier can—most of Chopin’s characters act more from their instincts, their cultural dispositions, than from conscious thought—but Wallace Offdean, the businessman Euphrasie will marry, certainly can: “What he wanted . . . was to get his feet well planted on solid ground, and to keep his head cool and clear. . . . Above all, he would keep clear of the maelstroms of sordid work and senseless pleasure in which the average American business man may be said alternately to exist, and which reduce him, naturally, to a rather ragged condition of soul.”
Offdean wants balance—between work and pleasure, the intellectual and the physical, the body and the spirit. He wants “a life that, imposing bodily activity, admits the intellectual repose in which thought unfolds.” Chopin writes of such a yearning for balance again and again in Bayou Folk and A Night in Acadie.
The first three stories in Bayou Folk explore marriage possibilities, and all revolve around the Santien brothers—Placide Santien, Euphrasie’s rejected fiancé in the first story; Hector Santien, a New Orleans
gambler, in the second; and Grégoire Santien, also rejected by a woman, in the third. Each of the Santiens is involved with a woman seeking a better life for herself, and the women are all successful. Euphrasie of “A No-Account Creole” will marry her New Orleans businessman, purchase the old Santien plantation, and reach for the quality of life she knew as she grew up with the wealthy Duplans. Suzanne St. Denys Godolph of “In and Out of Old Natchitoches” will agree to be courted by the planter Alphonse Laballière. And ’Tite Reine, the once imperious “little queen” of “In Sabine,” will escape from her drunken, abusive husband to seek the comfort of her family, if nothing else.
But marriage in Bayou Folk may lead to a loss of balance and a diminished social life. The Acadian Doudouce in “A Visit to Avoyelles,” like Grégoire Santien, encounters a woman whose difficult life affects him deeply. Doudouce’s journey to another parish—Chopin is fond of the journey motif—has brought him to a woman who has married an attractive outsider and is now living in poverty. But Mentine has no interest in being rescued. She adores her husband, poor as her life is, and Doudouce, who loved her before she left her community, loves her still.
Among the strongest stories in the collection is “At the ’Cadian Ball,” for which Chopin would write a magnificent sequel called “The Storm,” not published in her lifetime. The Bayou Folk story does not match the sweeping power, the intensity of focus, or the stunning language of “The Storm,” one of America’s great short stories, but it succeeds as a penetrating look at how two marriages came into being. Marriage is a social as well as an individual matter in the story. The ’Cadians hold all-night balls so young people can test possible marriage alliances. Old people attend the balls, as do married couples and children, but the evening belongs to the young ’Cadian women and the ’Cadian—and sometimes Creole—men who drift out onto the galleries between dances and whisper in the shadows.