Desiree's Baby

English 102

Unwanted

In “Desiree’s Baby”, Chopin seeks to make two main points on race and feminism, while turning it into a twisted love story filled with a main character change. Kate Chopin’s works are all usually concentrated around the same ideas. There was a revival of interest of Chopin in the late twentieth century because her concerns about the freedom of woman foreshadowed later feminist literary themes (“Kate Chopin”). One may argue that the story is primarily a character study, in this case on the character Armand Aubigny. The story showed larger claims than the one on Armand including the importance of race and feminism in the time period the story was written.

Kate Chopin showed how much of a role race plays in the time period the story was told in. We find out that the Valmondes adopted Desiree, the main character, and did not know of her heritage. At this point, the reader may think the child of Armand and Desiree is part African because of Desiree’s unknown orgin. This can only be a sign of many terrible things to come, knowing that Aramand was the owner “of the oldest and proudest in Louisiana” (Chopin 360). If a white family had a black baby, it could do harm to the family by society in the ways they thought about Africans in the nineteenth century. Whites felt inferior to blacks, and many blacks were used as slaves to work for a white man. Race was a big issue back then and played a big part in people’s status as human beings.

Armand’s way of treating Desiree throughout the story shows Chopin’s attempt to explain how important feminism was in the story. Armand shows how men treated women in that point in time. Chopin says in the story, “When he spoke to her, it was with averted eyes, from which the old love-light seemed to have gone out” (Chopin 361). This explains how Armand started to treat Desiree after he stopped caring for her because he thought Desiree had African genes. Armand absented himself from home, and...