Chopins Lilacs and the Story of the Annunciation :: Chopin Lilacs Essays

Chopins Lilacs and the Story of the contract When the theologian Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza writes that the legend of the Virgin Mary sanctions a deep psychological and institutional cling (59) among women in the Catholic tradition, she captures what Kate Chopin also captured in her story Lilacs. There, sisterhood between secular and religious women appears fragmented and nearly impossible. To scrutinize the office, Kate Chopin fashions her story nigh the portion of the Virgin Mary myth told in St. Lukes gospel of the declaration of the birth of Jesus spoken to Mary by the archangel Gabriel. functional with that text, Lilacs mocks a tradition prizing virginity and separating the cloistered from the secular. Irony prevails, but so withal does the sorrow born of religious restraint and condemnation. From the tension in the Annunciation between the virginal and the non-virginal comes ages of women divided from one another on the home of chastity and divided internally into eldritch and physical selves. Chopins Lilacs plays out this division on the grounds of a Sacred Heart convent and in the apartments of a Parisian mondaine to question whether a life almost wholly spiritual or a life almost wholly physical stern be anything but the subject of blackguard. The narrator tempts us to enjoy the ridicule only to have us feel more painfully at the storys end the dolorous effects of con strained desire, effects which accrue both nun and secular woman. As a story that draws so heavily on the details and symbols of the Annunciation story, Lilacs, we could assume, would want to remind us of Marys (and, by extension, womans) salvific role as the vessel chosen by God to ensure humankinds redemption. But Lilacs fails to announce the good news for women as it sees too clearly that what was salvific for humankind ended up dividing women at heart themselves and within the Catholic tradition because of that traditions insistence on Marys virginity before and by and by childbirth. This insistence separated the ideal virginal mother from real women and mothers whose joyously experienced sexual urge closed the doors to work within the clerical ministry til now until today. The Annunciation story for Kate Chopin is a story told at the expense of womens sexuality and spirituality, full and complementary as they might have been. The notion of a failed annunciation, then, opens Lilacs Mme. Adrienne Farival never announced her coming.