Vagina Talks & Bullshit Walks - The Storm by Kate Chopin - Essay Example

The Church promoted the ideal woman who is pure and submissive like Virgin Mary. The biology of male and female was also largely misogynistic (Guy 468). There was considerable difference between ideology and practice, however, with the prevalence of sex manuals and prostitution in Victorian cities (Guy 468). Apparently, the Victorian age included the day of temptation. During this time, people were interested with human sexuality and sexual behaviors (Guy 468). The Cult of Domesticity represented the confining of women in the four corners of her home.

Women were expected to promote traditional moral values and customs, as well as to maintain high taste or culture. The Victorian age also rendered sexuality as pathology, although other forms of science and pathology aimed to produce a “dispassionate” study on sexuality (Guy 468). The Gilded Age tried to attain freedom and self-sufficiency, but the word “gilded” indicated the lack of success in achieving these ambitious ideals. In “The Storm,” Kate Chopin questions gender rules, because she argues that nature can overcome society because it is part of humanity’s birthright.

“The Storm” narrates Calixta’s sexual affair with her former acquaintance Alcee within the context and personification of the storm. That day, a storm engulfs Calixta’s home, which threatens to destroy her home in the literal and figurative sense. Calixta reignites her attraction to Alcee and they make love, even when they are both married and have children. The storm, in the physical sense, is one of the tensest kinds of weather, because of the heavy rains and winds it brings with it.

In the story, it also represents the storm of struggle between people and society. Calixta struggles to keep her sexuality controlled, while her husband is gone, and Alcee is in the house. But just like the storm that cannot be stopped, Calixta cannot also suppress her nature or her sexuality. She must express her sexuality as part of her nature, in the same way that people accept storms as part of nature’s expressions. As the storm furiously beats the house, Chopin underscores the futility of fighting one’s storm of passion: “The rain beat upon the low, shingled roof with a force and clatter that threatened to break an entrance and deluge them there” (Chopin).

Chopin is saying that people should not even try stopping their sexual desires, because they will be expressed elsewhere. Calixta is the perfect model of a woman responding to her raw desires. She allows the storm of her sexual needs to fully ravage her. The circumstances especially favor their sexual tryst, as temptation knocks on Calixta’s door. When Calixta says the house will go next, this means that she is willing to overlook her marriage and family, so that she can own her sexuality. Before, she was “a passionate creature whose very defenselessness had made her defense, against which his honor forbade him to prevail” (Chopin).

Before, it is her virginity that obstructs her sexual desire. As a married woman, there is no virginity to protect anymore. Nevertheless, her marriage is a gender rule that forbids her to have an affair, but Chopin shows that women can also be tempted inside their homes. Calixta’s undeniable, lustful temptation shows her sexually charged nature, which is her weakness. At the same time, Alcee cannot control his storm of passion too: “The contact of her warm, palpitating body when he had