Q: How is “The Kiss” related to “The Story of an Hour” and other stories that Kate Chopin planned to include in A Vocation and a Voice, the short story collection that was never published in her lifetime?
A: Chopin’s biographer Emily Toth writes that “a typical Vocation and a Voice story is surprising, a revelation of secrets and passions that do not quite mesh.” Many stories planned for the book, Toth adds, “have touches of wry humor–and raise tantalizing questions. Sometimes the characters are disillusioned; sometimes they see all too clearly the blindnesses of others and connive around them. Nathalie, in ‘The Kiss,’ for instance, thinks she can flirt with one man even after marrying another–but has to console herself with her new husband ‘and his million.'”
Q: There’s nothing especially subtle about Nathalie’s actions, is there?
A: No. As early as 1970, critic Lewis Leary noted that this story focused on the guile of a woman in attracting a man is presented “with a kind of revelatory freedom not often encountered in print during the 1890s.”
Nathalie is, as Barbara Ewell points out, “ruthless,” like Lily Bart in Edith Wharton’s novel The House of Mirth. She understands, Ewell adds, that she cannot “combine independence and sensual satisfaction.” For Ewell, the story is a “curious hybrid” that “underscores a subtle ambivalence about female roles, a duality that continued to shape Chopin’s work.”
Q: I’m surprised that Kate Chopin had so many of her stories, like this one, published in Vogue. What did Vogue readers think of the stories?
A: Heidi Johnsen writes in the recent Kate Chopin in the Twenty-First Century that in the 1890s “the society pages indicate that Vogue readers were concerned with [the issue of women having to choose between passion and money] since the magazine copiously reports not only the engagements and alliances of the wealthy, but also the balls and dinners they give and the vacations they take. The magazine thrived on readers having an interest in those who are in the upper class, and yet Chopin laughs at them when she has Nathalie appear the fool.”