Chopin's Lilacs and the story of the AnnunciationWhen the theologian Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza writes that the myth of the Virgin Mary “sanctions a profound psychological and institutional split » (59) Among the women of the Catholic tradition, she captures what Kate Chopin also captured in her story “Lilac”. There, fraternity between secular and religious women seems fragmented and almost impossible. To examine this division, Kate Chopin shapes her story around the part of the Virgin Mary myth told in the Gospel of Saint Luke about the Annunciation of the birth of Jesus addressed to Mary by the archangel Gabriel. By working with this text, “Lilac” mocks a tradition valuing virginity and separating the cloistered from the laity. Irony prevails, but also sadness born of religious restraint and condemnation. From the tension of the Annunciation between the virginal and the non-virginal arise epochs of women separated from each other on the basis of chastity and divided internally into spiritual and physical selves. Chopin's “Lilacs” play out this division on the ground of a sacred being. Convent of the heart and in the apartments of a Parisian socialite to ask whether an almost entirely spiritual life or an almost entirely physical life can be anything other than the object of ridicule. The narrator tempts us to laugh at the ridiculous only to then make us feel more painfully, at the end of the story, the painful effects of a constrained desire, effects which diminish both the nun and the secular woman. The story of the Annunciation, “Lilac,” one might suppose, would remind us of the saving role of Mary (and, by extension, woman) as God's chosen vessel to ensure the redemption of humanity. . But "Lilac" fails to announce the good news for women because it sees too clearly that what was salvific for humanity ended up dividing women within themselves and within the Catholic tradition because of the The insistence of this tradition on the virginity of Mary before and after childbirth. This insistence separated the ideal virginal mother from real women and mothers whose joyfully lived sexuality still closed the doors to work within the clerical ministry today. The story of the Annunciation for Kate Chopin is a story told at the expense of women's sexuality and spirituality, as complete and complementary as they could have been. The notion of failed annunciation then opens “Lilac”: “Mme. Adrienne Farival never announced her arrival.