Passion Repressed: The Short Fiction of Grace King

Passion Repressed: The Short Fiction of Grace King Douglas J. McReynolds Upper Iowa University Almost as popular a chronicler of Creole life and manners in her time as George Washington Cable and as widely read among her contemporaries as Kate Chopin, Grace King has been virtually ignored for the better part ofthe twentieth century while those two have been subjects of a very great deal of scholarship. When she is mentioned, King is not given consideration as a contributing literary influence in the evolution ofthe American shortstory oras an original voice in American letters. David Kirby's recentstudy of her fiction — the only book-length evaluation available — perhaps inadvertently makes the point. "Today," he says, "King's writings are valuable for two principal reasons: they provide a unique angle of vision into the psychology ofthe American female at a time when she was ridding herself of one role and struggling to adopt a new one, and they allow the present day reader to look longand hard at a portion of the Southern experience that is not to be found in the writings of better-known authors."1 Kirby's consideration is thoughtful and interesting; but it falls short, for it insists on a merely historical significance to King's short stories: hers is a fiction notable, he argues, because it affords us a unique lens for viewing the past. Merrill Maguire Skaggs treats her primarily as a self-styled corrective to George Washington Cable's excesses and argues that her characters are stereotypes, admitting finally that perhaps she is "fairer to the Creoles than Cable was."2 Robert Bush says, modestly, that she "once enjoyed a modest reputation.''3 All three of these writers make much ofher exchange with Richard Watson Gilder when the editor of The Century asked 1.David Kirby, Grace King (Boston: Twayne, 1980), p. 9. 2.Merrill Maguire Skaggs, The Folk ofSouthern Fiction (Athens: University of Georgia, 1972), p. 184. 3.Robert Bush, ed., Grace King of New Orleans (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University, 1973), p. 3. 208ROCKY MOUNTAIN REVIEW her what the Creoles had against Cable;4 all three take her reaction to the question as an explanation of her art and seem embarrassed by what they read as racism, or at least stereotyping, in her stories. King's characters are largely sterotyped, and her plots are often borrowed; yet there occurs frequently in her short stories, and especially in her early ones, the ones collected into Tales o/a Time and Place (1892) and Balcony Stories (1893), a synthesis of fairly crude and certainly familiar stock elements into the startlingly clear insight that attends the revelation of human truth. More specifically, King writes about real, flesh-and-blood women; and by translating the experience ofsex and especially repressedsexuality into motifs of war and manners she, perhaps better than any of her contemporaries, makes accessible the unique experience of being woman in a man-dominated society. Her characters are stereotyped into predictable roles and behavior patterns to be sure, but it is not because they want to be. She makes it clear that they are trapped by a social structure which presumes male dominance and female passiveness; as girls they invariably resist that structure mightily. As women, the strong transcend the structure while the weak accept it and retreat into their closets and into their sewing. If her women are passionate creatures, ruled by feeling and almost anti-intellectual, King makes the point that this is because woman's passion is repressed by a society that denies it its natural expression. Passion must seek release where release can be found. For the men of Grace King's New Orleans there are sumptuous brothels, quadroon balls, and Civil War as legitimate outlets for sexuality and rage; for women there are embroidery and devotion to the Blessed Virgin. The search for sexual identity is couched in terms both of war and of race, and so King's stories tend to work on two, sometimes on three different levels. The best stories are packed with sexual imagery and sexual energy and, although Kirby repeatedly refers to King's women as "men of action," there is really nothing masculine...