by NANCY WALKER

In late May of 1899, after enduring several weeks of largely critical--although not yet outraged--reviews of her novel The Awakening, Kate Chopin wrote her well-known mock defense of the novel for Book News:

Having a group of people at my disposal, thought it might be entertaining (to myself) to throw them together and see what would happen. I never dreamed of Mrs. Pontellier making such a mess of things and working out her own damnation as she did. If I had had the slightest intimation of such a thing I would have excluded her from the company. But when I found out what she was up to, the play was half over and it was then too late. (qtd. in Private Papers 296)

Few readers then, and none today, would have taken this statement as a sincere apology for any of Edna Pontellier's actions. Chopin's flippant tone is obvious; she uses humor to create the pretense that she had little control over her own creation and thereby to disarm her critics. The attempt failed; by the time Book News published her comments in July, the critical die had been cast, and The Awakening was widely regarded as an immoral book. This was not the first time that Chopin had used humor in her writing. Indeed, it is a fact largely unremarked by scholars that Chopin was a skilled practitioner of humorous techniques--sometimes to avoid the sentimentality that could so easily find its way into "local-color" sketches and stories for children, but more extensively to critique such manifestations of late-nineteenth-century American society as ostentatious philanthropy, social pretentiousness, and even some aspects of the Southern culture that was her most common subject matter. A study of Chopin's use of humor and satire provides important insights into her opinions of the culture in which she lived and her ability to maintain an ironic distance from the parts of that culture that threatened her independence.

Indeed, although Chopin has most often been categorized--particularly during her own lifetime--as a writer of Southern regional fiction, she should also be seen as part of the tradition of American women's humor. [1] By the time Chopin's career was well underway in the 1890s, several generations of women writers had used wit and humor to declare their resistance to hypocrisy, pretension, and cultural constraints, particularly as they affected women's lives. In the 1840s, Frances Whitcher had used satire to point out that it was women's economic dependence on men that caused them to be competitive in the marriage market, and during the following two decades Fanny Fern (Sara Willis Parton) employed sprightly comedy to address conflicts between marriage and women's careers, the tyranny of fashion, and religious hypocrisy. By the 189 OS, Marietta Holley had emerged as one of America's most popular humorous writers; her central character, Samantha Allen, is an outspoken feminist who rejects sentimental views of m arriage and advocates female suffrage. Although there is no evidence that Chopin read the work of these predecessors, she similarly found the various humorous modes the appropriate vehicle for much of her social commentary.

In both her critical writing and her fiction, Chopin frequently declared her affinity for humor and her resistance to the sentimental and the conventional. One of her major reservations about Thomas Hardy's novel Jude the Obscure was that "from beginning to end there is not a gleam of humor in the book" (qtd. in Rankin 152). She valued a sense of humor as a personal characteristic as well as an element of literature. When she was invited to meet fellow writer Ruth McEnery Stuart in February of 1897, she initially dreaded the encounter: "I had met a few celebrities, and they had never failed to depress me." But the meeting with Stuart reassured her: "I might have known that a woman possessing so great an abundance of saving grace--which is humor--was not going to take herself seriously, or to imagine for a moment that I intended to take her seriously" (qtd. in Rankin 156--57). For those she met socially who did take themselves seriously, she sometimes expressed contempt. After meeting a Mrs. Stone in June of 1894, she wrote in her diary that she "looks like a woman who accepts life as a tragedy and has braced herself to meet it with a smile on her lips. The spirit of the reformer burns within her, and gives to her eyes [a] smouldering, steady glow" (Private Papers 185). Chopin was suspicious of reformers, because of both their sense of self-importance and their tendency to tell others how to behave. Writing in the Atlantic Monthly in 1899, she noted, "Some wise man has promulgated an eleventh commandment, 'Thou shalt not preach: which, interpreted, means, 'Thou shalt not instruct thy neighbor as to what he should do: But the Preacher is always with us" (qtd. in Rankin 159).

Also taking themselves too seriously were some of the writers whom Chopin met at the only writers' conference she attended, the Western Association of Writers in the summer of 1894. In her impressions of this event, which were published in the Critic, Chopin criticized these writers for their lack of skepticism, which had, in her view, a detrimental effect on their writing:

There is no doubt in their souls, no unrest: apparently an abiding faith in God as he manifests himself through the sectional church, and an overmastering love of their soil and institutions.... Their native streams, trees, bushes and birds. . . form the chief burden of their often too sentimental songs. (Complete Works 691)

In her own fiction, Chopin several times made fun of writers who clung to conventional forms and sentiments. One of the most overt examples is "Miss Witherwell's Mistake:' published in 1891. The satirically treated title character writes fiction and articles for the Boredomville Battery. The fact that she is a spinster does not deter Miss Witherwell from writing such articles as "A Word to Mothers," and she regards fiction and real life as entirely separate realms: "two such different cupids, as love in real life, and love in fiction, held themselves at widely distant points of view:" When Miss Witherwell's niece asks her aunt's advice about the story of two separated lovers that she does not know how to conclude, Miss Witherwell offers formulaic plot elements, such as having the young man rescue the girl's father from a railway accident or a shipwreck. When the niece protests that she wants a realistic story, Miss Witherwell expostulates, "the poison of the realistic school has certainly tainted and withered your fancy in the bud," and she suggests the only two endings that seem to her appropriate for fiction: "Marry them,... or let them die" (Complete Works 59-66). A similar commentary on conventional melodramatic fiction appears in "Elizabeth Stock's One Story" when Elizabeth is discouraged from writing about what she sees around her, and therefore concludes that she must write about such stock situations as a murder, or money getting stolen, or... mistaken identity" (Complete Works 587).

For Kate Chopin, then, humor meant more than the merely comic; it was allied with that which was modern, unconventional, realistic, and spontaneous, and opposed to pretension, cant, and self-importance. Although The Awakening is not a novel noted for its humor, the points at which the text incorporates comic elements underscore just such a distinction. When, in chapter five, Robert Lebrun jokingly describes to Edna Pontellier the passion he once felt for Madame Ratignolle, his use of hyperbole--"consuming flames till the very sea sizzled when he took his daily plunge"--signals to everyone except Edna that he is being playful rather than serious (Com plete Works 891). Chopin again uses humor to convey precisely the opposite message about Edna's overbearing father, whom she describes as having "little sense of humor," and who becomes a caricature when she describes him leaving New Orleans "with his padded shoulders, his Bible reading, his 'toddies' and ponderous oaths" (Complete Works 953-54). While Chopin's c haracter Miss Witherwell makes an absolute distinction between real and fictional love stories, the young Edna's inability to see the difference between reality and melodrama in her own life has led to her marriage to Leonce, as Chopin wittily relates:

Her marriage to Leonce Pontellier was purely an accident, in this respect resembling many other marriages which masquerade as the decrees of Fate. It was in the midst of her secret great passion [for the tragedian] that she met him. He fell in love, as men are in the habit of doing.... She fancied there was a sympathy of thought and taste between them, in which fancy she was mistaken. Add to this the violent opposition of her father and her sister Margaret to her marriage with a Catholic, and we need seek no further for the motives which led her to accept Monsieur Pontellier for her husband. (Complete Works 898)

The narrative voice, complicit with the reader in the pronoun "we," here comments not merely on Edna's romanticism but offers a wry perspective on marriage itself as an "accident" of the human tendency to self-delusion. A similar commentary occurs in chapter twelve in the bantering conversation, conducted partly in French, among Robert, Edna, and Mariequita. When Mariequita asks Robert in French whether Edna is his "sweetheart," Robert responds that she is a married woman with two children. But for Mariequita, these conditions preclude nothing; she immediately responds by recounting the story of Francisco, who "ran away with Sylvano's wife, who had four children. They took all his money and one of the children and stole his boat." When Edna, who has not understood this exchange, asks about the pair of lovers on the beach-- "Are those two married over there--leaning on each other?"-- Robert responds quickly, with a laugh, "Of course not" (Complete Works 915).

In Chopin's stories for adult readers, humorous commentary is at times subtle and incidental, easily missed except on close reading. She sometimes uses these moments to remark on nineteenth-century literature itself, as in the scene in The Awakening when Edna determines to embark on a course of serious reading and promptly falls asleep while reading Emerson's essays. In the story "Athenaise," Chopin makes a brief but telling reference to the readership of the local-color genre itself. When the journalist Gouvernail loans Athenaise a magazine, she later reports that "a New England story bad puzzled her,... and a Creole tale had offended her, but the pictures had pleased her greatly" (Complete Works 446). The potential of the local-color genre--whether in words or in pictures--to condescend to its subject is the theme of Chopin's "A Gentleman of Bayou Teche." The Cajun Evariste is initially pleased that the visiting Mr. Sublet, a painter "looking for bits of 'local color' along the Teche," wants to paint his p ortrait for "one fine Mag'zine," but the sensible Aunt Dicey warns Evariste that he is being taken advantage of and that the caption will read, "Dis heah is one dem low-down 'Cajuns o' Bayeh Teche!" The satirically treated Mr. Sublet, finally convinced of Evariste's humanity and individuality, allows him to choose his own caption: "Dis is one picture of Mista Evariste Anatole Bonamour, a gent'man of de Bayou Teche" (Complete Works 319-24). The late-nineteenth-century passion for individual self-improvement--best exemplified in the novels of Horatio Alger--is the target of satiric treatment in the story "A Night in Acadie," the title story of Chopin's second published collection. Telesphore, one of the central characters, has become the successful young man of American ideology not by cultivating the virtues advocated in Alger's novels, but by determining early in life to rebel against the example of his uncle, to whom his family is fond of comparing him. It happens that his uncle is illiterate, so Telesphore learns to read and write; his uncle enjoys hunting and fishing, so Telesphore shuns these avocations and tends to his farm. "In short, Telesphore, by advisedly shaping his course in direct opposition to that of his uncle, managed to lead a rather orderly, industrious, and respectable existence" (Complete Works 485).

Some of Chopin's stories, on the other hand, sustain a comic tone throughout. A gentle humor suffuses "Madame Celestin's Divorce," in which Chopin depicts the on-going flirtation between Madame Celestin, who enjoys complaining about the neglect of her absent husband, and lawyer Paxton, who encourages her to seek a divorce from Celestin because he secretly would like to marry her himself. Just as Paxton pretends to have only Madame Celestin's welfare in mind, so Madame Celestin adopts the pretense that she is pursuing the idea of divorce by consulting with the Catholic hierarchy. Her "Maman," Madame Celestin reports to Paxton, warns of family disgrace, and advises that she talk to her priest; Pere Ducheron preaches her a "perfec' sermon" and refers her to the Bishop, who, she says, lectures her on "the duty of a Catholic to stan' everything till the las' extreme." But Madame Celestin declares that she would not be dissuaded even by the Pope, and Paxton's hopes rise until the morning when she, with a face that "seemed ... unusually rosy," announces that Celestin has returned home, and "I reckon you betta neva mine about that divo'ce" (Complete Works 276-79). While the humor in "Madame Celestin's Divorce" conveys Chopin's amusement at the game her characters play with one another, she is not at all amused by Miss McEnders, the title character of a story that sharply satirizes a hypocritical do-gooder. The wealthy young Georgie McEnders is interested on an intellectual level in the problems of the working class; on the day of the story, she plans to deliver a paper on "The Dignity of Labor" to the Women's Reform Club, and to loin with "a committee of ladies to investigate [the] moral condition of St. Louis factory-girls." But when the actual problems of workers come too close to her in the form of a seamstress who is an unwed mother, Miss McEnders is incensed and orders the woman to stop working on her trousseau. The seamstress responds by daring Miss McEnders to find out how her father earns his money, which turns out to be the illicit sale of whiskey. Miss McEnders's concern with appearances rather than reality is suggested from the first lines of the story, when, dressing for the day's events, she is careful to remove all of her "rings, bangles, brooches--everything to suggest that she stood in friendly relations with fortune" (Complete Works 204-11).

"Miss McEnders" which was written in 1892 and published under a pseudonym in the St. Louis Criterion in 1897, would have had recognizable origins to many St. Louis readers. The "Women's Reform Club" was a thin disguise for the St. Louis Wednesday Club, to which Chopin belonged briefly early in the decade. Formed in 1890 as "a center of thought and action among the women of St. Louis" (qtd. in Toth 208), the Wednesday Club soon ceased to interest Chopin, who had a limited tolerance for reformers. Further, the model for the story's title character could be readily identified as Ellen McKee, the philanthropist daughter of William McKee, who had been convicted in the 1870s for stealing tax money from illegally brewed whiskey. Given the fact that Chopin's satire would have alienated some segments of St. Louis society, it is perhaps fortunate that the story was rejected by the five periodicals to which she submitted it under her own name in 1892 and 1893--including the New Orleans Times-Democrat and Vogue (Private Papers 161).

Kate Chopin's name did appear, however, on her first novel, At Fault, which she had privately printed in St. Louis in the fall of 1890 and which contains her most sustained satire on certain elements of St. Louis society. The novel draws upon Chopin's experience in both St. Louis and central Louisiana, and the latter locale is presented in a far more favorable light than are the vignettes of St. Louis and its inhabitants that form part of the narrative. The central female character, Therese Lafirme, resembles Chopin herself in being left a young widow with a business to run. When David Hosmer, a divorced man from St. Louis, appears at her plantation with the intention of starting a sawmill on some of her land, the attraction between them grows steadily until Therese's Catholic upbringing prompts her to rebuke him for abandoning his marriage and to suggest that he can gain her respect only if he re-marries his wife, Fanny. It is David's reluctant decision to do so that moves the novel to St. Louis and introduces the reader to Fanny's friends. After this point, the setting alternates between the natural countryside of Louisiana and the artificiality and frivolity of urban life. The plot has distinct elements of melodrama. Following David and Fanny's remarriage, they return to Therese's plantation, where Fanny gradually reverts to the alcoholism that had been one cause of the divorce; she later drowns in a river during a thunderstorm, and David and Therese finally unite in marriage. The satiric portions of the novel serve to counterbalance the melodrama and also allow Chopin to make fun of parts of her own St. Louis experience.

In her portrayals of Fanny's friends, Belle Worthington and Lou Dawson, Chopin depicts the pleasure-seeking of privileged women. Unlike Miss McEnders, Belle and Lou lack the veneer of philanthropy. Rather, "these were two ladies of elegant leisure, the conditions of whose lives, and the amiability of whose husbands, had enabled them to develop into finished and professional time-killers" (Complete Works 781). Preparing to go out to a matinee with Lou, Belle enhances her appearance by artificial means, pinning a set of "exquisitely soft blonde curls" to her own hair: "yellow hair it was," Chopin continues, "with a suspicious darkness about the roots, and a streakiness about the back, that to an observant eye would have more than hinted that art had assisted nature in coloring Mrs. Worthington's locks" (Complete Works 779). The two women play cards, drink, and flirt with men--an activity facilitated by Lou Dawson's husband's position as a traveling salesman and Mr. Worthington's distinctly secondary position i n his marriage to Belle, who is in some ways a caricature similar to Rip Van Winkle's shrewish wife. One of the bones of contention between the Worthingtons is books, which Chopin introduces as satiric commentary on the anti-intellectualism of some well-to-do people. To Lorenzo Worthington, books are "precious"; to his wife, Belle, they are mere clutter that "spoilt the looks of any room." The movement of books around the Worthingtons' apartment becomes a piece of near-slapstick comedy. At first, Belle places her husband's books on the top shelf of the kitchen pantry to "get them out of the way," and when Lorenzo protests, she agrees to move them to the top shelf of the bedroom closet, but "he had not foreseen the possibility of their usefulness being a temptation to his wife in so handy a receptacle":

Satirizing the habits and foibles of the wealthy was, of course, nothing new in American fiction, and it was not nearly as potentially risky as Chopin's humorous treatment of Catholicism in At Fault. If Catholic doctrine has its dark side in the resistance to divorce that causes Therese Lafirme to interfere in David Hosmer's life and perhaps inadvertently contribute to Fanny Hosmer's death--the "fault" to which the novel's title points--Chopin also reveals the distance she had traveled from her own convent education by including comic or satiric comments about Catholicism. [2] No one in the novel is conventionally pious; even Therese, who has absorbed from her Catholic upbringing a prejudice against divorce, is not a deeply committed Catholic. When her nephew Gregoire is killed, she asks the local Catholic clergymen to say masses for his soul, but does so more out of custom than conviction, as Chopin notes wryly: "Not that Therese held very strongly to this saying of masses for the dead; but it had been a cu stom holding for generations in the family and which she was not disposed to abandon now" (Complete Works 853). In her description of Belle Worthington, Chop in--herself the mother of six--comments ironically on the role of the Catholic woman as a mother. Having only one child, twelve-year-old Lucilla, Chopin writes, "...as [a] propagator of the species," Belle "had done less than her fair share..." (Complete Works 782). Belle observes the formalities of Catholicism without any sense of deep commitment: "This lady was a good Catholic to the necessary extent of hearing a mass on Sundays, abstaining from meat on Fridays and Ember days, and making her 'Easters'" (Complete Works 784). Lucilla, who attends, as had Chopin, the Sacred Heart Academy in St. Louis, is depicted as a religious fanatic. When the Worthingtons visit Therese Lafirme's plantation, Lucilla spends her time on the veranda rather ostentatiously tallying her good and bad "acts," and she explains to the servant Aunt Belindy that she is going to be a nun--"the religious never get married,...and don't live in the world like others"--which elicits Aunt Belindy's comic response, "Look heah, chile, you t'ink I'se fool? Religion--no religion, whar you gwine live ef you don' live in de worl'? Gwine live up in de moon?" (Complete Works 841). Not only, then, is religious faith not offered as a solution to life's problems, as it was in the sentimental novels that Chopin read as a girl, but the novel regards it with considerable skepticism.

Such stereotypical depictions were, of course, the norm rather than the exception to nineteenth-century readers accustomed to minstrel shows and theatrical productions based on Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, [3] in which black characters were figures of comedy or pathos. [4] Reviewers of At Fault generally praised Chopin for her skill in conveying "local color' which included her black characters, and the reviewer for the Nation--the only nationally circulated periodical that reviewed Chopin's first novel--even waxed nostaigic in discussing these characters:

The negro character [sic] are exceedingly well produced and the authoress traces with a mistress' hand the peculiarities of the African's dialect. Pierson describes in the natural Etheopian [sic] style Gregoire's spree in Cloutierville and the light and shade thrown by Belinda's remarks are perfect specimens of negro mannerism. Marie Louise and Morico form exquisite pictures of the old time darkies and remind the writer of the race and characteristics of his old nurse and yard-servant of the long ago. (qtd. in Toth 193-94)

Few reviewers even mentioned Chopin's satiric portrayals of such characters as Belle Worthington. The Nation reviewer merely commented that the sections of the novel set in St. Louis were "indited in the reportorial style and... a valuable auxiliary to the story" (qtd. in Toth 194). No reviewer mentioned, much less objected to, the religious skepticism conveyed by Chopin's humor. Indeed, those reviewers who were critical of the novel based their objections on moral grounds. The Nation reviewer, for example, found "improper" the "love or lovemaking" between Therese and David, and another reviewer objected to the fact that David's sister, Melicent, had been engaged five times: "If she really was engaged five times it ought not to be mentioned." Perhaps the most striking critique of At Fault concerned Chopin's use of language. The reviewer for the St. Louis Republic felt that referring to a railway station as a "depot" and a shop as a "store" served to "mar the value of the book." It was to this critique that Chopin chose to reply, in the witty manner she would later use to defend The Awakening:

I cannot recall an instance, in or out of fiction, in which an American "country store" has been alluded to as a "shop," unless by some unregenerate Englishman. The use of the word depot or station is optional. Win. Dean Howells employs the former to indicate a "railway station," so I am hardly ready to believe the value of "At Fault" marred by following so safe a precedent. (qtd. in Toth 190-93)

Chopin's most thoroughgoing foray into comic writing also constitutes her only known attempt to write a play. "An Embarrassing Position: A Comedy in One Act" was written in October of 1891 and finally published in the St. Louis Mirror in 1899. In form, the play is a farce or comedy of manners, set in an upper-middle-class urban household and employing misunderstandings, mistaken identities, and stereotypical characters. Chopin uses the form to comment on both excessive moral prudery and the myth-making of post-Civil War southern families. Mr. Willis Parkham, a "wealthy young bachelor" with political aspirations, is visited late one snowy night by Miss Eva Artless, whose father is delayed in returning home by the storm, and who has responded to his concern about her being alone overnight by coming to spend the night in his friend Parkham's house, oblivious to the perceived impropriety of two single people sharing a roof. When a newspaper reporter named Mr. Cool Lately sees and recognizes Eva in Parkham's hous e, he immediately smells a scandal, and Parkham fears for his political future. Parkham not only claims that Eva is his wife, but sends his black servant, Cato, for a minister to transform the pretense into reality, and as the play ends the couple pledge their love to one another as the minister enters the house. In keeping with the farce tradition, the characters speak past each other, deliver audible asides to the audience, and act largely out of self-interest: Parkham to protect his public career, the reporter to get the scoop on a story, and Eva Artless to find respite from her sheltered life. Also true to the farce is the abrupt and artificial denouement, with a previously uncommitted couple about to be joined in matrimony. Even more than in the case of Edna and Lonce Pontellier, this marriage is "purely an accident."

One of the most interesting elements of "An Embarrassing Position" is the role of Willis Parkham's servant, Cato. The play has no specific geographical location, but Cato's description in the stage directions as a "reputable old negro servitor" suggests a former slave-holding area of the south. Instead of being a stereotype like the black characters in At Fault, however, Cato displays an awareness of being given a role to play which he can choose to play or not, and he both emerges as the most nearly complex character in the play and serves as the vehicle for Chopin's satire on southern Civil War mythologies. Early in the play, Cato insists on cleaning up after Willis Parkham's poker party over Parkham's objections. When Parkham says, "It never occurs to you to take liberties, does it Cato?" Cato responds, "I never takes nuttin' w'at don' b'long to me," a remarkable double entendre that suggests both that he misunderstands the question and that "liberties" are indeed his to take. One of the liberties that Ca to takes is to refer to the gathering as a poker game when Parkham has called it a "political meeting"; while Parkham maintains that "one name'll do as well as another," Cato trusts not names but the evidence of his own eyes (Complete Works 164). The most extended dialogue between Parkham and Cato precedes Parkham's request that Cato find a minister to perform a midnight wedding; in it, Chopin satirizes fond Southern memories of Union aggression and faithful "darkies":

PARKHAM: Cato, can you be trusted?

CATO: Kin I be trusted? Ef dat aint some'pin putty fur old Marse Hank Parkham's gran'son to be a axin' Cato! Aint I done been trested wid mo' gole an' silver 'an you ever sot yo' eyes on?

PARKHAM: Oh, never mind that story.

By taking over the family's story of hiding the valuables from Yankee invaders and stressing his own role in it, Cato unsettles the balance of black and white, and Chopin exposes such stories as set-pieces of Southern mythology, repeated over and over again.

NOTES

WORKS CITED

Ammons, Elizabeth. Conflicting Stories: American Women Writers at the Turn into the Twentieth Century. New York Oxford Up, 1991.

Chopin, Kate. The Complete Works of Kate Chopin. Ed. Per Seyersted. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1969.

-----. Kate Chopin's Private Papers. Ed. Emily Toth and Per Seyersted. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1998.

Rankin, Daniel S. Kate Chopin and Her Creole Stories. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1932.

Toth, Emily. Kate Chopin. New York: Morrow, 1990.

Walker, Nancy A. A Very Serious Thing: Women's Humor and American Culture. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1988.

Walker, Nancy A., and Zita Dresner, eds. Redressing tire Balance: American Women's Literary Humor from Colonial Times to the 1980s. Jackson: U of Mississippi P, 1988.