Neither useful nor useless: The child in Kate Chopin’s fiction

Abstract

The aim of the article is to analyze the figure of a child in the fiction of Kate Chopin, an American proto-feminist writer, on the example of her novel The Awakening and three short stories: “Beyond the Bayou”, “Désirée’s Baby” and “Ripe Figs”. Characters are analyzed here in terms of James Phelan’s mimetic, thematic and synthetic components as well as character’s dimensions and functions. It is argued that children in Chopin’s fiction contribute to the development of the narrative by transforming the dimensions of adult characters into their functions. Chopin portrays two types of children common in the literature of the period: the economically useful child (a little laborer) and the economically useless but emotionally priceless child (a mascot). A third type of child emerges especially in Chopin’s short stories: the child that is extremely useful in psychological and moral terms. This figure adds moral depth to the narratives, prompts the adult characters to evolve and serves as a source of in-text instabilities or as a medium of transferring the narrative tensions. The child’s psychological and moral value on the level of the plot translates into their narrative significance on the level of story construction.