Desiree’s Baby

Desiree’s Baby is a small narrative wrote in the setting of nineteenth century Louisiana. It is basically a story of a woman who has a child and the baby ends up looking a little darker and getting accused of being black. Now no one really knows how that happens until the end when surprisingly the father is black. But no one ever even thought about blaming the father because of the way life was back then. Men’s domination over women played a big part in life back then because this created conflicts between people as a whole. This is also true because back then men were always considered superior to women. Since Armand contains a higher social position than Desiree, has a plantation, and owns tens of thousands of slaves, her has the power to master over her. But Desiree is adopted into a family lacking a valued name. Desiree is young. We can tell this by a quote a woman named Madame Valmonde said: "It made her laugh to think of Desiree with a baby. Why it seemed but yesterday that Desiree was little more than a baby herself." It also seemed that she was left nameless on Madame Valmonde’s porch when she was younger. Basically Madame, Desiree’s mother, reminisces on the times when Desiree was a young girl.

Kate Chopin addresses to pathos in this story. The plot is very emotional during the story. She explains how loving and caring Desiree is when she found out the baby was a quadroon she didn’t just neglect the baby she loved and cared for it still. Though, Armand starts to not care for the baby any longer. At first he was really excited, and later since he has found out the baby was a quadroon, he didn’t want to have anything to do with it. This takes a chief toll on Desiree. The sentence where it says Desiree was so miserable that she could die shows how badly she was hurt and felt about the situation. It also showed how she responded to certain situations and what type of person she is.

Kate Chopin’s diction during the story was sometimes indistinct and unclear though she did use a lot of metaphors and similes to put across imagery. For most of the story I was unclear on some things. Like, all through the whole story, the baby was nameless, even though this could have symbolized something like the baby was the same as Desiree when she was younger. It was, at all times, referred to as “the baby”. She could have also done this because the baby was a quadroon so it might not have been commendable of a name.

Desiree’s Baby was very interesting and confusing but Kate Chopin did a wonderful job using pathos to describe all of the different emotions in the story. She went into detail about how men were “superior” to women and how they would never even thought about blaming the man for causing the baby to be black.