Crossing boundaries: Liminality, space and the racial other in kate chopin’s short fiction

Abstract

This paper aims to examine the complex interplay between liminality, space and the racial Other in “Mamouche” (1894) and “Nég Créol” (1897), two short stories by Kate Chopin which have received scarce critical attention. Set in antebellum rural Louisiana, “Mamouche” traces the adoption of a homeless boy of uncertain origins by a wealthy white Creole man, while “Nég Créol,” which takes place in postbellum New Orleans, follows a Creole of color—as black Creoles were known in Louisiana at the time—who grapples with establishing his identity and social role in an emancipated society. The selected short stories will be analyzed through an interdisciplinary approach by means of a theoretical framework that combines concepts such as liminality (Turner 1969; Bhabha 1994), the racial stereotype (Bhabha 1994), the naturalist and historicist racial traditions (Goldberg 2002) as well as different notions related to the concept of spatiality (Soja 1989 and 1996; Goldberg 1994). I will contend that Chopin’s depiction of the racial Other is ambivalent because it reproduces traditional racial stereotypes, yet it also disrupts hegemonic power structures in a subtle way, through the use of liminal characters who embody antistructure, and spatial configurations which reveal an underlying ideological dimension. The results demonstrate that the notions of liminality, space and racial otherness are intricately linked in “Mamouche” and “Nég Créol,” since both liminality and race are spatially bound. Simultaneously, the short stories illustrate how the liminality of the racial Other entails a certain resistance. Nineteenth-century Louisiana was marked by its social stratification and its race-caste system, so the characters’ subtle refusal to accept or reproduce these rigid social and racial divisions may be understood as a form of resistance to dominant power structures.