Imaginative literature is really just the attempt to make a transmission of experience via descriptive language. Perhaps our job, as readers and critics, is to interpret the varieties of experience and hopefully find some kind of application for them in our own lives. I think, too, that it falls within the province of the discerning reader to gauge the genuineness of the experiences being communicated. In Kate Chopin's fiction, we come to sense and feel real cravings—first of the soul and, then, of a socio-political ideology that must have been very radical in her time. She calls for the liberation of the individual core being, as well as for the liberation of all women from social conventions and restraints. A Vocation and a Voice is singularly obsessed with these two important themes.

Of course, liberation must be liberation from something. In Chopin's world, the emancipation is often from men and, more specifically, husbands or lovers. In the book The Art of Seduction, Robert Greene writes of personality types he calls 'anti seducers'; one of these is identified as the Suffocator: "Never get involved with Suffocators; they are almost impossible to free yourself from without trauma." Sufficators, as thusly defined, turn up frequently in these tales—most noticeably in what is easily Chopin's most oft-reprinted one, "The Story of an Hour". Mrs. Mallard (whom exposition tells us has a frail heart) gets news that her husband has died in a train wreck. (Incidentally, this is how the author's own father passed away; he was one of the owners of the Pacific Railroad and was onboard a train when the Gasconade Bridge collapsed beneath it). At first, out of reflex, she weeps tears of grief; but, in a very few moments, she is seized by an ecstatic sense of newfound freedom, a feeling of joy that the relationship—nothing but a huge burden—is over, completely wiped out. I think anyone who has ever gotten out of a bad relationship can easily relate to this, although to feel it at the death of the other might be a bit extreme and probably not something we'd want to communicate, with exuberance, to the world . To write about this so openly in 1894, when the story was first published, was a monumental act of courage.

Mrs. Mallard, however, is in for a surprise (Chopin studied de Maupassant very carefully). It turns out that her husband did not die in the accident at all, that the report was incorrect. The shock of learning the truth kills her with a heart attack. Her existential choices: to die a literal death or to die a form of slow, living death in the prison of the loveless, passionless marriage with the Suffocator.

Two of Chopin's most important contributions to literature are her uncompromising honesty and her insistence on the primacy of the senses—emotions over the intellect and reason. Her name is, of course, forever linked to her novel which infuriated the entire world at its release, The Awakening. The stories here all explore similarly pilpulistic themes.

In "Her Letters", a woman battles herself over whether or not to burn her letters to and from a secret lover. She begins to burn a few, but cannot bring herself to finish, then presents her husband with an agonizing situation in regard to them. Here, we catch a glimpse of insight into Chopin's weltanschuung: it's all about (to borrow the phrase from Nietzsche) "the passion that whips the blood": "This man had changed the water in her veins to wine." In "The Story of an Hour": " Her pulses beat fast, and the coursing blood warmed and relaxed every inch of her body." In "Two Portraits": "Yet, she did not need instruction; the secret was in her blood..." In "The Unexpected": "She was alone with nature; her pulses beating in unison with its sensuous throb." And so on.

"The Unexpected", by the way, is an extremely uncomfortable story to read and reflect upon. Randall and Dorothea are engaged. He has to take a month-long trip and, when he returns, is in the grip of a terrible illness which has emaciated him and destroyed his looks. Appalled, she runs away, and she runs away even though he promises her great material wealth after marriage; she won't have it. She leaves him simply over the disappearance of his physical attractiveness. In "The Kiss", the opposite happens: a young woman eschews her good looking, healthy young man in favor of an old bat with money.

The title story is of particular note for various reasons. It's the longest story in the collection, it embodies all of Chopin's main themes, and, uncharacteristically, it has a male as the main character.

A young man, literally penniless, gets lost on a streetcar and ends up miles from his destination. Because he has no money and no contacts, he wanders into a park and, after a time, decides the only thing he can do is simply walk home by retracing the long route of the streetcar. In a short time, he comes across the wagon of a bogus fortune teller, a woman who is accompanied by a gentleman and a team of mules. He soon joins them in their meanderings. One night, more or less by accident, she seduces him after he accidentally sees her naked, bathing in the stream. Shortly after this, he breaks up an argument between the woman and the old man (a nasty drunk); appalled at his own use of a big hunting knife to do so, he rejects the travelling freak show lifestyle and joins a nearby friary (there have been allusions, throughout, to his religious leanings and the fact that he is an accomplished altar boy). In the friary, he takes the name Brother Ludovic and becomes one of the hardest workers and ascetics in the organization, an object of veneration for the others.

One day, working on the grounds, he hears the wagon of his former companions outside the walls, passing by, and the woman's voice, singing. He follows, entranced, enchanted, lured by the sweetness of memory. It would be easy to draw the conclusion that he's giving up the love of God for the love of Woman, but I think that's a mistake, and I think reading Chopin in this way is probably a serious error. The story, after all, has no definitive conclusion; it's left completely open-ended. Who can say? After all, earlier in the story, he turned his back on the church (in the form of the priest he befriends) when asked not to go off with the travelers but to remain. Then, he reverses this decision and goes back to be with the friars. So, why couldn't he be changing his mind again? He might well be, but he might not be. It's obvious that he's pulled between the two—between the life of devotion and the life of the flesh—and maybe Chopin means to say there is no fixed way to go, or that each of us must make our own choices in such situations. I think the writer is nauseated by what she considers to be the crassness of organized religion rather than by the idea of religion, itself (although I also think she is more inclined to worship Nature—with a capital N—than traditional deities). Observe, from the story "The Night Came Slowly":