Female Sexuality & Desire in Chopins The Storm Essay -- Chopin Storm

Female Sexuality & Desire in Chopins The ramp In Kate Chopins time traditional patriarchal notions roughly women and sexual urge deemed sexual passion a negligible, even improper, aspect of womens lives. Yet Chopin boldly addresses a womans sexual desire in her short report The Storm. This story shockingly details a torrid extramarital sexual clash between Calixta and Alcee in the midst of a raging act. age this story line could have been presented in a traditional light, mayhap as a lesson about the evils of uninhibited female sexuality, Chopin maintains a non-judgmental carriage by refraining from moralizing about the sanctity of marriage or conversance of Calixtas actions. In failing to condemn and even condoning Calixtas actions, as well acknowledging the humankind and depth of sexual desire in women, Chopin imbues The Storm with a unvoiced feminist tone and calls the very institution of marriage into question. The mere social movement of Calixtas sexual desire and certainly its marked intensity make this story revolutionary in its feminist statement about female sexuality. Chopin uses the self-assertion of a thunderstorm to describe the development, peak, and ebbing of passion in the encounter between Calixta and Alcee. At first, Calixta is unaware of the approaching storm, just as her sexual desire might be on an unconscious level yet, as the storm approaches, Calixta grows warm and damp with perspiration. Chopin deliberately juxtaposes these two events when she writes that Calixta, felt very warm...she unfastened her white saque at the throat. It began to grow dark and suddenly realizing the postal service she got up and hurriedly went about closing windows and doors (282). The gathering storm serves as ... ...s Chopin expresses in this story would certainly have seemed outrageous to her contemporary parliamentary law and would have been grounds for an almost universal condemnation of Chopin and her work. She daringly celebrates fem ale sexuality and uses this celebration as a feminist assertion about womens equal potentialities and rights to express themselves and experience pleasure. That every one was happy when the storm passed suggests that revolutionizing traditional concepts of gender and marriage will change everyones, especially womens, lives for the better. whole kit and boodle Cited Chopin, Kate. The Storm A Sequel to The Cadian Ball. Kate Chopin The Awakening and Selected Stories. New York Penguin, 1984. 281-86. Gilbert, Sandra M. Introduction The consequence Coming of Aphrodite. Kate Chopin The Awakening and Selected Stories. New York Penguin, 1984. 7-33.