Classroom Issues And Strategies

Chopin's irony is too subtle for some students, who may see her female characters as cold, unloving, unfeeling women. They have difficulty understanding that the protagonists in, say, "A Respectable Woman" and "The Story of an Hour" really do love their husbands, although in the one case the wife seems sure to commit adultery and in the other the wife exults in her freedom when she believes that her husband has died in an accident. The same students almost surely will judge Calixta (but probably not Alcйe) in "The Storm." Students almost always respond to Chopin's treatment of the relationship between men and women. Often the male students intensely dislike such characters as Mrs. Mallard and Mrs. Baroda. Often, also, they judge the mother in "A Pair of Silk Stockings" to be uncaring about her children and frivolous in spending her little windfall. In other words, students today still hold many of the notions about women that inspired Chopin's best irony and satire.

Class discussions usually help a great deal to clear up such misunderstandings. These discussions are based on a very close reading of the text, calling attention to the myriad small clues Chopin always provided but readers do not always observe. "The Storm," being a sequel to "At the Cadian Ball," becomes much clearer in characterization and theme when students understand the groundwork that was laid in the earlier work. Indeed, without such explanation, "The Storm" hardly makes sense to many students.

Since Chopin wrote everything she produced during the last decade of the nineteenth century but was too advanced in her thinking to be accepted until the last quarter of the twentieth century, she offers a fine vehicle for exploring the intellectual and aesthetic tides of American thinking and American literature. In important ways, she summarizes the nineteenth century with her fine