The Structure of Kate Chopin's At Fault

Abstract

THE STRUCTURE OF KATE CHOPIN'S AT FAULT Bernard J. Koloski Mansfield State College Even a casual reading of Kate Chopin's early novel Ar Fault (1890) is enough to convince us that the book lacks the intensity of The Awakening (1899) and that it shares litde of the later work's beauty of language. Its resolution seems contrived and melodramatic, while its tone, as Per Seyersted points out, strikes us as inconsistent.1 Yet At Fault is emphatically not a book we would look for in 1890, not a book like the one Chopin refers to as "the latest novel of one of those prolific female writers who turn out their unwholesome intellectual sweets so tirelessly, to be devoured by the girls and women of the age."2 It is in many ways a rewarding book, with a keenness of insight and a sureness of structure characteristic of Kate Chopin at her best. Like The Awakening, At Fault is developed through a well conceived succession of contrasts which gradually delineates the plight of a woman struggling with a seemingly irreconcilable difference between the social reality of an "outward existence"—to use the language of the later novel—and the private vision of an "inward life" (p. 893), an imaginative ideal. Edna Pontellier's struggle leads inevitably to alienation, isolation, and ultimately death. The heroine of Ar Fault, largely through chance, manages to unify her two realms and achieve a sense of peace. Edna yearns for an existence in which she can fulfill herself by escaping from what she comes to see as the restrictions and conventions of an essentially static society. Her plight is, therefore, the result of an interior change, the result of her awakened consciousness, her newly transformed vision of the possibilities of life. For Thérèse Lafirme, however, it is not a vision of life but life itself which is changing. Thérèse becomes increasingly sensitive to the dynamic character of her society, to the economic, cultural, and sometimes natural pressures which are altering not only the land about her but the nature of the communities which evolve on the land.3 Compelled by circumstance to assume the role of a major stabilizing force in such a society, she yearns for a world in which the old traditions and customs help preserve order and harmony. It is a threatened breakdown in the social order which provides the 90Notes impetus for the heroine's actions in At Fault. The newly-widowed Thérèse is shocked by the realization that people are stealing even the cotton seed from her plantation and that the cotton itself seems sure to disappear next. Convinced that she has inherited not only the land but also the "weight and sacredness of a trust" (p. 741), she reacts quickly to the disorder gathering about her and makes herself into what "Lafirme," her late husband's family name, suggests sheshould be: "the firm one," a tough and respected administrator. The experience, like Edna Pontellier's months with Robert Lebrun and the outgoing Creoles amid the sensuousness of the Grand Isle environment, proves to be a critically important one in the life of the heroine. Nearly every incident throughout At Fault illuminates some aspect of Thérèse Lafirme's efforts to maintain order, continuity, and peace in her community and her private life. Determined to prevent a recurrence of thenear chaotic situation that she faced when herhusband died, Thérèse tries her best to placate the half-Negro, half-Indian Joçint, who is enraged because his father forces him to work at a sawmill and give up the daily jaunts he once took in his beloved woods. She tries to rehabilitate her nephew Grégoire, who sets out to drink and brawl himself to death after he loses his nearby plantation to creditors. Most important, she tries—because she believes strongly in the social necessity of those moral supports provided by traditional Catholic precepts—to salvage the marriage of David Hosmer, the man who loves her and whose love she reciprocates, by persuading him to return to the alcoholic woman he has divorced. The twelve chapters ofPartI ofthebook depictThér...