In Kate Chopin’s “The Storm” she expresses two main points to her audience; one being that women, and men, will often try and find happiness and a sense of contentment through rather anarchistic ways. For example, Calixta, although a happy woman with a devoted husband and child still harbors feelings for her ex-love, Alcee, and they meet and copulate under the protection of a chance storm. Calixta is happy with her husband and child, but, the incidence with Alcee leads readers to believe that maybe Calixta was not fully satisfied with her tame life, or, she was simply afraid of the storm. Kate Chopin attempts to make Calixta more appealing in the eyes of her audience by making her seem like a woman who is afraid of the storm and is merely seeking refuge. Kate Chopin also leads readers to acknowledge the fact that she believes that adultery does not always produce bad results for the adulterers.
Calixta and Alcee both act happy to tend to their families after their little fluke and go on with their lives with no guilt or consequences with what they had done. Kate Chopin does not say that adultery is a bad or good thing morally, but she does make it a point in “The Storm” that the adulterers are not always punished for what they do. Chopin uses description and cause and effect to appeal to her readers. Chopin aptly uses description to describe how scared Calixta truly was of the storm, and Calixta’s fear helped Chopin to appeal Calixta to her readers. Chopin effectively blames Calixta and Alcee’s adultery on Calixta’s unintended fear of the storm and her pronounced vulnerability around Alcee.
Her readers in the mid to late 1800s were not appreciative of her choice of topics, and although she used many rhetorical strategies to pronounce her case, she was not, I think, able to justify what Calixta.
