Desiree's Baby Literary Analysis

Kate Chopin's "Desiree's Baby" is a timeless portrayal of one woman's startling descent into hysteria and the societal pressures that bring on rapid and uninhibited panic. Desiree unknowingly becomes the victim of her husband's hierarchical cover-up- he puts the blame for the child's condemned skin color on Desiree when he is in fact of black descent. This forceful allegation, compounded with other accusations of not being white that presumably take place outside of the home, in effect drive Desiree and her fragile soul six feet under. Alienation rears its cruel head time and time again in this story. Madame Valmonde, Desiree's guardian and literal savior, truly loves Desiree and treats the young woman as her own daughter. She speculates, "…Desiree had been sent to her by a beneficent
Initially, Armand is the picturesque face of a beautiful relationship, a man of "passion…swept along like an avalanche…drives headlong over all obstacles" (141). When Madame Valmonde asks Desiree what Armand thinks of the baby, she paints him as a most proud father, whose hostility towards the slaves has been weakened with each and every smile from the little one. Three months into the baby's life, the painting rots. Desiree cannot comprehend the reasons behind his awful transformation, but the reader can infer that the baby's blackness is becoming evermore visible. During these times, to be black was to be ugly; Armand's built-up anger and frustration toward his situation finally climaxed amidst his wife's pressing questions, and another instance of prejudice against minorities is exposed. "It means that the child is not white; it means that you are not white" (143). Emotionally ravished and bent over with false guilt, Desiree storms out of the house, the baby in arms, and permanently disappears among the banks of the nearby