Marriage is a social as well as an individual matter in the story. The ’Cadians hold all-night balls so young people can test possible marriage alliances. Old people attend the balls, as do married couples and children, but the evening belongs to the young ’Cadian women and the ’Cadian—and sometimes Creole—men who drift out onto the galleries between dances and whisper in the shadows.

The two couples in the story come from different social groups. Alcée Laballière (brother of Alphonse Laballière of “In and Out of Old Natchitoches”) and his beautiful but cool kinswoman Clarisse are Creoles—the elite of the region, comparatively wealthy, sophisticated descendants of settlers from France or Spain. Bobinôt and the seductive Calixta, with her Cuban blood, are part of the Acadian community—poorer, less well-educated descendants of the two thousand or three thousand Catholics who found their way to the bayous of Louisiana after the British drove them out of Acadia, Nova Scotia, in 1755. The possibility that Alcée might persuade Calixta to agree to a rendezvous in another parish is a dangerous threat to both couples—and the stability of both social groups. The intervention by Clarisse restores equilibrium. Balance once again prevails.

The charming, witty “Madame Célestin’s Divorce,” focused on a marriage’s end, might seem the antithesis of “At the ’Cadian Ball,” but Chopin builds the story around a picket fence, suggesting a boundary that separates the hopeful lawyer from Madame Célestin and keeps the woman inside her marriage and her community. The story, like the interaction between the lawyer and the woman he would like to make his own, is flirtatious, and Chopin masterfully uses a broom to suggest the power of sex in preserving this marriage.

Yet marriage is not the only subject emphasized in Bayou Folk, and at times balance—with the chance for stability and fulfillment that it brings—cannot be grasped by the characters in the collection. In “Ma’ame Pélagie” an obsession with the past interferes. In this story near the end of the book, Chopin develops the house-reconstruction motif she uses in the first story, and brings in an outsider as she does there and in other works.

The outsider Wallace Offdean in “A No-Account Creole” will help Euphrasie restore the old Santien house. But the new person in “Ma’ame Pélagie”—La Petite, a niece of Pélagie—blocks a restoration effort. Like Offdean, La Petite articulates what she wants, and her sense of rich social possibilities resembles his: “I must live another life,” she says, “the life I lived before. I want to know things that are happening from day to day over the world, and hear them talked about. I want my music, my books, my companions.” But La Petite’s needs and Pélagie’s vision for the restored house are incompatible. The young girl will have what she wants, as will Pélagie’s sister. But Ma’ame Pélagie herself has lost her dream, her fantasy, and lost something tangible as well—her chance to regain for herself and her sister the prewar social position upon which her sense of fulfillment depends.

The darkest moments in Bayou Folk are in “Désirée’s Baby,” Chopin’s most popular story throughout most of the twentieth century—and one of her few stories set before or during the Civil War. Again a fantasy, one of racial superiority, drives the narrative. But it leads not—as in “Ma’ame Pélagie”—to one person’s acceptance of a diminished social position in return for the happiness and fulfillment of a beloved sister, but to a woman’s shame, humiliation, and, presumably, death. Nowhere in Chopin’s fiction does an inability to balance social and individual fulfillment result in more disastrous consequences.

The story’s famous ironic ending hinges on differences between cultures. Armand Aubigny’s white father and black mother apparently lived together happily in Paris, so Armand’s rejection of his wife and child because the child carries black blood—part, if not all, his own—is a rejection of his parents as well, and perhaps even of himself. It is not clear if Armand knows that he is of mixed race or if he has had a child with La Blanche, his slave, nor is it clear just what Désirée understands about her husband. The story leaves much unexplained, but its stinging condemnation of racism has burned itself into the memory of readers for generations.

The depressing tone of “Désirée’s Baby” is echoed at the end of Bayou Folk. The youthful optimism of the early stories is gone. “La Belle Zoraïde” and “A Lady of Bayou St. John” are linked stories centered on whites’ attitudes toward race and on people’s obsessions with fantasies. Both stories—separated by the lighter “A Gentleman of Bayou Têche”—close the collection with a focus not on the possibilities of the future but on the destructive pull of the past.

 

The principal theme in A Night in Acadie, as in Bayou Folk, is a search for personal fulfillment and cultural richness. But A Night in Acadie is a better balanced book, and its stories are stronger. Kate Chopin wrote other fine stories in the mid-1890s before she started on The Awakening, ones she did not include in this second collection—“The Story of an Hour,” “Lilacs,” “A Vocation and a Voice,” “The Falling in Love of Fedora,” “A Pair of Silk Stockings,” and one or two others—and she wrote some powerful short fiction later in her career, notably “The Storm” and “Charlie.” But she would produce little to surpass the works she published in A Night in Acadie—“Athénaïse,” “A Matter of Prejudice,” “Nég Créol,” “Tante Cat’rinette,” “A Respectable Woman,” “Ripe Figs,” and a few more. The Night in Acadie stories show us a world where life remains as difficult as it was in Bayou Folk yet is bursting with possibilities. A Night in Acadie is one of America’s best nineteenth-century collections of short stories—and one of the most compassionate views of life in American realistic fiction.

The stories in the collection are framed by beginning and ending narratives about a man setting out on a short trip that leads to unexpected results—a probable marriage in the first, an act of kindness in the last.