Bayou Folk and A Night in Acadie pdf Kate Chopin Free Download

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ISBN 978-1-1011-9986-2 in Adobe eReader format

BAYOU FOLK
AND
A NIGHT IN ACADIE

KATE CHOPIN

EDITED WITH AN
INTRODUCTION AND NOTES BY
BERNARD KOLOSKI

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INTRODUCTION

Kate Chopin spent the decade before she published The Awakening writing some ninety short stories, many of which she published in national and regional magazines. In 1894 she gathered together twenty-three of those stories in a collection she called Bayou Folk, and in 1897 she chose twenty-one others for a collection titled A Night in Acadie. The books were well received by reviewers, who lauded them as charming, delicate portraits of Creole and Acadian life, and often compared them to works of the French realist Guy de Maupassant.

Chopin’s Bayou Folk publisher had encouraged her to write a novel, arguing it might be more popular than another collection of stories. Yet when The Awakening appeared in 1899, most reviewers found it disturbing and flawed—disagreeable, unhealthy, vulgar, morbid. Although they praised the artistry of the novel, they condemned the choice of subject matter, especially Edna Pontellier’s adultery and suicide. Chopin’s reputation was tarnished. Her third collection of stories, to be called A Vocation and a Voice, was not published in her lifetime.

Chopin wrote a few more short stories before she died in 1904, but people became excited about her work again only in the 1970s when they rediscovered The Awakening and made it among the most often read and best loved of classic American books. Today there is renewed interest in the stories Chopin wrote before her great novel. Bayou Folk and A Night in Acadie are the two books Kate Chopin’s contemporaries most likely knew her by.

The books are celebrations of people in their communities, whether they are inhabitants of New Orleans or of the rural areas of Louisiana, mostly in the 1870s and 1880s. Chopin’s characters are Creoles, Acadians, and “Americans,” people of color and of mixed blood, Native Americans and immigrants, adults and children, the educated and the illiterate, the rich and the poor. The stories are strikingly varied from one another and from Chopin’s famous novel. Some (like “Madame Célestin’s Divorce” or “A Respectable Woman”) focus on women’s issues—on the restrictions women face in seeking self-fulfillment—but many do not. Some (like “Athénaïse” or “Regret”) deal with an awakening by someone—often a woman—to something, but many do not. Chopin centers stories on men (“Mamouche,” “Ozème’s Holiday”) and children (“A Turkey Hunt,” “Boulôt and Boulotte”) as well as on women. She writes about ethnic distinctions, class, race, money, divorce, religion, sex, and, more than anything else, social possibilities.

Most of the strongest stories depict people striving to establish better lives in their communities at a time of traumatic social change. The Civil War is over but its devastation is evident everywhere. Poverty is the norm, illiteracy is common, and the potential for violence is often palpable. Slavery has been abolished but most African Americans struggle to survive. The once-dominant Creoles have lost their economic—if not their social—power and sometimes work the fields alongside lower-class Acadians and blacks. Many young people are dissatisfied, attracted to newly arrived outsiders who by their very presence suggest fresh options. The ruined economy and social order are embodied in decaying plantation mansions with crumbling porticos.

Yet the stories are mostly bright, animated, full of hope because Chopin’s energetic, resilient characters sense possibility in the midst of hardship. They manage to cope, using whatever strategies or tactics they have available. Many of them function as both insiders and outsiders in their communities, intuitively grasping (though rarely intellectually comprehending) the changes going on around them. They recognize opportunities and reach for them. They pass quietly back and forth across the social boundaries that define appropriate behavior by race, class, gender, or generation. It is not coincidental that the child in “Mamouche” tears down fences, that La Folle in “Beyond the Bayou” crosses a terrifying border to save the life of a child, or that the woman in “Madame Célestin’s Divorce” hides behind her picket fence while negotiating with a man of a higher social class. It is not surprising that so many children in the stories have learned from adults to be resourceful, to fend for themselves. Characters in the stories appropriate values from others, gaining for themselves and their families experience that helps them build more fulfilling lives.

Chopin brings to the stories a complex perspective that reflects her background. She grew up bilingual and bicultural in St.

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INTRODUCTION

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