Désirée’s Baby is a short story written by Kate Chopin, one of her most famous pieces. It was written in 1892, a little less than thirty years after the abolition of slavery in the United States. Kate Chopin’s family came from St. Louis, Missouri, where having slaves was considered to be normal until the 1850s. Kate grew up in a household like that, so she witnessed the injustices of racial discrimination with her own eyes and was familiar with the issue from the inside.
In Désirée’s Baby, Chopin is attacking the dominance of racism and patriarchy in society, at the same time describing the duality of life. However, she is trying to show that nothing in the world is “black-and-white”, most of the things lay in the grey area, and it especially concerns the prejudice and stereotypes existing in the society.
Désirée’s Baby tells a story of Désirée, a young woman, who marries a man named Armand Aubigny and gives birth to a baby. Armand comes from a wealthy white family in Louisiana, who naturally has a plantation and a number of slaves. A few months after the child’s birth, something changes in the behavior of the previously happy husband. He becomes distant with Désirée and the baby and gets much more brutal with the slaves.
As it turns out, his newborn son is not white – Armand accuses Désirée of having African roots, and soon afterward, she leaves the house. At the end of the story, Armand sets up a big bonfire, burning all the things that have ever belonged to Désirée and reminding him of her. In the last sentence, it becomes clear that the person who has the African roots is not Désirée; it is Armand himself. He owns the letter that says that his mother “belongs to the race that is cursed with the brand of slavery” (Chopin 158). This twist leaves the reader shaken up and appalled.
Désirée’s Baby is built on the contrast – the black and white skin, the master and the slave, the man, and the woman – and there is no mistake as to who is dominant in each case. However, Chopin shows how irrational and absurd this opposition is – and things look particularly ridiculous when it comes to Désirée’s ‘blackness”. Armand is described as having dark features, dark face, yet he is considered to be white due to the family he is coming from and his class (Chopin 151).
He is wealthy and privileged enough to be able to ‘choose’ his race. At the same time, fair-skinned and grey-eyed Désirée is accused of being black, and she does not have enough power to resist it (Chopin 154). None of this is based on the real facts, just the prejudice that is dominant in society at the moment.
Being a woman, Désirée depends majorly on her husband – and in the middle of the story, she seems to be repressed by him. When she is crying in her bedroom, leaning over her son, she “tries to speak…but no sound comes out” (Chopin 153). However, later she decides to step up, gets her power back from him, and leaves the house on her own. With this move, Chopin once again shows the absence of the strict “black-and-whiteness” in the world, as every place of dominance and every unequal situation can be turned upside down.
Désirée’s Baby by Kate Chopin shows the duality of the prejudice and inequalities existing in society – whether it is contemporary to her or is present nowadays. In her work, Chopin addresses the issues that are still relevant in modern society since the domination of whiteness, maleness, and richness has not gone anywhere since the end of the 19th century.
Work Cited
Chopin, Kate. “Désirée’s Baby.” Bayou Folk, Houghton Mifflin Publishing Company, 1894, pp. 147-158.