Mapping Spatial Consciousness in Kate Chopin’s Bayou Folk Stories

Often associated with The Awakening (1899) more than her short story collections, Kate Chopin produced her first collection of short stories in Bayou Folk (1894), which firmly positioned her work onto a national stage. Before the collection’s publication, many of her stories appeared in national magazines, such as the Youth’s Companion, the Century, and Vogue, but this did not secure her first short story collection’s publication. According to Emily Toth’s biography, Unveiling Kate Chopin, Chopin traveled to Boston and New York and even obtained an audience with the Century’s editor, Richard Watson Gilder. Ultimately, though, Houghton, Mifflin of Boston, and not the Century, accepted the collection (originally called “Collection of Creole Stories”) in 1893 (Toth 133–147).

Upon publication, Bayou Folk received many favorable reviews, but Chopin lamented in her diary that these reviews showed “no feeling for the spirit of the work, the subtle genius which created it” (Kate Chopin’s Private Papers 187). For Chopin, “spirit” and “subtle genius” embodied more than descriptions of Louisiana’s landscape and regionally inspired characters. “Virtually all of the stories,” Toth argues, “contained some kind of social criticism that was just as applicable to St. Louis or Boston—as it was to Louisiana”; Chopin was only able to publish these criticisms because reviewers failed to recognize them within the Louisiana setting (Unveiling 150). In Writing out of Place, Judith Fetterley and Marjorie Pryse point out that regionalist writers may be critically relegated to liminal genre classifications, such as “local color” but their use of constructed “space” most often serves to impart an “alternative vision . . . inviting readers to immerse themselves in the ‘open exception’ regionalists take to the very power structure that has ‘regionalized’ their characters and their writing” (24). Regional literature magnifies spatial relationships, and, in this way, Kate Chopin’s Bayou Folk stories render an alternative social vision within a regional frame.

If we think of a story as a map that depicts physical and psychological boundaries within representational borders, then a short story collection gathers and orders these maps into a single volume.¹ By connecting individual stories to one another within an arranged narrative space, short story collections guide readers through a spatial experience in which both individual stories and the ordering of those stories become a framework for interpretation.² Chopin scholar Peggy Skaggs categorizes the twenty-three Bayou Folk stories thematically and, in particular, classifies four stories—“Beyond the Bayou,” “The Return of Alcibiade,” “A Wizard from Gettysburg,” and “Ma’ame Pélagie”—as “lingering dislocations.” In this essay, however, I argue that these four stories are actually located by their privileging of geography to illumine spatial relationships among place, time, and body. Examining these relationships, as geographer Edward Soja argues in Postmetropolis, “cannot only enrich our understanding of almost any subject but [has] the added potential to extend our practical knowledge into more effective actions aimed at changing our world for the better” (2). While Soja’s subject matter focuses on modern-day metropolises like Los Angeles, his conceptualizations of space can be applied to rural geographies. Using place and space theory and narrative theory to consider geosocial relationships, this essay asserts that Chopin’s use of region allows the reader to visualize how sociopolitical narratives are constructed and (possibly) deconstructed over time. By analyzing spatial positioning both within individual stories and their collective arrangement, Bayou Folk stories map Chopin’s cultivation of spatial consciousness.

It is difficult to know if Kate Chopin was thinking of spatial awareness as a way to facilitate reader perspective when writing and arranging the stories in Bayou Folk.³ Regarding the stories’ arrangement, the only editorial request was to keep the “Santien boys” together, which Chopin does by grouping “A No-Account Creole,” “In and Out of Old Natchitoches,” and “In Sabine” as the first three stories of the collection. Toth concludes that the rest of the stories were arranged “for variety” (Unveiling 150–151). Looking closely at the arrangement of “Beyond the Bayou,” “The Return of Alcibiade,” “A Wizard from Gettysburg,” and “Ma’ame P...