In the Library
A Night in Acadie
Kate Chopin, 1897
- Form
- Form Collection
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Moderate
- Reading time
- Reading time 5 hours
- Chapters
- Chapters 21
- Length
- Length 66k words
£1.99
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She called marriage a trap set for the feet of unwary and unsuspecting girls
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About the book
Mamzelle Aurélie is fifty, farms her own land in a man's hat and boots, and has never once wanted a husband. Four small children are left with her for a fortnight, and when the cart carries them away again she sits down in the dark and cries the way a man cries, with sobs that seem to tear her very soul. Chopin wrote these Louisiana stories two years before The Awakening, and she was already doing the thing that would get that novel buried: letting women find out exactly what they want, and declining to punish them for it. Athénaïse walks out on a husband she cannot fault, for no reason except that being married galls her. A wife sits close enough in the dark to touch her husband's friend, goes away instead, and a year later asks for him to be invited back. Half the talk is in French and the bayou heat never lifts; the whole book passes for gentle regional sketching right up to the moment a woman in it stops pretending she is content.