The Duality Of Kate Chopin's Racial Attitude Revealed In Her Short Stories

Kate Chopin(1850-1904),the nineteenth-century American Southern fiction writer,has published two novels and almost one hundred short stories.These short stories are respectively collected in her two collections,Bayou Folk(1894)and A Night in Acadie(1897).Chopin shows great concern for blacks in these two collections of short stories.Both have no less than fifteen short stories with black characters in primary roles.Most researches,however,only focus on The Awakening and a few famous short stories,like “The Story of An Hour”(1894)and “Desiree' s Baby”(1893)to analyze the marriage and female liberation that lead to a long neglect of Chopin's racial theme.Furthermore,a systematic study on Chopin's conflicting racial attitude through analyzing black images depicted and the selective omniscient perspective employed in her short stories is still scant.Therefore,based on the imagology theory and the selective omniscient perspective,this thesis intends to explore the duality of the author's racial attitude via a detailed analysis of her five short stories with blacks in the primary characters,“Beyond the Bayou”(1891),“The Bênitous' Slave”(1892),“La Belle Zora?de”(1893),“Desiree's Baby”(1893)and “Dresden Lady in Dixie”(1894),selected from her two collections.Through the analysis,it is found that Kate Chopin presents her conflicting racial attitude in her short stories by changing the point of view and depicting two different types of black images.This analysis of the duality of Chopin's racial attitude not only helps readers better understand Chopin's short stories,but sheds light on the construction and exploration of American black images.