A Summary and Analysis of Kate Chopin’s ‘Old Aunt Peggy’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

‘Old Aunt Peggy’ is a short story by the American writer Kate Chopin (1850-1904). She wrote the story on 8 January 1892 and it was accepted for publication by Harper’s Young People – who paid Chopin $3 for it – although in the end it was never published in that magazine.

The story concerns a former slave, Aunt Peggy, who asks her former master if she can live out her old age on their land while she waits for ‘the end’.

Summary

The story is set in Louisiana in the wake of the end of the American Civil War in 1865. Aunt Peggy is a recently freed slave. She approaches her former master (identified only as ‘Monsieur’), requesting to remain on the plantation. She tells him she is getting old and frail and she knows she doesn’t have much more time left. She humbly asks for a small corner where she can settle down and wait peacefully for her death.

Monsieur and Madame, the master’s wife, are touched by her affection for them, and when the old plantation is reconstructed and reorganised, they give her a small cabin on the grounds to live in. Madame even gave Aunt Peggy an old rocking-chair for her to relax in.

Every two years or so, Aunt Peggy struggles up to the house and gives the same speech to her former master and his wife, asking to see their children and their family photographs and the piano in their house before ‘it’s too late’. She has lost her sight in one eye and the other one is failing her now too. Every time she makes this journey to the house, they send her back to her cabin with an apron filled with all manner of gifts.

Initially, Monsieur had felt uneasy with the new situation of supporting someone who is no longer obligated to work. But his initial scruples have been replaced by admiration for her, as well as astonishment that she has survived for so many years. Indeed, Aunt Peggy claims to be one hundred and twenty-five years old.

Analysis

Though it is only a very brief narrative running to just one page in length, ‘Old Aunt Peggy’ provides us with an insight into the complexities of navigating freedom for formerly enslaved individuals and the evolving dynamics between them and their former owners in the aftermath of the Civil War.

Chopin pays tribute to ‘Old Aunt Peggy’ who is, we are told, very old indeed. There’s a kind of twist, or even double-twist, at the very end of the short narrative, whereby the third-person narrator tells us that Aunt Peggy is ‘a hundred and twenty-five, so she says’. No sooner have we read these last three words which caution us to take Peggy’s own estimate of her age with a pinch of salt (‘so she says’ inviting an unspoken but clearly perceptible ‘but …’), than the very last short paragraph of the story wrongfoots us again: ‘It may not be true, however. Possibly she is older.’

Of course, it is unlikely that Old Aunt Peggy really is a hundred and twenty-five years old, let alone even older: in the nineteenth century that would have been quite a feat (indeed, it still is). But the narrator’s clever sleight-of-hand, whereby we are invited to laugh at Aunt Peggy’s view of her venerable age only to find the narrator pronouncing it an underestimate, functions as a device for emphasising the tenacity and determination of a black woman who has survived slavery with all of the physical and psychological hardships it must have brought her.

The character of Old Aunt Peggy

Of course, we are also invited to admire the pluck and ingenuity of Aunt Peggy, whose initial request to her former master was taken as a ‘mark of affection and fidelity’: her deference to her former slaveowners ensures that her wish is granted, but as her visits to the house – and subsequent return to her cabin laden with presents – suggest, Aunt Peggy’s deferential gesture of ‘fidelity’ or faithfulness to her master lands her a very comfortable home, with enough provided for her in her ‘retirement’ to sustain her for decades after her slaving days were over.

The story begins in the past tense (‘When the war was over, old Aunt Peggy went to Monsieur …’), but ends firmly in the present tense (‘Possibly she is older’). Assuming the present day here is 1892, when Kate Chopin wrote the story, Aunt Peggy has enjoyed a comfortable retirement for more than a quarter of a century at her former master’s expense, effectively drawing a pension which might be regarded as a form of payback for the years of involuntary servitude she gave them.

So although ‘old’ Aunt Peggy may present herself as a submissive figure, Chopin cleverly hints at the canny, enterprising spirit which motivated her request in the first place. She has the last laugh, in other words – although she has also won over her master, too, whose ‘profound astonishment’ and ‘wonder’ at the ripe old age to which Aunt Peggy has already lived are seemingly twinned with admiration: the ‘scruple’ or doubt he entertained about supporting her has vanished rather than grown.