Identity In Desiree's Baby By Kate Chopin

Kate Chopin’s writing often consists of topics not necessarily thought as acceptable by her society. During Chopin's time women often remained home receiving credit for nothing at all. Women often were presumed as having no true value.Through her writing, Chopin gives women a new role in life. Her stories give a view into the daily struggles women go through. In Kate Chopin’s “Desiree’s Baby,” she uses several different themes including race and racism, love, and identity: foreshadowing, irony, flashbacks, and local color to show her readers that love can easily become an object and not really

Kate Chopin uses the theme of identity in “Desiree's Baby” to show the reader status plays a big role in how the characters are looked at. In “Desiree’s

In “Desiree’s Baby” Kate Chopin states, “Why, it seemed but yesterday that Desiree was little more than a baby herself; while Monsieur in riding through the gateway of Valmonde had found her lying asleep in the shadow of the big stone pillar” (Chopin 1). Madame Valmonde raised Desiree from the time she was a baby to now. It was not very long ago when she found Desiree laying up against the pillar with no chance at life. She could not believe that Desiree was now old enough to have a child of her own it seemed like she was still a child herself. Madame Valmonde allowed her to be able to have a normal life like other kids. She allowed her a chance to restart and know what true love really meant. Chopin allows the reader to be able to learn that without the help of Madame Valmonde there would be no story to tell for Desiree may never have even lived to be seventeen. Something readers learn is that during the story's time period people got married and have kids at alot younger age than you would expect. In “The Fiction of Limits; ‘Desiree’s Baby’” Cynthia Wolff states, “Desiree is presumed to have been left by a party of Texans- pioneers en route to the territory whose slave policies were so bitterly contested when it was annexed that they proved to be a significant precursor to the Civil War that followed” (Wolff 94). It is believed her parents left her as they embarked on their

Chopin was overall known for her use of local color writing. In “Critical Essay on ‘Desiree’s Baby’”, Rena Korb states, “While reviewers and readers of Chopin’s day lauded the story, most emphasized Chopin’s ability to bring to life the bayou Louisiana that she knew so well. Critics today find ‘Desiree’s Baby’ a rich text filled with universal themes and careful authorial technique. As Robert D. Arner writes of the story, it is ‘one of the best of its kind in American Literature.’” (Korb 78) Chopin used local color to bring life to her stories. By using strong details about the bayou readers who have never experienced the bayou have a better understanding about the conditions in which the characters lived in daily. Kate is often seen as a local color writer because of her references to the French and Creoles who are people of Spanish and French descendent. In “Desiree’s Baby” Kate Chopin states,

Madame Valmonde had not seen Desiree and the baby for four weeks. When she reached L’Abri she shuddered at the first sight of it, as she always did. It was a sad looking place, which for many years had not known the gentle presence of a mistress, old Monsieur Aubigny having married and buried his wife in France, and she having loved her own land too well to ever leave it. (Chopin