Dead Women Talking: The Transgressive Manuscripts of Kate Chopin’s “Her Letters” and “Elizabeth Stock’s One Story”

Abstract

MARGOT SEMPREORA Webster University Dead Women Talking: The Transgressive Manuscripts of Kate Chopin’s “Her Letters” and “Elizabeth Stock’s One Story” Tyger Tyger, burning bright, In the forests of the night; What immortal hand or eye, Could frame thy fearful symmetry? —From William Blake, “The Tyger” TWO STORIES BY KATE CHOPIN—“HER LETTERS” AND “ELIZABETH STOCK’S One Story”—first interested me because of the ways in which they depart from Chopin’s own practice of fiction: each is set in Missouri, away from Chopin’s usual Louisiana locale, and each focuses on women writing, a subject which constitutes a second break from Chopin’s usual practice. That the unusual aspects of setting and character herald further innovation and experimentation becomes obvious when we consider Chopin’s manipulation of the nineteenth-century convention of the framed narrative. Chopin encountered the technique of framing in the fiction of Guy de Maupassant, whom she identified as a source of inspiration and several of whose framed tales she translated. Traditionally, the nineteenth-century “framed” tale begins with a narrator who introduces the central material of the text and thereby sets up expectations about what is to follow. The initiating narrator frequently returns to finish the tale with editorial, moral, or ironic commentary,sometimesproscribingthereader’sresponsetotheinternal tale. For example, the framing narrator in “Solitude,” one of the Maupassant tales Chopin translated, introduces the reader to a friend who walks beside him and takes over the story with an anguished, melancholy monologue on loneliness and isolation. The framing narrator/friend returns briefly at the conclusion of the story to ask, “Was he drunk? Was he mad? Was he wise?” (Bonner 197). These questions suggest the limited selection of possible reader responses to the encounter. In Maupassant’s “Suicide,” again translated by Chopin, the 452 Margot Sempreora narrator begins, “A letter discovered upon the table of a suicide has fallen into my hands” (Bonner 203). The suicide note is recounted as the embedded tale and the narrator returns to close the frame with one sentence: “And it is thus that many a man kills himself, in whose life we may seek in vain to discover great sorrows” (205). The final sentence constitutes an interpretation of the suicide note; the reader’s own possible interpretation is co-opted by the framing narrator. In her own stories, Chopin restructures the framing device in Maupassant’s tales in a gesture of aesthetic liberation and self-assertion. “Her Letters” and “Elizabeth Stock’s One Story” were both written at defining moments in Chopin’s career. “Her Letters” was written in 1894 in the middle of Chopin’s translations of Maupassant’s “Mad Stories”—eight tales she chose from six different volumes of Maupassant short stories (Fusco 144) or perhaps selected from an assortment of French periodicals. Translating Maupassant’s “Mad Tales” required Chopin to inhabit the first-person monologues of psychotic, often woman-loathing, narrators. Chopin’s admiration for Maupassant’s mastery of the short story led her to translate these manic and misogynistic tales; in giving her own words to Maupassant’s repeated expression of misogyny and his dark, increasingly pathological portraits of human relationships, Chopin became more conscious of her own portraits of women and their language, symbols, concerns, and vulnerabilities. “Elizabeth Stock’s One Story” (1898) was written during a second significant period in Chopin’s career, as she awaited the publication of The Awakening. She had found her voice in the novel and must have known that publication of The Awakening would expose her to the potentially silencing commentary of literary and social critics.1 So, while she awaited the public’s response, Chopin created a portrait of a Missouri woman writer, Elizabeth Stock, who—though she struggles with self-doubt and censure even as she sits down to write her story—ultimately delivers into the reader’s hands a subtle indictment of the influences that have kept her silent. Awaiting publication of The Awakeningseemstohaveprecipitatedexplorationoftabooterritory;five months after writing “Elizabeth Stock,” Chopin wrote a second transgressive text, “The Storm.” 1 Heather Kirk Thomas also notes the significant timing of Chopin’s creating this “realistic” and “compassionate” portrait of the woman writer (27). 453 Dead Women Talking...