At Fault

From the back cover:
“Widowed at thirty-two, beautiful, resourceful Therese Lafirme is left alone to run her Louisiana plantation. When Therese falls in love with David Hosmer, a divorced businessman, her strong moral and religious convictions make it impossible for her to accept his marriage proposal. Her determined rejection sets the two on a tumultuous path that involves Hosmer’s troubled former wife, Fanny.”

This was Chopin’s first novel, written eight years after she herself was widowed at 32 on a Louisiana plantation (though unlike Therese, Chopin had six kids at the time). Chopin then had a romance with a married man before abruptly moving back to St. Louis a couple of years later.

The idea of divorce in the 19th century was show more highly distasteful, and particularly so to conservative, Catholic, southern communities. In her personal life as well as in her writing, Chopin thus wrestles with the question of an individual’s happiness in light of social pressures and the ethics of the times, like Edith Wharton would shortly afterwards. The conclusions she draws are clear: to subvert one’s happiness for the sake of an arbitrary code of righteousness is a mistake.

As for the writing itself, ‘At Fault’ is rough around the edges; dramatic events seem a little forced and the ending is too clean. The treatment of African-American characters is also tough to take, not because of outright violence, but because of the casual racism evident in how they’re depicted, which is lazy and unintelligent – and this isn’t just from the characters in the novel; Chopin herself apparently had these prejudices.

However, I took this as one of the truths of the novel, in effectively transporting me back to a bayou plantation and St. Louis in the 1880’s. Chopin’s characters are interesting, from the Creoles to the society ladies who she satirizes. A recurring theme is the difficulty of carrying on through change or after loss, which I suppose has a bigger implication in the Reconstruction South, but it’s highly personalized here.

This is a first novel and must be forgiven a few sins, and if you want the more polished Chopin head directly her classic, ‘The Awakening’, but I found ‘At Fault’ interesting and enjoyable.

Just this quote, on decisions in life:
“She tried to convince herself that a very insistent sting of remorse which she felt, came from selfishness – from the pain that her own heart suffered in the knowledge of Hosmer’s unhappiness. She was not callous enough to quiet her soul with the balm of having intended the best. She continued to ask herself only ‘was I right?’ and it was by the answer to that question that she would abide, whether in the stony content of accomplished righteousness, or in an enduring remorse that pointed to a goal in whose labyrinthine possibilities her soul lost itself and fainted away.” show less

On one level an engaging love story against a Louisianan backdrop, and on another e look at the conflict between love and honor, and the problem of interfering in the lives of others.