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Catherine (Kate) O’Flaherty Chopin was born in 1850 to a respectable St. Louis family and grew up surrounded by strong women who ensured her access to education. After her marriage to Oscar Chopin in 1870, Chopin lived in New Orleans, a lively and crowded city where she had the time and liberty, despite a busy home life with children, to get to know the place and its inhabitants. Financial need caused the family to move to the rural parish of Cloutierville, where Oscar’s family owned a plantation. After her husband’s death in 1882, Chopin managed the plantation before returning in 1884 to St. Louis. The years she spent in Louisiana, and her sharp observations of Creole and Cajun cultures, provided material for her early career as a talented local color writer.
Local color is a style of writing that attempts to capture the lifestyles, geography, culture, and language of a particular area. During the 19th century, as the United States began to expand westward, local color stories gained popularity and were published in leading magazines. Writers specialized in portraying far-flung parts of the country for readers who wanted to know about people elsewhere on the continent. Writers wrote short stories and sketches of life on the west coast during the Gold Rush, for example, or of the experiences of Great Plains settlers or mountain families in Tennessee. Chopin’s early reputation rested on her portrayals of New Orleans and of Louisiana parish life.
As is typical with local color stories, Chopin’s stories feature dialect, especially the influence of French in Cajun dialect and, in some stories, English as spoken by enslaved peoples. Many of her characters would have struck the original readers of her stories as eccentric and humorous, another hallmark of local color writing. The settings—in the bayou, on plantations, and along the Mississippi—were exotic locales for many 19th-century readers. “The Storm” partakes of the local color subgenre in its use of dialect, detailed setting, and colorful characters. However, much of 19th-century local color writing had an edge to it, a touch of criticism about the colorful characters who lived far from the eastern cities. But Chopin is generally sympathetic to her characters. This distinction in her local color stories foreshadowed the reaction to what is now considered her masterpiece, The Awakening.
When The Awakening was published in 1899, its thorough development and realistic treatment of Edna Pontellier’s attempts to live as she chooses to, rather than as society dictates, jarred readers accustomed to entertaining sketches of Louisiana life. Though they eagerly read about the “eccentrics” of Chopin’s stories, they pushed back against her most developed protagonist. The novel’s initial reception frustrated Chopin, who wrote only a few stories between its debut and her death in 1904. How early readers would have responded to “The Storm,” written in 1898, is a matter of speculation. The story, among Chopin’s final works, was not published until 1969, in The Complete Works of Kate Chopin.
