By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘Doctor Chevalier’s Lie’ is a short story by the American writer Kate Chopin (1850-1904), written in 1891 and published in Vogue magazine in 1893. This brief narrative concerns a doctor who is summoned one night to a brothel, where a young woman has killed herself by shooting herself in the head.
Summary
Doctor Chevalier works in the ‘unsavoury quarter’ of the city. One night, just after midnight, a gunshot is heard, and the doctor is summoned to a ‘house’ (although it’s not mentioned, we are invited to infer it is a brothel, or ‘house of ill repute’) where a young woman has shot herself in the side of the head, killing herself with one shot.
Such a sight is all too common in Doctor Chevalier’s line of work, but usually the victims are unfamiliar to him. This girl, however, is known to him. In a flashback, we learn that just over a year earlier, the doctor had been on a hunting expedition with a friend, when they had stopped at a cabin in Arkansas for shelter and food.
There were other people at the cabin, including the parents of some young girls, one of whom was the victim whose body he now attends to. The parents were clearly proud of their ‘handsome girl’, who intended to leave her home in Arkansas and travel to the ‘big city’ to seek her fortune. Instead, of course, she has wound up working in a brothel, and now she has taken her own life.
Doctor Chevalier pronounces the girl dead and tells the onlookers that he knew her well, and will take care of her body, making sure it receives a ‘decent burial’. The next day, he wrote a letter to the girl’s parents, telling them the bad news, but leaving out the ‘shame’ of their daughter’s end: namely, that she was working as a prostitute when she took her life.
Instead, he lies to the parents, telling them that she had fallen ill and died from her sickness. He enclosed a lock of her hair and a few other minor belongings the girl had owned, even inventing some last words the daughter has supposedly ‘said’ from her sickbed, as if intending the doctor to relay them to her parents. Of course, these last words are a complete fiction.
The story ends with the third-person narrator remarking that the locals gossiped that Doctor Chevalier had taken care of the remains of a ‘woman of doubtful repute’, although few people passed moral judgment on this or read more into it. Briefly, the well-to-do society in which the doctor moved thought of disowning and ostracising him, presumably because they suspected he had some unsavoury involvement with the girl, but in the end, the doctor’s reputation survived intact.
Analysis
Many of Kate Chopin’s short stories set in late nineteenth-century New Orleans focus on brief moments in the lives of women, but in ‘Doctor Chevalier’s Lie’ we have a slightly unusual variation on this, in that the story is focalised through a male character, the titular Doctor Chevalier, who reacts to the death of a girl whose family he had met just over a year before the girl’s death.
The doctor’s surname, Chevalier, is French – like so many of Chopin’s characters – but its literal meaning is also significant. It means ‘horseman’ or ‘knight’, and carries connotations of chivalry (from the same root, ultimately from cheval, ‘horse’) and gallantry, and thus prefigures or foreshadows the doctor’s kind behaviour, whereby he risks his own reputation in order to protect the girl’s.
Of course, ‘Chevalier’ already contains the seeds of that ‘lie’ which Doctor Chevalier tells to the dead girl’s parents. This lie can be described as a ‘white lie’, designed to spare them the additional grief of learning that their daughter had fallen on hard times and had been driven to selling her own body just to keep herself alive. The squalid nature of her death of despair would have added shame to tragedy, and the doctor, out of kindness, decided that concocting a fiction concerning some illness from which the girl was suffering would allow the parents, living in another state, to maintain the cherished memory of their daughter as someone ‘pure’ and uncorrupted by the vices of the big city.
‘Fiction’ may be an apt word here. In many nineteenth-century novels, readers expected – and so authors provided – a ‘Providential’ ending to their narratives, whereby, as Oscar Wilde memorably put it, ‘the good ended happily, the bad unhappily: that is what fiction means’. The girl in Chopin’s story is clearly not portrayed as a ‘bad’ character: instead, she is a good character who has failed to realise her dreams of making her ‘fortune’ in the city and was driven to desperate measures to stay alive. She does nevertheless need to die according to the nineteenth-century rules of Providence, because she has become a fallen woman.
Illness, however, is indiscriminate and can strike down both good and bad people equally. In the nineteenth century in particular, it was merely a matter of chance as to whether you would survive into adulthood and not succumb to the ravages of smallpox, typhoid, or cholera. When you reached adulthood these threats persisted.
In giving her parents the reassuring lie that their daughter was simply a victim of misfortune, struck down in her prime by some unnamed illness, Doctor Chevalier is effectively acting as a kind of ‘author’ figure, steering the narrative, selecting what to leave out from the sordid reality and what to include. Where necessary, he even takes to writing dialogue himself (the girl’s fictional last words).