English · Chapter 7
Study notes aligned to the official NEB syllabus.
Kate Chopin (1850 to 1904) was an American writer, born Katherine O'Flaherty in St. Louis, Missouri. After marrying Oscar Chopin she lived in New Orleans and in rural Louisiana, and the Creole and Cajun society she observed there became the material of her fiction. She began writing seriously after her husband's death and produced the story collections Bayou Folk (1894) and A Night in Acadie (1897) and the novel The Awakening (1899), now regarded as a landmark of early feminist literature. "A Respectable Woman" is a short story first published in Vogue in 1894 and later collected in A Night in Acadie. Like much of her work, it examines a woman's inner life against the rules of a conventional marriage.
Mrs. Baroda is a little provoked to learn that her husband Gaston expects his old college friend Gouvernail to spend a week or two with them on their Louisiana sugar plantation. The couple have entertained a great deal during the winter in New Orleans, and she had been looking forward to a period of unbroken rest and quiet talk alone with her husband. She has never met Gouvernail, who is now a journalist and not a society man, but she has already formed a picture of him as tall, slim and cynical, with eye-glasses and his hands in his pockets, and she has decided that she does not like him.
When Gouvernail arrives he is slim enough but not very tall and not at all cynical, and he has neither eye-glasses nor hands in his pockets. Rather to her surprise, she likes him. He is quiet and courteous, makes no attempt to win her approval, and sits mute and receptive before her chatty efforts to make him feel at home and Gaston's frank, wordy hospitality. He spends his days on the wide portico in the shade of a Corinthian pillar, smoking a cigar and listening to Gaston's experiences as a sugar planter, content simply to be there.
Mrs. Baroda cannot make him out. At first she leaves the two men alone, but when Gouvernail takes no notice of her absence, she imposes her company on him, walking with him to the mill and along the river bank and trying to break through his reserve. Growing restless, she asks Gaston when his friend is leaving and complains that she would like Gouvernail better if he gave her some trouble, if he were more like other men so that she had to plan for his comfort. Gaston defends him as a fine, brilliant fellow who has been overworked and needs rest, and teases his wife for being so full of surprises. She announces that she will go to the city the next morning to stay with her aunt Octavie.