25 pages • 50 minutes read
Kate ChopinThe Night Came Slowly
Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1895A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
Maple Tree
The maple tree, which is a central feature of the setting in this work, both connects and separates the narrator from The Divinity of Nature. It parallels the narrator, in a sense, symbolizing the narrator’s own status. The narrator is striving to grow. They are reaching toward a new level of awareness. But the narrator is also rooted in their own mortality, their present perception of reality, and they are not quite able to reach the sky—especially not with the disruptions caused by the “fools [who] cumber the Earth” (Paragraph 6).
The maple tree’s leaves in particular represent aspects of perception and sight. As the narrator lies beneath the tree, the only light left after night has arrived comes “filtering through the maple leaves” and through the stars that are “looking down through every cranny” (Paragraph 2). The leaves are a veil of sorts, preventing the narrator from quite fully taking in the light that comes after nightfall. Nature tickles the leaves, creating a sense of fingers brushing: “wind rippled the maple leaves like little warm love thrills” (Paragraph 5). But the leaves remain in place, and the spell ultimately breaks before the narrator can slip fully into slumber.
The Night
The night is perhaps the most complex symbol in “The Night Came Slowly.” First, Chopin clearly associates the night with death, or at least with an awareness of one’s own mortality. For example, the association of the night with sleeping, both generally and given the “slumber song” of the katydids (Paragraph 5), calls to a broader association with a more eternal sleep. The night casts a “necromancer’s spell” (Paragraph 6), necromancy being in broad terms the practice of communicating with the dead. Night also emerges first “creeping, creeping stealthily out of the valley” (Paragraph 2); Kate Chopin’s education and experience in an especially Roman Catholic culture indicate she would have been familiar with the Biblical reference to “the valley of death.”
Simultaneously, as the piece states explicitly, the night “means mystery” (Paragraph 3). It speaks to what is beyond the realm of human knowledge. What man does not know is vast. Accordingly, the night is permeating and all consuming, present and emerging from all things. In addition, unlike the “chatter” and “course manner and speech” of man (Paragraph 6), who seems prone to announcing his own arrival, the night is content to sneak and creep into place. This interpretation of the night as mystery perhaps explains why the night, unlike man and books, does not make the narrator suffer. The night does not force strictly defined thoughts upon the narrator. Instead, it erodes distinctions: “the outlines of trees and foliage nearby blended in one black mass” (Paragraph 2). Slipping into the night, the narrator is accordingly soothed—free to be at peace with simply not knowing.
Men and Books
Chopin equates men and books. In many ways, they are described as one and the same because both of them cause suffering for the narrator. The narrator trusts neither men nor books because both are biased. Men can be used as universal term to describe all of humanity, but terms like mankind also reflect society’s tendency to default to men. In Chopin’s time, humanity was defined based predominantly on the male experience.
While the narrator doesn’t describe the kind of suffering that men and books caused her, it’s easy to imagine how different ideas prominent in the time could cause a woman to suffer. Women were often seen as lesser than men and were often prevented from controlling property, earning their own money, or divorcing. They were considered unreasonable and less capable, and early psychological principles suggested that women were failed men (Freud’s Studies on Hysteria was published in 1895, shortly after this story was published). Thus, most information available during Chopin’s time was affected by the era’s biases, which included sexism, racism, and classism.
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