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2 Grace King and the Cultural Background of Balcony Stories Grace King’s career began as an answer to the negative representation of the Creoles of New Orleans in George Washington Cable’s Old Creole Days and his celebrated novel The Grandissimes, in which some of the aristocratic class is depicted as dissolute gamblers incapable of conducting the family business and dependent upon inherited wealth for their survival. Although, as Presbyterians,both King and Cable were alike in being alien to the Catholic world of Louisiana, their works present dramatically different portrayals of life in the Crescent City.Cable fought for the Confederacy in the Civil War, but his fiction reveals the inhumanity of slavery and racial bigotry and the pretensions of the ruling caste. In contrast, King’s stories depict a noble and benevolent portrait of the same society, one in which slaves had been loved and protected by their masters and then devoted their lives to serving them faithfully, even after they had been emancipated. Indeed, King’s first important publication, the story “Monsieur Motte,” involves just such a situation. “Monsieur Motte” appeared in the New Princeton Review in January of 1886, the first issue under the editorship of William M. Sloane.1 In a letter to Sloane’s friend Charles Dudley Warner,who first advised her to write fiction to counter Cable’s presentation of Creole life, King suggested that her objective was to focus on relationships derived from slavery and to bring the races together, an interesting goal in the context of the frequent complaints in modern scholarship about her racial insensitivity.2 The story covers a few days in June of 1874 in the life of Marie Modeste, an orphan student at the prestigious Institut St. Denis in New Orleans, which featured a historical emphasis on French education. King had attended a similar school, the Institut St. Louis, and she took two characters from her experience for the story,a quadroon hairdresser and the headmistress of the institution.3 As she explained in Memories of a Southern Woman of Letters,“the story shaped itself Grace King and the Cultural Background of Balcony Stories 59 through the description of our annual Commencement Day with its great concert and distribution of prizes. The quadroon woman, Marcélite, I took from life,as also the head of the Institut,Madame la Reveillière,who was the old beloved and respected Madame Lavillebeuvre.”4 Given her disposition to work from life whenever possible, she set “Pupasse” in the same location. The titular reference to a Monsieur Motte is ultimately revealed to be ironic in that there is no such person. A former servant in the Motte family, Marcélite, a woman of color, created a fictional uncle when Marie’s parents died leaving her an orphan. Marcélite had been raised by the girl’s grandmother and treated as a member of the white family, a sister to Marie’s mother, and her loyalty and affection for the young girl are unbounded. This idea is a recurring situation in King’s work in her depiction of “many instances of loyalty and even sacrifice to their former masters on the part of black or quadroon women in the period of Reconstruction.”5 Earning a meager living as a coiffeuse, the woman secretly sacrifices her own standard of living to support the girl at an exclusive institution. All of this is revealed in a melodramatic conclusion, and the girl is taken in by the head of the school, Madame Laraveillére, and her attorney, Monsieur Goupilleau, who agree to supervise her young adulthood. In critical terms, the true protagonist is Marcélite: she struggles with the key internal conflicts, suffers emotional turmoil, and exhibits emotional and psychological growth, serving as a surrogate mother for Marie for thirteen years. The first extended character description is of her and emphasizes her positive qualities: “Her features were regular and handsome according to the African type, with a strong, sensuous expression, subdued but not obliterated .Her soft black eyes showed in their voluptuous depths intelligence and strength and protecting tenderness”(94).The narrative perspective is identified with her mind more than with any other character,and her activities are the main focus. However, two other women also serve as central concerns: Marie and Madame Laraveillére. Both become the center of consciousness for crucial passages, and their emotional investments in the plot deepen the psychological context. The ruse of the nonexistent Monsieur Motte comes to...

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