Summary
The rain beats on the low roof so hard that it threatens to break through. It's clear that this is a small house, as one single room acts simultaneously as the dining room, the sitting room, and the general utility room. There is a door open to a separate room, though, and in it is the big white bed where Calixta and Bobinôt in. With closed shutters, it looks "dim and mysterious."
As Calixta picks up the cotton sheet that she had been sewing off the floor, Alcée throws himself into a rocker. Calixta worries out loud that with rain this bad, the levees might break, and Alcée responds diminutively, asking why she cares about the levees.
The real root of Calixta's concern comes out: that Bibi and Bobinôt went out to Friedheimer's store and haven't come back yet. Again, somewhat sarcastically, Alcée says he hopes Bobinôt has enough good sense not to go outside in a storm like this.
Calixta goes over to a window to watch the storm, wiping some condensation off the glass. Alcée comes over to watch over her shoulder. The rain is falling in sheets and lightning bolts strike regularly. When one hits a Chinaberry tree, its sound shakes the house, and the white light is blinding. Calixta can't help but jump backward, startled.
Of course, she lands in Alcée's arms and he pulls her closer instinctively. But Calixta pulls herself away, crying out loud that the house will go next and that she wishes she knew where Bibi was. But while Calixta is in the midst of a worried fit, Alcée can't help but be aroused by his longstanding "desire for her flesh."
He attempts to calm her down by pointing out that the house is surrounded by trees much taller than it, and therefore she doesn't have to worry about the house being struck. He brushes her hair away from her face and takes in her red lips, white neck, and her firm, full bosom. When Calixta looks into his eyes, he sees both fear and an unconscious sensuous desire.
Struck by the urge to kiss her, Alcée asks if she remembers a time together in Assumption. Calixta remembers: he kissed her and kissed her, and her very willingness to take things further made Alcée restrain his desire. But now, Alcée thinks to himself, her lips, throat, and breasts are free to be tasted.
Analysis
In this segment of the story, it becomes clear that the storm is an allegorical conceit for the affair that will take place between Calixta and Alcée. It's a savvy maneuver on Chopin's part, as the fearsome beginning of the storm coincides with some implied concerns about the sexual tension between Calixta and Alcée. Just as Calixta is afraid that the storm will destroy her house, so too we could imagine a concern that an encounter with Alcée could destroy her home life.
This threat of a critical rupture in Calixta's role as wife and mother is a palpable one. When Alcée arrives, Calixta is deep in her domestic duties, and there's even an awkward non-verbal exchange when Calixta picks up the sheet that she was sewing. Alcée doesn't simply encounter a woman who he's been attracted to for a long while, but enters her domestic sphere, and, in turn, threatens its existential tidiness. The fact that this is all happening while Calixta worries about where her husband and son are implies that first their absence and later their potential interruptive return weigh on her mind.
In a 1978 essay about the relationship between women's work and a patriarchal society that represses the female erotic impulse entitled "The Uses of the Erotic," the black feminist scholar Audre Lorde wrote, "The erotic is not a question only of what we do; it is a question of how acutely and fully we can feel in the doing." It's an essay about the relationship between women's work and the ways that patriarchal society represses the female erotic impulse. Through this lens, we can recognize Alcée's arrival and Calixta's being at a loss for how to react to that intrusion as something that makes her become aware of how fully she herself can feel in the doing of all those typical household chores.
After all, Calixta is not threatened by Alcée's presence or even his advances. At no point does she try to deter him from his act of seduction, or demur when he starts laying it on thick. Instead, we watch Calixta awaken as a more sensual, erotic version of herself, transitioning from a responsible domestic in a marriage to which it's expected she will remain faithful, into an object of desire and a subject of her own passions.
