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

Chopins Lilacs and the Story of the Annunciation When the theologian Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza writes that the myth of the Virgin Mary sanctions a deep psychological and institutional split (59) among women in the Catholic tradition, she captures what Kate Chopin also captured in her grade Lilacs. There, sisterhood between secular and religious women appears fragmented and nearly impossible. To scrutinize the division, Kate Chopin fashions her story most the portion of the Virgin Mary myth told in St. Lukes gospel of the Annunciation of the birth of Jesus spoken to Mary by the archangel Gabriel. Working with that text, Lilacs mocks a tradition prizing virginity and separating the cloistered from the secular. Irony prevails, but so too does the sorrow born of religious restraint and condemnation. From the tension in the Annunciation between the consummate(a) and the non-virginal comes ages of women divided from one another on the basis of chastity and divided internally into spiritual 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 nigh wholly spiritual or a life almost wholly physical can be anything but the subject of ridicule. The narrator tempts us to enjoy the ridicule only to have us feel more than painfully at the storys end the dolorous effects of con strained desire, effects which diminish 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 bottom themselves and within the Catholic tradition because of that traditions insistence on Marys virginity before and after childbirth. This insistence separated the ideal virginal mother from real women and mothers whose joyously experienced sex closed the doors to work within the clerical ministry even 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.