Desirees Baby essays

Desiree's Baby essays Kate Chopin's short story, "Desiree's Baby," begins by explaining how Desiree comes to live with Monsieur and Madame ValmondeMonsieur Valmonde finds her as a child sleeping on his property, and he and his wife decide to raise her. When Desiree grows up, Armand Aubigny falls in love with her, and despite Monsieur Valmonde's warnings that Desiree's origins are unknown, Armand marries her and they have a baby boy. At first, they are both extremely proud and happy, and Armand even treats his Negro slaves kindly because he is in such a joyful state of mind. However, Armand's manner changes when the baby is three months old: he stops looking into Desiree's eyes when he speaks to her, he treats the slaves awfully, and he seems to fall out of love with Desiree. Desiree is miserable and cannot understand why her husband has changed. One day she is in her room looking at her sleeping child and she notices that his skin color is darker than "normal;" she asks Armand what it means, and he tells her that the child is not white, so therefore she must not be white, and he sends her away and burns all of her things, only to read an old letter that reveals it was his own mother who was black. The moment Armand presumed Desiree to be of Negro origins, he wanted nothing to do with her or his own son because to him, being black was completely inferior; however, the irony is that it was him all along who had a black parent, sending Chopin's message that judging another human being based on his or her skin color is completely immoral The central character in this story is Desiree, who grows up to be a "beautiful and gentle, affectionate and sincere" woman with a fair complexion and long, silky brown hair. Desiree is happy and gleeful, is kind to her slaves, and wants to please her husband in any way. Chopin writes of Armand and Desiree: "When he frowned she trembled, b...