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Many people assume that love and passion go hand-in-hand in a relationship. People have come to believe that one true love can satisfy the need for passion. In The Storm, Kate Chopin uses imagery, flashback, and parallelism to draw a fine line between passion and love. Chopin presents passion as an emotion separate from love. She creates the feeling that passion is an intense emotion that is more mysterious than love could ever be. Passion is an ardent drive, an escape, the fulfillment of fantasy, and it is as mysterious as it is intense.
The Storm presents an affair between a married man and a married woman, who know each other from their younger years. The affair is portrayed as a necessary escape from reality. It is the fulfillment of the lust they felt for each other in the years past. The storyline forms the feeling that the affair is necessary in order to maintain a satisfied marriage with their spouse. Through this story, Chopin demonstrates the need everyone has for an escape at one point in any type of relationship. An escape can be a simple breath of fresh air in solitude, a break from the redundancy of married life, or a satisfaction of lusts. The affair is considered a part of a bigger picture in which all parties, though obviously unspoken amongst themselves, need a short break. A mixture of storming emotions lead to a need of a break in a relationship.
The action of the story is focused around the central motif of a storm, both literally and emotionally. Although the rising storm is first mentioned in Part I of the story, it is not fully described in vivid detail until Part II. In this section, Chopin describes and parallels the cycle of this incoming raising storm to the growing emotional uproar brewing between Alcèe and Calixta. First, it begins to grow dark and Calixta notices the weather has grown oddly warm. These are the signs of the oncoming cyclone, and foreshadowing of the affair that is to come. An affair that is dark in...