Summary
Calixta and Alcée now disregard the terrible storm raging outside, with the sounds of the rain making Calixta laugh in Alcée's arms. They begin to indulge desires on the couch, and Calixta begins to explore a depth of sensuousness that she hadn't explored before, with the narrator evoking a creamy lily to describe her delicate, life-giving passion and a white flame to evoke the raw energy of her sexuality.
Alcée tastes her breasts as they give into their urges, and "swoon together at the very borderland of life's mystery." They are described as tangled in one another and stroking, giving all to their lovemaking. And as the storm passes, their sexual encounter ends. It lures them to fall asleep, but they fight that urge, knowing that would be the riskiest act yet.
When the rain finally ends, Calixta stands on the porch, watching Alcée ride away on the horse. The world around them is described as glistening like green gems, and when Alcée turns to smile at Calixta with a beaming face, she smiles and laughs out loud.
When Bobinôt and Bibi are returning home, the father points out that the son is covered in mud. Bobinôt wants them to look presentable for Calita, so he and Bibi stop to scrape the mud off their bodies and clothes. The two enter the house cautiously, hesitant about the scrupulous Calixta's reaction.
Calixta is in the midst of preparing dinner with coffee being made on the hearth. She's overjoyed by their return, and grabs Bibi, kissing him effusively. Bobinôt has all manners of apologies prepared for Calixta, but drops them all when Calixta pats him to feel his dry clothes, and expresses gratitude that they made it home safe. Bobinôt then offers Calixta the shrimp he bought her, and she's so overjoyed that she gives him a big kiss on the cheek. The three sit down for a joyous dinner where they "laughed much and so loud that anyone might have heard them as far away as Laballière's."
Speaking of which, the next thing we see is Alcée Lavallière writing a letter to his wife, Clarisse. It's a tender, loving letter, in which he writes that if she and the children are enjoying Biloxi, they should stay there for a while longer. He says that while he misses them, he's willing to deal with the distance for a while longer in the name of his family's health and happiness.
Clarisse is charmed to receive the letter, and it finds her and the children doing well. She describes an amenable society life in Biloxi, and agrees it would be best if they all stayed there for a little while. Clarisse realizes that she's enjoying a kind of liberty she hadn't enjoyed since her days before marriage, and as devoted as she is to Alcée, would enjoy a bit more of the freedom.
And, as the story ends, everyone is happy after the storm passes.
Analysis
There's an important shift that happens about halfway through the depiction of the encounter between Calixta and Alcée. At one point, the narrator stops portraying Alcée's point of view as the seducer—such as his gaze beholding Calixta's body, his physical actions as he initiates the affair—and starts exploring Calixta's experience of the encounter. In turn, the climax of the story coincides with what Chopin implies is Calixta's own climax, with all of the prior tension of her domestic life and worry about the harshness of the storm dissolving, replaced by a palpable sense of joy.
The fact that the story centers Calixta's subjectivity in this erotic experience is important for two reasons. For one, it demonstrates Chopin's proto-feminist impulses as an author. Chopin is showing that a woman's sexual experience is rich enough fodder to make a compelling narrative, lending primacy to a type of female experience which American society traditionally ignored and actively repressed.
The second reason that subjectivity is important is that Chopin depicts this experience without any kind of moralizing or pathologizing. Calixta isn't made to answer for the fact that she's enjoying an illicit encounter during the brief moment when her husband and son are stranded away from home, and there's no implication that she succumbed to some evil temptation or misguided impulse. Instead, Chopin simply represents a woman's pleasure in and of itself. Chopin must have had some sense of how radical of a move this was at the time, since she never attempted to publish "The Storm" herself.
Calixta, of course, isn't the only woman in the story who enjoys a kind of autonomy and freedom outside of her marriage. At the end, we meet Clarisse, Alcée's wife, who is currently away from home, staying in Biloxi with their children. Alcée writes her a letter telling her he doesn't mind if they stay in Biloxi for a while longer, with the implication being that he might want to keep them away so that he can pursue more of an affair with Calixta. But when Clarisse receives the letter, she quite likes the idea of staying away from her husband for a bit longer. The narrator mentions a kind of personal liberty Clarisse hadn't enjoyed since before marriage, and we see, once again, a great value placed on a woman's autonomy. Chopin herself wrote this story well after her husband had died, when she had been living a content life as a widow for a number of years.
