Western American Literature

J O Y C E C O Y N E D Y E R Western Reserve Academy R O B E R T E M M E T T M O N R O E Harvard University Texas and Texans in the Fiction of Kate Chopin Kate Chopin’s Texan becomes the stereotypical hard-drinking, violence-loving villain critics such as W. H. Hutchinson, John G. Cawelti, and Richard W. Etulain identify as a necessary part of the formula Western so popular in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.1 But his presence is not a sign of Chopin’s simplistic understanding of character and human nature, as it might first appear. For there is little about Texan descriptions and Texans that Chopin intends to be realistic and accurate. She is not, for example, interested in analyzing and understanding the social and political causes of her western villains’ parasitic behavior, as someone like Eugene Manlove Rhodes seems to have been.2 Chopin is interested, instead, in making the Texan villain a symbol rather than an individual. Throughout Chopin’s brief writing career, she was always experimenting with ways to explore psychological truth and complexity symbolically. The Texan stereotype permitted her to separate the primitive side of human nature from the genteel, to examine the content of the primitive more closely, and then to show through parallels with the hero how unavoidably real and attractive the villain is, even to refined dudes from the East. Bud Aiken, Chopin’s Texan villain in her 1893 story “In Sabine,” exhibits most of those qualities “civilized” society despises, or pretends to despise. He seems to represent the savage state that civilization must destroy, conquer and replace. He lives, appropriately, in “the big lonesome parish of Sabine”3 on the border of Texas; the parish connects civilized Natchitoches parish, from which the hero Grégoire Santien will arrive, with the wilderness of Texas proper. The setting, then, becomes the perfect metaphoric battleground for the struggle between Grégoire (civilization) and Bud Aiken (savagery).4 4 Western American Literature Among Bud Aiken’s many crimes and vices are these: he has been under the “sustained influence of ‘Pike’s Magnolia’” (I, 326) and other brands of liquor for years and years; he fooled the once-lovely ’Tite Reine (from Bayou Pierre, also in civilized Natchitoches parish) into thinking their illegal marriage by a drummer was the real thing (he has managed to get her to “live in sin,” in other words) ; he has made slaves of his “wife” and Mortimer, the black sharecropper who lives on his property, forcing and commanding them to do all the labor that needs to be done: wood chopping, cooking, cotton planting and gathering; he has choked and beaten ’Tite Reine and mentally tormented her; he has stolen a pig and lied about the theft, saying he had purchased it at M any; he has gambled and smoked and told tasteless jokes and lewd stories all his life; he has openly and emphatically expressed his prejudice and intolerance, calling his wife a “Cajun,” and accusing all Cajuns of not having “sense enough to know a white man when they see one” (I, 327) ; he has exhibited, on more than one occasion, a dominant, demanding, possessive nature and a violent temper. Bud Aiken is the kind of character W. H. Hutchinson would label a “Heavy Villain,” for he is a completely dishonorable wretch whom we might easily imagine “leer[ing] and drool[ing].”r’ The cabin Aiken and ’Tite Reine occupy in “In Sabine” reflects the Texan’s coarse ways. His one-room home is primitive and rough. It is sparsely furnished — “a cheap bed, a pine table, and a few chairs, that was all” (I, 328). The items clearly emphasize the centrality of physical pleasure in his life: the bed where he sleeps with ’Tite Reine, the table where he eats the corn bread, fried salt pork, and gumbo-filé she prepares, and the chairs for male companions who want to indulge in card-playing and drinking. The mud daubing which once cemented the cabin’s logs has fallen onto the floor ; bags and bits of cotton fill the holes now forming...