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Themes are the fundamental and often universal ideas explored in a literary work.
Social Expectations and Gender
“The Storm” explores restrictions that social expectations enforce in characters’ lives. The designated roles of men and women were clear and rigid in the culture in which Chopin’s stories occur. Men provided for and guided their families. Women kept the home, bore children, and rarely lived independently. Because men worked outside the home, they experienced more of life’s rough-and-tumble. Women, supposedly ensconced safely in the home, were protected from the harsh realities of public life. Men’s sexual desires were assumed to run strongly, while robust sexual desire in women was discouraged. While Alcée and Calixta abide by these expectations as dutiful spouses and parents, both set their duties aside when the chance arises.
Calixta complies with her expected roles as an affectionate mother and a competent housekeeper. She and Bobinôt have an amicable relationship. However, even before marriage, Calixta chafes under social restrictions that constrain her high spirits. When Alcée reminds her of their passionate time together in Assumption, the narrator says, “Oh! she remembered.” During the storm, Calixta rejects the expectation of wifely fidelity and proves herself to be as full of desire as Alcée. At least for the moment, she directs the passion that should be confined to her marriage toward a lover.
Alcée is also expected to act, if not with perfect faithfulness, then at least with discretion. He appreciates his wife and children, yet he, too, violates his marriage vows. Alcée can do so while still, for the most part, staying within expected social roles. Because the storm provides privacy, he exposes Calixta to no shame or blame. Because Calixta is a sexually experienced, willing lover, honor does not demand that he flee temptation. In the end, neither character experiences any repercussions for breaking briefly with social expectations. In fact, both appear to be better for it.
Marital Relationships
Marriage in Chopin’s time was not primarily what it is for most readers today—a union of like-minded, romantically attached partners who may or may not have children. For Chopin’s characters, marriages are often practical and transactional. These marriages can be limiting or dissatisfying or, at worst, oppressive. Alcée and Calixta are both in marriages that would have been considered successful at the time. Each relationship achieves the primary goals of marriage at the time: to continue the family line and run the family business—Alcée’s plantation and Bobinôt’s farm. Yet clearly, both main characters find their outwardly successful marriages incomplete.
Alcée was well aware of his strong attraction to Calixta’s physical beauty and spirited nature long before he married Clarisse. That Clarisse manipulated Alcée into proposing does not change its outcome: a workable marriage that produces children, sustains the plantation, and is affectionate enough. Yet Alcée is starved for intimacy and is transformed only when he finally makes loves to Calixta.
Calixta entered marriage for transactional reasons that exploited Bobinôt’s sense of inferiority to Alcée, and she seems not to have transferred to her husband the thrilling emotions she experienced with Alcée. Because Calixta is caught entirely off guard by her response to Alcée’s lovemaking, when her body knows “for the first time its birthright” of sexual passion, readers can infer that her marriage has been friendly, even affectionate, yet not intimate or transformative. Only the time that she spends with Alcée during the storm leaves her full of gladness that she can then share with her family.
Alcée and Calixta are dutiful spouses and no doubt are fond of their families, but as the outburst of passion in “The Storm” makes clear, neither character’s need for intimacy is met in marriages that began on mainly transactional terms.
Façades as Social “Glue”
Chopin’s characters develop and maintain façades that act as social “glue,” holding together social units necessary for a family or community to function. “The Storm” focuses on the lovers’ tryst, which unlocks deep sexual desires that Alcée has set aside and that Calixta has denied herself. There is not much room in the story to develop and contrast the façades that each creates to exist in a less-than-satisfying marriage, yet the story’s falling action suggests how such social masks function to hold social groups together.
Readers today must recall that divorce was considered scandalous, even sinful, in Chopin’s time. There were few ways to be released from marriage. Chopin explores the most common, widowhood, in “The Story of an Hour.” It is near impossible for Alcée or Clarisse to imagine leaving a passionless marriage for a more matched relationship, and their façades help them manage whatever dissatisfaction they may feel.
The lovers’ façades are useful in their roles as plantation owner and housewife, and as a husband who provides for his family and a wife who looks after hers. Their authentic selves emerge, as naturally and inevitably as a sudden change in the weather, when they are alone with one another and experience true intimacy. But when turned toward their families, Calixta’s suddenly cheerful mood and laughing affection for her husband and son and Alcée’s equally sudden “tender solicitude” for his absent wife are as false as the social façades they wear daily because these “faces” are meant for each other, not for their spouses. Façades serve the lovers and their families, however, by allowing life to continue as if all is well in both marriages. They allow Alcée and Calixta to continue in the roles society expects them to fulfill.
