Kate Chopin Beyond The Bayou

[Jen Ondrey]

Amiddle-aged black woman named La Folle lives in a cabin past an abandoned field next to the bayou, and she has never visited the woods beyond her home. Her name was once Jacqueline, but she gained her nickname because she went a little mad after a frightening experience in her childhood when the young master P'tit Matre came bloodied into her mother's cabin after a skirmish in the woods. La Folle has never entirely returned to sanity, and she now lives alone, knowing nothing of life outside of the bayou besides what she imagines in her mind.

La Folle has never crossed the bayou, even when the mistress of Bellissime died. P'tit Matre now owns Bellissime and has multiple daughters and a son whom La Folle adores and calls Chri. One summer, after Chri has grown older and has gotten his own gun, the children and the cattle are able to cross the bayou on foot due to a mild drought and subsequent lowering of the water level. On Saturday afternoons, the fields are deserted while the men go to market and the women do domestic tasks.

While La Folle does her Saturday chores, she often thinks of Chri, and when Chri returns, he comes to her before going into the wood to hunt. He has bragged to her before about the game that he will bring to her. Today, however, she hears a shot of the rifle accompanied by a cry of distress, and she runs toward the sound.

She discovers Chri on the ground, moaning that he had stumbled and accidentally shot himself in the leg. She wants to take him to Doctor Bonfils but is afraid to cross into the world of the bayou, so she shouts for help. Upon hearing no reply, she runs terrified into what is for her a new world.

Other people notice with surprise that she has crossed the bayou with Chri, but they do not approach her because of her mad expression. Someone alerts P'tit Matre, and she dumps Chri into his father's arms before fainting. When she awakens, she is again in her cabin and peacefully goes back to sleep, alleviating everyone's worries that she might die.

The next morning, she calmly wakes up, crosses the bayou, and walks with delight upon the new terrain, enjoying the beautiful flowers. No one is yet awake to observe her. She climbs to the veranda and becomes ecstatic as she observes the bayou.

La Folle knocks upon the door, and Chri's mother answers, hiding her astonishment at seeing La Folle. La Folle calmly asks about Chri's state, and the mother replies that he will recover easily. La Folle decides to wait on the veranda until Chri wakes up, and she watches the sunrise with wonder and contentment.

The title of "Beyond the Bayou" is significant because it initially establishes the sense of boundary that is the centerpiece of La Folle's inner struggle. The main conflict in "Beyond the Bayou" is within a woman's mind as she suffers from her deeply ingrained fear of the unknown. As with a number of Chopin's short stories, such as "The Story of an Hour," the main character is a woman who discovers new aspects of her own independence and ability at a moment of crisis. Unlike Louise Mallard of "The Story of an Hour," however, La Folle is able to reclaim her liberty without any sudden setbacks, and the end of "Beyond the Bayou" features an image of triumph that associates a sunrise with La Folle's prospects for the future.

Chopin initially introduces the bayou as a distinct line that cordons off her land from the remainder of the world so that her universe consists of a single hut and an abandoned field. The lack of people in this area contrasts with our knowledge of the crowdedness that exists beyond the bayou. Consequently, La Folle commences as a somewhat pitiable character who no longer bears her true name because her unreasoning fear creates a self-enforced boundary that restricts her both physically and mentally. By the end of her story, however, the situation of exigency created by Chri's accident has allowed her to cross the barrier of the unknown as well as the social barrier that separates her enslaved existence from the residence of the owners of Bellissime. When the sun rises, it visually and symbolically breaks the bayou's boundary line so that La Folle is no longer constrained.

The origin of La Folle's madness foreshadows the crisis that leads to the resolution both of the narrative and of La Folle's mental conflict. Kate Chopin describes La Folle's traumatic childhood experience as one where P'tit Matre returns bloodied to her mother's cabin while being pursued after a skirmish. Whereas a serious battle is implied in this incident, although the exact nature of the pursuers is never revealed, Chri's misadventure is relatively trivial and involves a minor injury in which the ten-year-old shoots himself in the leg. The relative inconsequence of the accident contrasts with La Folle's reaction because she associates it with P'tit Matre's battle wounds and with her childhood fear.

Unlike many of Chopin's stories about the antebellum South, "Beyond the Bayou" explores the world of the Louisiana plantation not from the viewpoint of the privileged upper class, as in "A Respectable Woman," but rather from the opposite end of the social spectrum. Although "Beyond the Bayou" does not deal as specifically with racial issues as does "Dsire's Baby," the bayou's division of La Folle's world from the plantation owners' house implicitly indicates La Folle's separation from the white upper class. Over the course of the story, the owners of Bellissime only enter La Folle's domain twice, in both cases to ask for help in a time of need. Conversely, when La Folle finds her sanity, her choice to walk first toward the door of P'tit Matre's home suggests that La Folle has also asserted her equality as a human being. That she is a slave bears no input on her status as the story's heroine or on her newfound freedom.

A curious facet of La Folle's characterization is that her fear outweighs her physical stature, which exceeds that of most men on the plantation. Chopin's depiction of the effects of her fear uses auditory imagery, with a comparison of her heart's beating to the sound of a "muffled hammer" and an emphasis on her loud cries and unheeded voice. In this story, however, fear is counterbalanced by love, and love is eventually connected to La Folle's autonomy and mental independence. That love coincides with the ability to control one's life is not true in all of Chopin's works, which often feature love as destructive, as in "Dsire's Baby," or limiting, as in "The Story of an Hour." Yet, La Folle is fortunate, and her love for Chri allows her to break her mental and physical boundaries.

Authors sometimes pepper their writings with features of orality. Charles Dickens, Emily Bront, Thomas Hardy or George Bernard Shaw have become household names renowned for this propensity to rely on the vocal medium. Orality, however, is an umbrella term that covers a wide range of possible meanings. In this paper, I shall mainly be concerned with direct speech and the way it represents spoken discourse proper.

Kate Chopin is well known for her rendering of dialects and accents, as many of her stories show, but less attention has been paid to her use of paralinguistic vocal features ((See Jobert (2002) for the use of paralinguistic vocal features in fiction.)). These two layers of vocal encoding give her stories an undisputable oral quality and create a vocalscape in which the action is set. These features find an echo in the narrative voice that takes on an oral quality and a rhythm somewhat comparable to that found in poetry. In other words, what is present in the diegesis is, more often than not, reverberated in the narrative.

Realist representations of dialect speech in literary writing do not work through exact correlation with an actual referent (an actual dialect outside the text), but are perceived as credible because they mobilize codes that are significant to the reader.

It is as though Kate Chopin was fully aware of the difficulty of encoding dialect and was preparing the ground for the ensuing dialogue. Interestingly here, direct speech is presented in Standard English despite what is indicated in the inquit. In most cases, however, to evoke Louisiana English, Kate Chopin resorts to morphophonological encoding (Lon, 1993). More specifically, the dialect presented seems to be a blend of South American English and Yat. Here is a selection of some of the major regional speech pointers used in the story ((This presentation is based on Wells (1992). A rigorous phonetic description of Louisiana English at the end of the 19th century (i.e. when the story is set) would require a contemporary description of this accent. However, this presentation being based on a fictional text (which only retains the most obvious features), such linguistic minutiae did not appear necessary.)):

Narrative reports of speech acts (Leech & Short, 1981) then take over, thereby indicating that what matters is the emotions conveyed through her voice, rather than the actual content of her speech. In linguistic terms, the paralinguistic message overrides the linguistic message proper:

Jobert, Manuel. Voix publiques et voix prives. Approche paralinguistique de la rhtorique vocale dans le chapitre 1 de The House of Mirth . Bulletin de la Socit de Stylistique anglaise, 23, 2002. (35-50).

The bayou curved like a crescent around the point of land on which La Folle's cabin stood. Between the stream and the hut lay a big abandoned field, where cattle were pastured when the bayou supplied them with water enough. Through the woods that spread back into unknown regions the woman had drawn an imaginary line, and past this circle she never stepped. This was the form of her only mania.

She was now a large, gaunt black woman, past thirty-five. Her real name was Jacqueline, but every one on the plantation called her La Folle, because in childhood she had been frightened literally "out of her senses," and had never wholly regained them.

It was when there had been skirmishing and sharpshooting all day in the woods. Evening was near when P'tit Matre, black with powder and crimson with blood, had staggered into the cabin of Jacqueline's mother, his pursuers close at his heels. The sight had stunned her childish reason.

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