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In Kate Chopin’s 1898 story “The Storm,” a woman and a man—both married to other people—navigate their passionate sexual attraction to each other, raising questions about the nature of human intimacy that, at the time Chopin wrote the story, were scandalous and disturbing. However, the story’s treatment of character, setting, and resolution present the scandal of a sexual affair as surprisingly beneficial for everyone involved, a revolutionary perspective on an uncomfortable topic.
The story’s inciting incident is also its title, with its double meaning reflecting the actual thunderstorm that separates the main characters, Alcée Laballière and Calixta, from the watchful eyes of family and society and its reference to passion denied so long that it is like a building storm, ready to break when conditions are right. Yet this inciting incident, the storm’s arrival, might be ineffective in launching the action were it not for the history of Alcée and Calixta revealed in the 1892 story “At the ’Cadian Ball,” part of Bayou Folk (1894), a collection of stories related by recurring characters. Their passionate attraction to each other begins when they are still single; now, having willingly entered marriages with spouses to whom they are dutiful but who do not arouse their desire, Alcée and Calixta do not even realize how much they yearn for sexual intimacy, until the storm forces them into Calixta’s rural home and sets their sensual passion ablaze again. Alcée rides up to ask, so politely, for shelter, and at the sound of his voice, Calixta seems to awaken suddenly “as if from a trance,” perhaps the trance of desires denied so long that she has nearly forgotten them.
The rising action begins when, sheltering from the powerful storm, Calixta’s fears—of overwhelmed levees and dangerous lightning—create in her a heightened state of emotional arousal, and Alcée comforts her. This comfort requires that he touch the woman whose beauty, he finds, has not faded with five years of marriage and may be even more voluptuous. The heat of the air, the modest dimensions of the house, and the “white, monumental bed” nearby rapidly move the action toward a decisive moment. Sexual fidelity was demanded of wives in Chopin’s world, and while a man’s desires were assumed to be naturally stronger than a woman’s, honor demanded that women be protected, not seduced. When they were younger, Alcée chose to remove himself from Calixta’s presence, leaving this “immaculate dove,” as he saw her, “inviolate.” But now, as he embraces her “warm, palpitating body” and sees her lips “as red and moist as pomegranate seed,” Alcée decides differently, and Calixta responds passionately.
The climax of the brief story finds the lovers in bed, astonished at the intensity of their desire. Neither has ever experienced such intimacy and responsiveness as they “swoon” at the “borderland of life’s mystery.” As the storm blows wildly around the cabin, they seem to meld with elemental nature, their sexual union rising with the storm and then, spent, abating as the storm fades into the distance until they reluctantly part. The world around them is rain-washed, clean and shining, and their own faces beam with bliss and laughter. Not one detail of this passionate afternoon, described in some of the most explicit language Chopin wrote in any story, is in any way negative.
In the story’s brief falling action, Calixta’s husband, Bobinôt, and her son, Bibi, who had waited out the storm in the general store, return home expecting to find a flustered, fearful housewife. Instead, they find a relaxed, laughing, loving woman who welcomes them with affection and declares that they will “have a feas’ tonight.” Meanwhile, Alcée writes to his absent wife, generously allowing her to extend her visit to friends. In this time period, a sexual affair would usually result in remorse for the man and in shame and even ruin for the woman, but here, the tryst improves the lives of all the characters because sexual desires—depicted as natural and inevitable as thunderstorms—are celebrated, not denied. Readers are left to decide for themselves whether Alcée and Calixta will continue their affair or perhaps revitalize their marriages with new intimacy, but in the story’s single line of resolution, the narrator declares, “So the storm passed and every one was happy.”
