20th century AD

Studies in Short Fiction, Spring, 1996 by Dara Llewellyn

from the jessamine clumps around her.

There were roses, too, without number. To right and left palms

spread in broad and graceful curves. It all looked like enchantment

beneath the sparkling sheen of dew. (179-80)

Chopin's spare prose shifts to a rich, flowery piling of sensual image upon sensual image, springing out at the reader in its abundance.

La Folle's embracing of this new world of rich, varied sensory experience provides the story's closure: "A look of wonder and deep content crept into her face as she watched for the first time the sun rise upon the new, the beautiful world beyond the bayou" (180). The world of "morbid fancy" has become a rich potential for delight, a representation of that notion in the definition of boundary that limit and potentiality are somehow intimately connected, perhaps even the same, that one is somehow a product of the other in a reflexive way. This final sentence in the story, with its implicit openness, is in direct contrast to the confining and binding description of the bayou found in the opening sentence discussed earlier.

Because the reading time between the first and last sentence is so short, the contrast between them is registered in a special way peculiar to the aesthetics of short stories. The reading experience conflates--yet contains--duration. Of course, there is a certain unidirectional flow to time in the story. It is, after all, the story of a woman's life. But, as with many stories, the reader's experience follows a pattern of flow different from just a chronological countdown. Although La Folle does move from childhood to adulthood within the story, the path that the reader follows is more circular, time turning back on itself and, paradoxically, only then being able to flow forward once again.

If we look at the time line of La Folle's life from the reader's perspective, a wave pattern is more apt for tracing that experience than outlining a straight linear progression, despite the very real presence of a cause and effect sequence to account for her trauma. The wave pattern of La Folle's life as the reader experiences it cannot flow simply from childhood to adulthood, because very early on that flow runs into an outside interference that results in an immobilizing trauma: the bloody child emerging from the "unknown woods." At that point, the energy and direction behind the flow of her life line is obstructed and the flow can only lap back upon itself. In fact, the energy of the flowing wave is almost canceled out, as can be witnessed in the barrenness of the enclosed field. It takes another outside influence, Cheri's accident, to open that channel and once again permit the flow of time. La Folle's life energy is diffracted. Her wave is freed and "passes into the region behind"--or beyond, we might say, given Chopin's title.(4) The bloody child image may resonate in the reader's experience as a classic image or symbol of rebirth, a way of returning to full knowledge of oneself, but it is a boundary marker of experience even as the bayou is. The reader is tensely caught up in La Folle's predicament and feels an appropriate release later when La Folle collapses after crossing the boundary of the bayou. The child has been merely an impetus to the awakening (or rebirth) of La Folle's emotional self, more symbolic than participatory. Here, perhaps, is a touch of the old notion of catharsis in these shared emotional confrontations and release, for the reader does track La Folle's emotions, but the reader's role also involves more than simple emotional identification.