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Foucault informs Kate Chopin's short fiction.

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Abstract

My essay discusses Michel Foucault's theory on power in relation to Kate Chopin's "The Storm" and "Desiree's Baby." I argue that due to reversals of power, Chopin's oppressed female protagonists challenge patriarchal structures and position themselves outside of the strict social and moral codes of the nineteenth century that Foucault alludes to in The History of Sexuality. Teachers of literature will find my paper useful because it approaches short fiction from historical, social, and gender-based perspectives.

Scholars have written extensively on Kate Chopin, but not enough on her female characters in conjunction with theorists such as Michel Foucault and his theory on power and sexuality in The History of Sexuality. Also, most of the criticism on Chopin in connection to Foucault's work tackles Chopin's most famous text, The Awakening. Matilde Martin Gonzalez looks at how Foucault's theoretical formulations on the body apply to Kate Chopin's The Awakening. Robert Strozier's article covers several novels including a brief analysis of The Awakening and Foucault's theory on objective knowledge.

I will look at how ideas on power and married life in the nineteenth century as articulated by Foucault have echoes in Chopin's depictions of female characters from her short fiction. Foucault discusses the strict social and moral codes of the nineteenth-century married life and argues that husbands controlled the sexual practices and sexuality of powerless individuals such as women, children, and slaves. As a southern female writer of the region, Chopin empowers oppressed individuals such as women and people of mixed blood and addresses women's turmoil and struggle for autonomy in a time when white male masters, husbands, and fathers dictated the rules in society. With women like Calixta from "The Storm" and Desiree from "Desiree's Baby," Chopin offers alternatives to the stifling married life of the period. By positioning these women outside of the social norm and allowing them to reverse patriarchal norms and define...

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