Kate Attract In Kate Chopin's 'The Storm'

Kate Chopin wrote the short story “The Storm” one of her most bold stories and did not even intention to publish it (Cutter 191). The two main characters in the story are Calixta and Alcee. They both used to be attracted to one another in previous years, but now they are both married to someone else. After Alcee arrives to Calixta’s house looking for shelter they are driven into a passionate moment. In the story “The Storm” the storm has a significant meaning; without it the affair of Calixta and Alcee performed would not have been as powerful as it was between them. “The Storm” has a great deal of symbolism throughout the story: the clouds, the use of color white, the storm relative to the affair, the after effects of the affair, Calixta,

In the story "The Storm", Kate Chopin plots a situation in which two people surrender to their physical desires. Chopin wrote fiction stories in the late 19th century. She was condemned due to the immorality presented in her work. At her times, woman was considered to be very innocent, and always faithful to her husband. In Chopin's work one sees a totally different view of a woman's behavior. She is not a popular writer of her era because of her crude works; the audience of her period could not justify her stories. In the story "the storm", Kate Chopin by hiding the immoral behavior of her characters behind the fear of bad weather is being ironic.

The short story, “The Storm,” can be classified as a story that is explicit of its kind because of its sexual and adulteress content. Although the story is portrayed as that, Chopin is able to bring about two parallel subjects to combine with each other to bring about one meaning that contributes to the subject as a whole. In the story, an affair occurs in the midst of a storm between Calixta and Alcee, two fond lovers that find each other once again and relive their

    It is interesting how Ms. Chopin uses the thunderstorm to parallel with theintensity of the relationship between Alcee and Calixta.  Ms. Chopin creatively parallels the development of the thunderstorm to that of the physical development between Calixta and Alcee.  In the beginning, the rain slowly begins to fall as the emotions between the two past loves are starting to rekindle.  Then, as the storm proceeds to intensify, Alcee is forced inside the house, alone with the woman of his desire.  When the lightening

The theme adultery was first initiated when Alcee requested to reside in Calixta’s house till the rain passed. “His voice and her own startled her as if from a trance…”. Judging from the way they both reacted, it is clear that the two still have some sort of feelings for each other. Another aspect that leads to the feelings of both characters is when Chopin outlines the setting of the room they are in. “The door stood open, and the room with it’s white monumental bed, its closed shutters, looked dim and mysterious.” Already, the tone has changed becoming more tense and so has the storm as it beat upon the shingled roof with force like Chopin describes in the story. When Calixta realizes the storm has gotten worse, she then walks over to the window with a disturbed look on her face and Alcee of course follows behind her which proves that he wants to be around her. From the minute Alcee walks in, Calixta begins to show signs of nervousness which proves that he still has some affect on her. The tension of the rain and Calixta’s feelings both build up as it begins to rain harder, the winds blow harder and the lightening become stronger which symbolizes Calixta’s feelings at the moment. She tries to

The short story, “The Storm” by Kate Chopin is about a love that could never be until it briefly was. The point that Chopin was trying to get across was that Calixta and Alcee had a strong passion for one-another, and perhaps loved each other, but they could never have been married because of their social differences. It is a passionate, but brief affair between two married people from different social classes that takes place during a cyclone in Louisiana around 1898. The story symbolizes the freedom that a woman felt inside after the rain during a time when women had no freedom. (Firtha lesson 2 page 1)

Kate Chopin is an American writer best known for her novels and short stories. She was born February 8, 1850, in St. Louis, Missouri and she died on August 22, 1904, in St. Louis, Missouri. Kate Chopin was a feminist author. She was the author of two short stories, The Story of an Hour, and The Storm.

The Storm As the distinguished Haruki Murakami once said, “When you come out of the storm, you won't be the same person that walked in. That's what the storm is all about.” Murakami suggests that even though sometimes a storm does not leave tangible evidence, its effect will in fact be remembered. In “The Storm” , by Kate Chopin, the storm is exciting and dangerous just as the affair between Calixta and Alcee. Once 'the storm' has subsided, everything recovers and goes back to the way it was before it.

The presence of Calixta's sexual desire and its intensity make this story revolutionary in its feminist statement about female sexuality. Chopin uses the conceit 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 does the obvious by 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 closing windows and doors" (Part 2 Paragraph 1).

The storm is menacing, it rolls in “somber…with sinister intention.” Chopin allows us to see the storm build up slowly, reaching its highpoint, and passing. The storm builds chaotically to its climax, Alcee and Calixta are together. As the storm dies out and fades away everything is quiet again in terms of the relationship. The reader can make the assumption that the marriages are unharmed, but it shows that they aren’t perfect.

In “The Storm” Kate Chopin makes the setting an essential and entwined part of her action and ideas. The story focuses on the two main characters, Calixta and Alcee and their short love affair. The action is taking place in a small town in Louisiana where all of the characters live. The story is set in the late nineteenth century when adultery was not expected from anyone, as woman were considered to be innocent and faithful. The integration of setting and story can be followed in details about the storm itself, setting of the atmosphere/mood, and also the complexities of married status in the society.

The conflict between love and lust begins with the contrast between one young man’s true love for Calixta and another’s lust. In the first story, Chopin introduces the reader to Bobinôt, an Acadian farmer, who is day dreaming about Calixta, the “Spanish vixen” (Chopin 1265). With a Cajun background, Bobinôt already possesses a social tension with Alcée, a wealthy Creole planter. Guarino comments on this cultural tension in her ethnic analysis: “Belonging mostly to the lower class, Cajuns have always had a conflict relation to the upper class formed mostly of Creoles” (7). Chopin displays this in the distaste Bobinôt mentally expresses towards Alcée in the first story “At the ‘Cadian Ball.” In addition to the social turmoil between the two men, Chopin further distinguishes between true love and lust by contrasting Bobinôt’s

“The Storm’s” theme was based on Love, Immoral affair, and Freedom. Chopin’s technique of foreshadowing, symbolism, irony, tone, and imagery set the plot for Alcee, Calixta, Bobinot, and Clarisse in this short story. “A bolt struck a tall chinaberry tree at the edge of the field. It filled all visible space with a blinding glare and crash seemed to invade the very boards they stood upon” (425). The writer used Imagery to depict how nature shook the foundation of their respective marriages. The significance of the tall chinaberry tree that crashed the boards was that it made Bobinot and Clarisse almost irrelevant in the story. The author used the metaphorical expression to indicate how the storm schemed Bobinot and Clarisse out of the reckoning.

In the short story “The Storm” by Kate Chopin, the main character Calixta is a wife and mother who appears to be unhappy and restless in her marriage and commits adultery. Calixta is able to fulfill her sexual desires with another man and does not feel guilty about it. Some readers may say that Calixta’s attitude on having an affair is selfish and most readers will not identify with the main character but may know characters that have Calixta’s mentality.

Both Kate Chopin and Katharine Mansfield used women as the protagonist and interpretations of the lives and morals during that era. In the storm, Calixta is a wife and mother. Her responsibility is taking care of the family, she gave her love her husband and son. When she met her former lover Alcee, and eventually she could not control herself. In the story, Carlixta has the affair at the right time and place which she has already betrayed her husband. However, Calixta doesn't feel self-deprecating. It is surprising that her husband and son came back after the rain stopped, "the three seated themselves t table they laughed much.... as far away as Laballiere's" (Chopin 108), Calixta changed to a good wife and mother again. Unlike Calixtar cross