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KATE CHOPIN'S "FEDORA" is SURELY one of her most interesting arid ambiguous stories. Published in 1895, under the pen name "La Tour" and the title "The Falling in Love of Fedora," "Fedora" is a very brief story recounting the experience of its thirty-year-old title character, a rather stern, unmarried woman who is suddenly smitten with a twenty-three-year-old man, Young Malthers. She does not act on this passion but resorts to touching his hat or burying her face in the folds of his coat. When Young Malther's sister is set to arrive for a visit, Fedora insists on driving to the station to meet her. She is delighted with the young woman, who bears a close resemblance to her brother, and after helping her into the carriage, Fedora puts her arm around Miss Malthers, bends down, and presses a "long penetrating kiss upon her mouth."1 She then quietly picks up the reins and drives her astonished guest home.
A traditional reading of the story has seen Fedora as a repressed old maid whose passion is awakened by a tall, good-looking young man. Unaware of what to do with such passion, she momentarily displaces it onto the sister and then, treating it like the "restive brute" she is driving, firmly takes it back in hand. She will hereafter continue to repress this new-found sensuality. Certainly, this is a possible reading. Chopin does describe Fedora as a woman who is "tall and slim, and carried her head loftily, and wore eyeglasses and a severe expression" (p. 467). Most of the young people "felt as if she were a hundred years old" (p. 467). Conversely, Fedora is uninterested in the young people and their merry-making. She is thus painted in stereotypical spinsterly terms. Her repression is also evident. One day Fedora looks up at Young Malthers and realizes suddenly "that he was a man-in voice, in attitude, in bearing, in every sense-a man" (p. 468); from that moment on he began to exist for her" (p. 468). Fedora begins experiencing conflicting emotions: "uneasiness, restlessness, expectation" and "inward revolt, astonishment, rapture" (p. 468). Clearly, her reaction to this young man has upset her otherwise uneventful life. At this point she begins to fondle his clothing and insists on going for...