Feminist Literary Theory

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Naturalism and the Short Story Form: Kate Chopin’s ‘The Story of an Hour’ Author: Scott D. Emmert Date: 2008 From: Scribbling Women and the Short Story Form: Approaches by American and British Women Writers Publisher: Lang Reprint In: Short Story Criticism(Vol. 211. ) Document Type: Critical essay Length: 5,090 words

Full Text: [(essay date 2008) In the following essay, Emmert cites “The Story of an Hour” as an example of “the structural advantages the short story has for naturalist writers.” He argues that Chopin “stands squarely within a tradition of American literary naturalism and careful attention to short story craft, and her naturalist stories demonstrate a deft integration of theme and form.”]

When writing about American literary naturalism, most scholars focus on the novel. Although in their discussions of naturalism critics may include short stories by certain writers, such as Stephen Crane and Jack London, statements about the structural properties of naturalist fiction derive exclusively from a study of novels. This close attention to the naturalist novel has yielded valuable insights, to be sure, because naturalist writers created new ways to tell stories. For example, the plot of decline in which a character degenerates physically, socially, and even morally over an extended period of time is a naturalist invention, as David Baguley indicates when he identifies two types of plots of dissolution developed by French naturalist writers (22). In its origins and uses, however, the plot of decline comes to America as a way of structuring novels only, and as Philip Fisher and June Howard indicate, such a plot served most obviously to give form to Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie (1900) and Frank Norris’s Vandover and the Brute (1914) (Fisher 169-78; Howard 63-69). In addition to the plot of decline, Fisher finds the structure of naturalist novels to be dependent upon different “temporary worlds” through which characters carry their desires and seek their identities (138-53).

Short stories, in contrast, cannot easily form narrative with the plot of decline or with a series of temporary worlds. Their length makes it exceedingly difficult to present the span of time needed to make plausible a character’s gradual degeneration, and at best a short story may focus successfully on a small number of settings. The short story nonetheless provides advantages to naturalist writers. A story’s limited length and formal compression may assist writers as they dramatize the oppositional forces arrayed against naturalist characters. Indeed, often the sense of restriction and entrapment felt by these characters registers with greater inevitability in short stories than in novels. Just as inventive as naturalist novelists, short story naturalists employed their own formal techniques to express the theme of determinism. These techniques—including symbolic characterization, the predictive beginning, and the sudden reversal—can be recognized in Kate Chopin’s masterful “The Story of an Hour”,1 which displays the structural advantages the short story has for naturalist writers.

At first glance, the work of a woman regionalist writer such as Kate Chopin may appear to be intrinsically opposed to the naturalist milieu David Shi has described as “a world full of fists” (223). Although Shi’s metaphor emphasizes a violent masculinity, Chopin also wrote about a kind of violence, one directed against the emotions and psychologies of her female characters in a restrictive, male- dominated society. While male characters in naturalist stories by men often meet deterministic forces in the larger world of adventure (e.g., in war or at sea), in the natural environment of desert or arctic wastelands, and in urban squalor, the female characters in stories by Chopin and other women naturalists discover these forces much closer to home—in their bedrooms, kitchens, and drawing rooms, in both the biological and gender limits particular to a woman’s experience. In this light, a recent body of scholarship has identified a distinctive kind of naturalism that chronicles the struggles of women against an array of coercive forces not necessarily operative for men.2

A basic affinity between the fiction of Kate Chopin and that of other naturalist writers lies in her focus on restricted characters. Recognizing this focus is essential to understanding much of Chopin’s work, which has been defined as “the fiction of limits” because “the demarcating limits of human experience” command “the center of attention” (Wolff 133, 127). Along with a psychological determinism that frequently limits her characters,3 Chopin dramatizes the biological imperatives that circumscribe human behavior. Certain critics of The Awakening (1899), for example, argue that Edna’s increasing sexual appetite results in her loss of individuality, becoming a greater factor in her death than oppressive gender roles.4 The desire to portray characters limited by forces beyond their control may in fact provide one explanation for Chopin’s interest in the short story, a form that is especially well suited to a depiction

of confinement. Critic Andrew Levy has argued that “[a]mong prose genres” the short story “is most like an enclosed space, most concentrated in form. Among all genres, it is most ‘locked,’ requiring the synthetic closure of an impact-filled beginning and a dramatic conclusion” (65). Chopin and other naturalist writers found ways to take thematic advantage of these formal requirements to portray the boundaries imposed by nature and society.

Contrary to long-standing opinion that regarded her as a literary natural who cheerfully struck off stories in a single sitting amid the clamor of her children, Chopin was a deliberate and diligent artist5 who was drawn to the short story genre. Her output consists of two novels but nearly one hundred stories and sketches, and Per Seyersted notes that her stories usually number around 3,000 words with only a few running longer than 5,000 words. Her partiality for the shorter literary form derives in part from a preference for character and situation over plot and from a desire to control the elements of her fiction to produce a specific effect (Seyersted 116). Part of her desired effect was to provide, as Seyersted puts it, “a more powerful realism” than that available in the novels of Madame de Stael and George Sand while still offering “a true picture of the fundamentals of [female] existence” (98). The drama of the fundamental limits that women face receives a stronger expression in a short story such as “The Story of an Hour” (1894) than in Chopin’s famous second novel, mainly because of the story’s greater sense of closure.6

A tautly constructed drama that admits little ambiguity, “The Story of an Hour” vividly depicts a sudden loss of freedom. The story begins by announcing that Mrs. Mallard’s weak heart may be vulnerable to the knowledge that her husband has been killed. Far from dying of grief, however, Louise Mallard weathers a “storm” of emotion and finds herself becalmed in front of an open window. Outside of this window lies an “open square […] all aquiver with the new spring of life.” Louise breathes in the “delicious breath of rain” while her eyes fix on the “blue sky showing here and there through the clouds.” From these sense impressions comes a “subtle and elusive” awareness, one she cannot resist, cannot “beat […] back with her will.” First she names it, uttering “over and over under her breath: ‘free, free, free!’” And then she experiences a physical revitalization. When first hearing of her husband’s death, she felt “a physical exhaustion that haunted her body and seemed to reach into her soul,” but in front of the open window, with the word “free” on her breath, Louise feels her own pulse, her “coursing blood” (352-53).

Thus enlivened, Louise can clearly recognize what before had been only an elusive “something.” Stretching before her appears to be “a long procession of years to come that would belong to her absolutely. […] There would be no one to live for her during those coming years; she would live for herself. There would be no powerful will bending hers in that blind persistence with which men and women believe they have a right to impose a private will upon a fellow-creature.” Louise comes into a “possession of self-assertion which she suddenly recognized as the strongest impulse of her being” and she looks forward, as she has not before, to a long life (353).

Louise’s sense of freedom and her greater awareness of an individual self imply, at this stage of the story, her kinship with protagonists in fiction by literary realists. As Lee Clark Mitchell has persuasively argued, realist characters tend to possess autonomy unavailable to naturalist characters. An essential self often allows such characters to resist, or at least successfully negotiate, external forces. The realist character Huckleberry Finn, for example, is able to defy his social conditioning by refusing to return Jim to slavery. Characters in literary naturalism, in contrast, frequently lack both an essential self and the ability to act independently of “their strongest desires,” desires that are produced and enforced by biological or social energies (Mitchell 7). Although Louise’s sudden sense of autonomy, her “possession of self-assertion,” creates an exultant vision, because she is unable to act on this vision, she is never completely a realist character. This perception of freedom, furthermore, seizes her consciousness against her will. Her feelings possess her uncontrollably, suggesting her lack of self-possession by insinuating the power of an elemental force.

Louise’s “freedom” is short-lived of course, for her husband is not dead, and when he enters the house, Mrs. Mallard suffers a fatal heart attack. The story’s last sentence ironically emphasizes the false sentiment behind society’s view of marriage: “When the doctors came they said she had died of heart disease—of joy that kills” (354). As Emily Toth argues, “The Story of an Hour” offers “a criticism of marriage itself, as an institution that traps women” (10). If, for an hour, she thinks of herself as unique and independent, Louise’s fortunes are reversed suddenly, and she dies not out of “joy” but from a traumatic divestment. Louise’s heart fails at her abrupt return to “Mrs. Mallard,” to her socially constructed identity. In a sense, she is killed by the shock of becoming, finally, a naturalist character.

Naturalist characters may often be interpreted therefore as symbols of human frailty, pressured as they are by conditions and forces that tend to erase differences among people and that deny the exercise of a self-defining free will. Characters in short stories, however, do not require justification for being symbols instead of uniquely represented selves. One reason naturalist novels present their characters in connection with numerous disparate worlds is that movement through these worlds helps to explain why characters change over the course of the novel. They change not in some essential core of being, but in the desires that push them into different sets of circumstances. Conversely, in short stories a character’s motivations do not require the level of explanation found in novels; as Sean O’Faolain writes, “The characterization of short-stories is always of the simplest” (153). Because readers of short stories place less emphasis on an extensive elaboration of character, the motives and background of short story characters can be suggested rather than detailed.7

Consequently, naturalist short stories allow greater freedom for characters to function symbolically, in contrast to novels in which characters are less easily abstracted from the more abundant referential detail that surrounds them. Taking them as individuals first and foremost, we expect to know a novel’s characters intimately. The never-named protagonist of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952), for example, shocks in part because his is the central consciousness in a story of over five-hundred pages. Tellingly, however, characters in naturalist stories are sometimes not even given proper names, or their names—as is often the case in the stories of Ambrose Bierce, for instance—are ironically grand designations, pretensions to individuality belied by a reductive plight.

Still, readers tend not to mind so much if a character is not named in a short story. One explanation may be that readers have intuited that short stories are about incidents, discontinuous slices of time—what Edith Wharton called “situation” (48). Michael Trussler has

argued that because a short story, unlike a novel, “emphasizes the integrity of the singular event, the autonomy of the moment,” it resists the “totalizing experience” that is expected from a reading of a novel. In novels, the interpretive context, which Trussler defines as the “encyclopedia” of knowledge provided by the text and by the reader, is more equally weighted between text and reader (561-62). By providing less textual evidence, however, short stories require greater interpretive effort. Aware of the need for compression and trusting the reader’s greater attention, short story writers are freer to insinuate meanings, to provide less characterization, less explanation.

A symbolic use of detail, including characters, is one method of achieving thematic compression in the short story. Theorizing about the ways stories realize “compression rather than expansion,” Charles E. May argues that in short fiction characters become “stylized figures rather than ‘real people’” (64). Similarly, Suzanne Hunter Brown maintains that the “[t]echnical factors” of short stories “lead many short story writers to project an individual’s nature as an essential given” (199). The naturalists’ interest in portraying mostly static characters that lack an essential identity is therefore assisted by the short story form. Interpreted as a symbol, Mrs. Mallard in “ The Story of an Hour” has often been seen as representative of married, middle-class women in 1890s America, women who were subjected to a strict set of social codes that governed female desire and identity. Allusively, in one definition “mallard” means male duck: Mrs. Mallard’s identity is certainly determined by the socially sanctioned prerogatives of the male, particularly the defining power to name.

The abrupt change in status near the end of the story—the sudden shift from “Louise” to “Mrs. Mallard” and, of course, her swift death—most clearly dramatizes Mrs. Mallard’s loss. In place of the plot of decline, naturalist short story writers often employed peripeteia, a sudden reversal of fortune, to emphasize the determined circumstances of their bounded characters. “The Story of an Hour” is similar in this regard to other short stories that are more commonly identified with literary naturalism. Crane’s “The Open Boat,” for instance, features the unexpected death of the most capable character, and London’s “To Build a Fire” stages nature’s unforeseen dangers, most memorably the results of a misplaced fire. In these stories, circumstances intrude when characters feel the most liberated, the most confident, or the most secure. By quickly overturning these feelings, each story violently contradicts the illusion of personal control over events.

Although the ending of “The Story of an Hour” may, as Chopin likely hoped, take readers by surprise, it is nevertheless foreshadowed by the opening paragraphs. In fact, the beginnings of naturalist stories often predict endings in which characters succumb to external circumstances. Naturalist stories frequently begin by instantly establishing the dramatic situation, creating immediacy by quickly moving readers over the “ontological gap” that separates the world of the reader from the different reality of the story.8 The need to interest readers of the periodicals in which naturalist writers published can explain the immediacy of their stories’ first sentences. But in addition to appealing to readers beset with rapidly increasing demands on their attention and leisure, the beginnings of naturalist stories have thematic significance. The famous first lines of “The Open Boat,” for example, not only place the reader within a particular setting but also within a perception of that setting, thereby announcing the story’s epistemological theme.9

A more general theme inheres at the start of many naturalist short stories, however, because frequently these stories begin by putting characters in danger or placing them amid confining circumstances. Unlike naturalist novels, whose opening paragraphs do not necessarily foreshadow inevitable decline or dissolution, short story naturalism often seeks to reduce suspense and thereby suggest the inevitability of defeat. While naturalist novels commonly depict a character’s decline over time, characters in naturalist short stories are regularly placed immediately in crisis. One senses the protagonist’s dire predicament in the opening paragraphs of “To Build a Fire,” for instance. And the first sentence of “Before the Low Green Door,” a naturalist story by Hamlin Garland, announces the approaching death of the suggestively named Matilda Bent, an overworked farmer’s wife. From their beginnings, these stories confront characters with the insurmountable, implying subsequent reversals of the characters’ misguided sense of freedom and foreshadowing an ultimate submission.

“The Story of an Hour” also declares the protagonist’s present danger: “Knowing that Mrs. Mallard was afflicted with heart trouble, great care was taken to break to her as gently as possible the news of her husband’s death” (352). The story’s opening sentence immediately establishes Mrs. Mallard’s “heart trouble,” but it also presents the presupposition that a wife’s life and emotional stability (her “heart”) will naturally be threatened by “the news of her husband’s death.” This sentence indicates both the reality of sudden death and the societal assumptions that affected women in the late nineteenth century. Mrs. Mallard is, from the beginning, confined both physically and socially. Subtly her end has been predicted to allow the story’s conclusion to come as a credible surprise. This matching of beginning and ending, moreover, provides a structural and thematic “lock” to complete both the story’s narrative trajectory and Mrs. Mallard’s fate.

The second paragraph of “The Story of an Hour” introduces another significant element in naturalist fiction. This element may conveniently be labeled the “familiar uncommon,” and here it is represented by the “railroad disaster” that has supposedly killed Mrs. Mallard’s husband. The desire among naturalist writers to depict the unusual experience found in everyday life10 led them to combine the probability of realism with the extraordinary qualities of romance, much in the manner of the yellow press of the time, which reported sensational stories as part of day-to-day events. Familiar but uncommon events significant in naturalist fiction by other authors include the real murders that inform Norris’s McTeague (1899) and Dreiser’s An American Tragedy (1925), and the incidents of shipwreck found in Vandover and the Brute and London’s The Sea-Wolf (1904). In addition to murders and shipwrecks, railroad accidents captured a great deal of press attention. Similar to today’s airplane crashes, these accidents were reported with front-page emphasis. One of Dreiser’s first big stories as a newspaper reporter, for example, was a train wreck that occurred outside of St. Louis, Missouri, in the early 1890s. A personally meaningful train disaster for the longtime St. Louis resident Kate Chopin resulted in the death of her father, Thomas O’Flaherty, who was killed in 1855 when a railroad bridge collapsed.

In naturalist short stories, the familiar uncommon may provide a central dramatic situation, as is the case with the shipwrecked characters in “The Open Boat.” Though not central, the “train disaster” in “The Story of an Hour” certainly helps to establish the dramatic circumstances. More important, however, is its suggestive purpose, the way it plants in the reader’s mind the issue of

sudden death in a manner that may be more “realistic” to contemporary readers, and that functions more obviously than the implications of a woman’s weak heart. On first reading, this suggestion may not lessen the impact of the abrupt death that ends the story, but in retrospect this detail certainly helps to support the story’s theme of the powerless individual.

The formal compression required by short stories emphasizes individual details like this one. Such compression also places greater importance on the ending, which arguably functions differently in short stories than in novels.11 In addition to providing, as Levy writes, an expected “dramatic conclusion,” the endings of short stories often enforce an interpretive re-orientation by requiring readers to “sweep back through the story” and judge its details in relation to the finale (Trussler 572). Short story endings have a “shaping influence” in that they often obligate the reader to re-examine details for missed or misplaced significance (Trussler 573).

The ironic last sentence of “The Story of an Hour” (“When the doctors came they said she had died of heart disease—of joy that kills,” 354) shapes our understanding by requiring a re-examination of the story’s seemingly straight-forward details. In this way, the social determinism becomes clear. Along with grasping the central irony that Mrs. Mallard does not die when she learns her husband is dead but when he turns up alive, readers may discover other, more subtle ironies, including the sense of restriction found in the single setting: Louise feels herself to be free, but she never leaves the house. The ending reveals, furthermore, that the most violent force in the story is not a derailed train but a gendered set of social expectations—a husband who will enforce his “private will” on a wife and a public opinion that rigidly normalizes the oppressive dynamics of marriage. The irony in the last sentence is, of course, available only to readers. As unironic pronouncement its finality is implacable for the story’s remaining characters. To them, Mrs. Mallard will be remembered as the tender-hearted wife, and her private suspicion of marriage as a barrier to personal liberty will never be known. In the end, Chopin has dramatized the peril of a socially determined identity while recognizing the difficulty—maybe even, for women in the 1890s, the near impossibility—of opposing society for the sake of individual freedom.12

While “The Story of an Hour” provides an example of social determinism, other stories also reflect the influence of naturalism on Chopin’s fiction. These stories demonstrate, moreover, an important development in American literary naturalism. In stories such as “La Belle Zoraïde”, “Athénaïse”, and “Désirée’s Baby” Chopin registers the biological forces arrayed against her female protagonists, thus clearly falling within the male tradition of American naturalist fiction. Her concentration in these and other stories on sexual passion and the female reproductive role aligns her with the male naturalists’ emphasis on innate physical drives—what Dreiser called “chemisms.” She marks a stage in the development of naturalist fiction, however, by going beyond natural determinism to demonstrate the seamless connection between a woman’s biological imperatives and her social roles. To be sure, Chopin was not alone in her presentation of social determinism, for a fair measure of such determinism shows up in fiction by Stephen Crane. But unlike Crane, whose stories often present separate naturalist dramas, one in nature and one in society, Chopin combines the natural and social worlds to demonstrate the ways in which these worlds remain inseparable for women.13

By making this connection Chopin is able to raise issues of miscegenation and heredity to express the taboo subjects of female sexuality and racial “purity.” Taboo or “sordid” subject matter was claimed by male naturalist writers, from Emile Zola to Frank Norris, as an important and even necessary foundation for a new kind of fiction. But while male writers tended to confine themselves to a depiction of the lower classes, Chopin portrayed both marginalized and middle-class women who are compelled by similar deterministic forces. Her stories exhibit, therefore, an early signal of naturalism’s spread beyond a lower class, male-centered milieu. Thus much of Chopin’s short fiction presages Edith Wharton’s class-bound women, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s doomed social climbers, and the snare of Southern history that traps William Faulkner’s characters. She stands squarely within a tradition of American literary naturalism and careful attention to short story craft, and her naturalist stories demonstrate a deft integration of theme and form.

Notes

1. First published as “The Dream of an Hour” in Vogue on December 6, 1894.

2. Donald Pizer, for instance, locates a social determinism—the “theme of the entrapment of women within social codes and taboos”—in “a great deal of fiction by women about women” (14). In addition, Susan Ward places a number of nineteenth-century women writers within the parameters of naturalism, among them Chopin, Edith Wharton, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Rebecca Harding Davis. Donna M. Campbell argues that both Wharton and Chopin “attempt [a] fusion of naturalism and local color” (148), and she cites a number of studies that consider naturalism in Wharton’s novels (205, n6). See also the unpublished dissertation by Linda Ann Kornasky.

3. In a critique of Hamlin Garland’s literary theories, Chopin argues for a timelessness in human psychology: “Human impulses do not change and can not so long as men and women continue to stand in the relation to one another which they have occupied since our knowledge of their existence began” (“Crumbling Idols” 693). Nancy Walker argues that Edna in The Awakening “resembles a sleepwalker” who, unable to understand her psychological motivations, “is not really in control of herself” (101).

4. Walker and Karen Simons.

5. Chopin carefully cultivated the public view that she was not an assiduous artist but a widow who casually wrote stories to help support her family. In 1923, Fred Lewis Pattee wrote, erroneously, of her method: “Without models, without study or short-story art, without revision, and usually at a sitting, she produced what often are masterpieces before which one can only wonder and conjecture” (327). Years later, Seyersted quotes her claim that she was a “spontaneous” artist (117), implicitly accepting Pattee’s earlier declaration about her lack of revision, while elsewhere demonstrating that Maupassant was clearly an influence. Newly discovered manuscripts, however, reveal her to be “a diligent reviser” (Toth 167). As Emily Toth writes, behind the pretense that her writing was merely “a hobby,” Chopin “was actually a very dedicated and ambitious author. She was never a dilettante” (142, 109).

6. Interpretations of The Awakening frequently hinge on the extent of Edna’s freedom at the end of the novel. Is she coerced into

suicide or does she choose death to express her refusal to submit to social norms? The novel’s ambiguity inspires critical disagreement on this score. My point here is that the obvious lack of freedom enjoyed by Mrs. Mallard in “The Story of an Hour” lends this story more easily to a deterministic reading.

7. In The Writing of Fiction, Wharton also posits an essential difference between the more developed characters in novels and those in short stories: “[T]he characters engaged [in short stories] must be a little more than puppets; but apparently, also, they may be a little less than individual human beings” (47).

8. See Susan Lohafer (55) for a discussion of this term.

9. Writers at the turn of the century clearly understood the need for dramatic openings in their short stories, but they also insisted on the thematic import of a story’s first sentences. Jack London, for example, once exhorted himself in a set of notes, “Insist on your [emotional and thematic] key” as he worked out the beginning of a possible story (271). Wharton also identified the importance of a short story’s beginning in service of unity and theme (Writing of Fiction 50-51).

10. For example, Frank Norris in “Zola as a Romantic Writer” argues that “the characters of a naturalist tale […] must be twisted from the ordinary” (72).

11. See John Gerlach on the function of short story endings.

12. The contemporary aversion to the theme of positive female self-assertion, however thwarted, is indicated by the difficulty Chopin had in publishing this story. Seyersted notes that it was rejected by Richard Watson Gilder, editor of The Century magazine, because he “considered it unethical” (68). Even Vogue, which eventually did publish the story, at first rejected it (Seyersted 209, n. 59).

13. Helen Taylor emphasizes the interconnected relationship between biology and society that often affects Chopin’s characters (161).

Works Cited

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Brown, Suzanne Hunter. “The Chronotope of the Short Story: Time, Character, and Brevity”. Creative and Critical Approaches to the Short Story. Ed. Noel Harold Kaylor, Jr. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1997. 181-213.

Campbell, Donna M. Resisting Regionalism: Gender and Naturalism in American Fiction, 1885-1915. Athens: Ohio UP, 1997.

Chopin, Kate. “‘Crumbling Idols’ by Hamlin Garland”. The Complete Works of Kate Chopin. Ed. Per Seyersted. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1969. 693-694.

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Full Text: COPYRIGHT 2015 Gale, Cengage Learning Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition) Emmert, Scott D. "Naturalism and the Short Story Form: Kate Chopin’s ‘The Story of an Hour’." Short Story Criticism, edited by

Lawrence J. Trudeau, vol. 211, Gale, 2015. Gale Literature Resource Center, link.gale.com/apps/doc/H1420119416/LitRC?u=hunt25841&sid=LitRC&xid=bc8c77a1. Accessed 21 Apr. 2021. Originally published in Scribbling Women and the Short Story Form, edited by Ellen Burton Harrington, Lang, 2008, pp. 74-85.

Gale Document Number: GALE|H1420119416