Analyzing “Ripe Figs” by Kate Chopin / KateChopin.org
“Ripe Figs” is Kate Chopin’s short sketch about a young girl seekingpermission to visit her cousins.
“Ripe Figs” characters:
- Maman-Nainaine [in thecontext of this story, French for “Godmother”]
- Babette: Maman-Nainaine’s goddaughter
“Ripe Figs” time and place:
The story takes place in Louisiana, in the late nineteenth century.
“Ripe Figs” topics / themes:
The processes of nature; women’s search for selfhood, for self-discovery or identity.
Kate Chopin’s “Ripe Figs” written and published:
The story was written in1892, and published in Vogue.
“Ripe Figs” is classified as:
a short story (1,000-20,000 words); anIdyl (happy, peaceful, pastoral); a sketch (very little plot; generally shorter than short story) – “Ripe Figs” has 288 words.
Criticisms:
ElaineGardiner argues that Chopin employs in “Ripe Figs” three techniques that she uses in her other work, including The Awakening–contrasts (youth and age, patience and impatience, innocence and experience); natural images as emotional correlatives and structural parameters (sugar cane, figs, chrysanthemums); and cyclical patterns (growth, movements directed by the seasons).
Q: I understand that some critics think of “Ripe Figs” as a children’s story. What do they mean by that?
A: About a third of the short stories Kate Chopin wrote are ones she sent to magazines intended for children–magazines like Youth’s Companion or Harper’s Young People (although some, like this one, she sent to Vogue and other magazines)–or ones with subjects and themes similar to those. Today we know Chopin mostly through her works about intelligent, sensitive, adult women seeking integrity, independence, and fulfillment, struggling with social and cultural constraints. But Chopin had other subjects for her work, and some of those subjects appealed to children.
Peggy Skaggs writes that this story “reveals beautifully the differing perspectives on time of the child and the adult, expressing in one short page virtually the essence of the generation gap.”
Barbara Ewell describes “Ripe Figs” as a “fine lyrical sketch that captures a fragile sensuousness in a child’s eagerness for the ripening of the figs. . . . Chopin’s harmonizing of [Babette’s] wait–and, implicitly, all human life–with the slow processes of nature gives a characteristic poetry and dimension to this simple event.”
And Pamela Knights notes in the Cambridge Companion to Kate Chopin that some of Chopin’s children’s stories “offer glimpses of young people demonstrating the competence, judgement and articulacy more usually ascribed to adults.” Babette in “Ripe Figs,” Knights adds, “presents Maman-Nainaine with evidence, in a beautifully appropriate form, that the older woman’s stern contract has worked its course.”
Q: What are we supposed to understand by Chopin’s statement, “That is the way Maman-Nainaine was”?
A: In Kate Chopin’s nineteenth-century Louisiana, Bernard Koloski writes, Creole culture often “shapes Creoles’, ‘Cajuns’, blacks’, and others’ understanding of what is natural.” Creole Maman-Nainaine gives no reason for why Babette is to visit her cousins when the figs are ripe or for why Frosine is to return the visit when the chrysanthemums are in bloom.
Maman-Nainaine and other Creoles in Chopin’s fiction, Koloski writes, are “people who speak and act with authority and who by their words and actions show others that the authority they possess is deserved, is just, intrinsic, as ‘natural’ as the ease with which they live their lives and influence other people’s.”
You can see another Creole character like Maman-Nainaine in Chopin’s short story “A Matter of Prejudice.”
First and last name
Mrs. Moskovitz
English II Honors – Per. 2
17 August 2017
Directions:
- Print “Ripe Figs” by Kate Chopin and bring to class tomorrow. You do not need to print the notes above, but please use them to help further your understanding of the work.
- Annotate: highlight key words, passages, vocabulary, etc., that are important to the work as a whole. Jot down questions along the margins or add your own ideas/analysis of work throughout the piece.
- Include your original thesis: What do you believe Kate Chopin wants readers to understand?Type.
- Apply 3 of Foster’s ideas to “Ripe Figs” and concisely explain the relationships/connections found. Type the 3 ideas and explain their importance overall. Use MLA (see heading above left).
Thesis (generic structure): ______proves to be ______because ______. (subject) (claim) (evidence)
Thesis Rough Draft: ______
“Ripe Figs” By: Kate Chopin
Maman-Nainaine said that when the figs were ripe Babette might go to visit her cousins down on the Bayou-Lafourche where the sugar cane grows. Not that the ripening of figs had the least thing to do with it, but that is the way Maman-Nainaine was.
It seemed to Babette a very long time to wait; for the leaves upon the trees were tender yet, and the figs were like little hard, green marbles.
But warm rains came along and plenty of strong sunshine, and though Maman-Naiaine was as patient as the statue of la Madone, and Babette as restless as a humming-bird, the first thing they both knew it was hot summer-time. Every day Babette danced out to where the fig-trees were in a long line against the fence. She walked slowly beneath them, carefully peering between the gnarled, spreading branches. But each time she came disconsolate away again. What she saw there finally was something that made her sing and dance the whole long day.
When Maman-Nainaine sat down in her stately way to breakfast, the following morning, her muslin cap standing like an aureole about her white, placid face, Babette approached. She bore a dainty porcelain platter, which she set down before her godmother. It contained a dozen purple figs, fringed around with their rich, green leaves.
"Ah," said Maman-Nainaine, arching her eyebrows, "how early the figs have ripened this year!"
"Oh," said Babette, "I think they have ripened very late."
"Babette," continued Maman-Nainaine, as she peeled the very plumpest figs with her pointed silver fruit-knife, "you will carry my love to them all down on Bayou-Lafourche. And tell your TanteFrosine I shall look for her at Toussaint - when the chrysanthemums are in bloom."