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

pistillate Sexuality & Desire in Chopins The Storm In Kate Chopins time traditional patriarchal notions about women and sexuality deemed sexual passion a negligible, level off improper, aspect of womens lives. Yet Chopin boldly addresses a womans sexual desire in her short story The Storm. This story shockingly details a torrid extramarital sexual encounter between Calixta and Alcee in the thick of a raging storm. While this story line could waste been presented in a traditional light, perhaps as a lesson about the evils of unsuppressed female sexuality, Chopin maintains a non-judgmental stance by refraining from moralizing about the holiness of marriage or impropriety of Calixtas actions. In failing to condemn and in time condoning Calixtas actions, as well acknowledging the existence and depth of sexual desire in women, Chopin imbues The Storm with a strong feminist tone and calls the very universe of marriage into question. The mere presence of Calixtas sexual desire and certainly its marked intensity make this story revolutionary in its feminist control about female sexuality. Chopin uses the conceit of a thunderstorm to describe the development, peak, and reflux of passion in the encounter between Calixta and Alcee. At first, Calixta is unaware of the draw close storm, just as her sexual desire might be on an unconscious level yet, as the storm approaches, Calixta go ups warm and damp with perspiration. Chopin by choice 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 situation she got up and hurriedly went about gag law windows and doors (282). The gathering storm serves as ... ...s Chopin expresses in this story would certainly have seemed outrageous to her contemporary society and would have been grounds for an almost oecumenical condemnation of Chopin and her work. She daringly celebrates female sexuality and uses this celebration as a feminist assertion about womens equal potentialities and rights to express themselves and experience pleasure. That either one was happy when the storm passed suggests that revolutionizing traditional concepts of gender and marriage give change everyones, especially womens, lives for the better. Works Cited Chopin, Kate. The Storm A Sequel to The Cadian Ball. Kate Chopin The wake up and Selected Stories. New York Penguin, 1984. 281-86. Gilbert, Sandra M. Introduction The Second Coming of Aphrodite. Kate Chopin The Awakening and Selected Stories. New York Penguin, 1984. 7-33.