SOURCE: Steiling, David. “Multi-Cultural Aesthetic in Kate Chopin's ‘A Gentleman of Bayou Teche.’” The Mississippi Quarterly 47, no. 2 (spring 1994): 197-101.

In the following essay, Steiling discusses Chopin's use of irony to address regional and ethnic stereotypes in “A Gentleman of Bayou Teche.”

“A Gentleman of Bayou Teche” by Kate Chopin is seldom read and has attracted virtually no critical attention, but the subject and design of this sketch amply demonstrate that its author understood how subcultures can be particularly sensitive to the way they are perceived and recorded by outsiders. This sketch shows that Chopin had thoughtfully considered how the drawing of “local” characters can easily be distorted into the creation of stereotypes. But Chopin, writing a hundred years ago, not only illustrates the problems of writing about regional American life but poses a solution to these problems that readers today might find extraordinary for its manifestation of current...