Chopin's Lilacs and the Story of the Annunciation

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Chopin's 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 story "Lilacs." There, sisterhood between secular and religious women appears fragmented and nearly impossible. To scrutinize the division, Kate Chopin fashions her story around the portion of the Virgin Mary myth told in St. Luke's 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 virginal 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.

Chopin's "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 almost 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 painfully at the story's 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 Mary's (and, by extension, woman's) salvific role as the vessel chosen by God to ensure humankind's 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 within themselves and within the Catholic tradition because of that tradition's insistence on Mary's virginity before and after childbirth. This insistence separated the ideal virginal mother from real women and mothers whose joyously experienced sexuality 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 women's 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.

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