Failing Fictions: The Conflicting and Shifting Social Emphases of Kate Chopin's "Local Color" Stories

Southern Quarterly, Winter 2004 by Holtman, Janet

And what is it that makes the depiction of gender struggle so problematic in these stories? I would argue that it is the complication posed by an overt, simultaneous, and complex entanglement with class and race issues. Feminist critics like Fetterly and Pryse have made great strides in proving that there is, in regionalism, an important, and previously ignored, form of women's realist fiction that often treats of rurality and poverty, but it would seem that they have not been completely able to address the fact that such fiction might begin to speak, at times, of issues of class rather than, alongside, or in conflict with those of gender. But just as it is difficult to separate the workings of gender from those of class, it is likewise difficult to isolate class from race, in Southern literature particularly. And Fetterly's model of the opposition of male repressive power and female subversion makes it difficult to explain how regional women's writing relies, at times, on popular discourses of class and race as much as it sets itself against them. So what can Chopin's work tell us about this interwoven mesh of discursive threads? And how might one describe Chopin's fiction as both resistant to and complicit with certain discourses of race and class superiority? As these questions indicate, I do not claim that Chopin's stories fit neatly into the paradigm of subversion established by Fetterly and Pryse, but it does seem that they offer something more interesting than the quaint exactitude and patronizing tourist fascination of traditionally defined "local color" fiction.

John A. Staunton has offered support for such a reading, arguing that Chopin's short fiction constitutes an ethical regionalist engagement with local realities, which, if it sometimes lapses into humorously quaint depictions, nevertheless attempts to maintain a resistance to simplified or stereotyped representations that would "permit a simple refashioning into our pet ideologies" (231). While Staunton's argument regarding Chopin's sustained attempt to engage responsibly with local realities is largely compelling, it unfortunately also relies upon an implicitly subject-centered notion of authorial intent that allows him to make claims perhaps too broad for Chopin's social awareness, for her "sophisticated and indeed implicitly ethical knowledge of the dangers inherent in claiming to offer an authentic or enduring relation of another person or community" (204). Staunton's evaluation of Chopin's ethical knowledge and intent comes, perhaps surprisingly, just after he acknowledges her well-known warning that "social problems, social environments, local color and the rest of it are not of themselves motives to insure the survival of a writer who employs them" (qtd. in Staunton 203). This statement both conflates "local color" with socially interested writing and, simultaneously, if implicitly, separates social issues from the aesthetic and formal. Thus, it appears simply to reenact a nineteenth-century bourgeois valuation of artistic merit, one that, for perhaps conspicuous sociopolitical reasons, was interested in obscuring the connections between art and power.