Spotlight On: Désirée’s Baby

Kate Chopin was born in February of 1850 in St. Louis, Missouri, where she would spend much of her early life. When the Civil War began, eleven years later, the population of St. Louis was composed mostly of recent immigrants of Irish—like Chopin’s father, Thomas O’Flaherty—and Catholic German descent, many of whom made up early volunteer regiments of the Union army. Though St. Louis remained under Union control for the duration of the war, there were many Southern sympathizers living in the city, including Chopin’s half brother, who joined the Confederate army and later died of typhoid fever after being captured by Union forces. Missouri, if you’ll recall from your eighth grade history class, became a state in 1820 under the Missouri Compromise, which—in seeking to maintain the ratio of free-to-slave states—admitted the titular state into the Union as a slave state and Maine as a free state. In wealthy homes in the city of St. Louis, there were often slaves, and Chopin’s family home was no exception.

Though Chopin is more commonly known for themes which explore various aspects of womanhood in her writing, she has also written a number of short stories that serve as particularly interesting commentaries on race relations and social unrest during the Civil War and Reconstruction Eras in which she lived.

In “Désirée’s Baby,” Chopin provides us with a troubling example of the violent consequences of placing arbitrary value on human life based solely on race. Chopin paints the titular Désirée as this ethereal object of love and beauty as the tale begins to unfold. She is “sent to her [mother] by a beneficent Providence to be the child of her affection,” some divine gift bestowed upon a woman who was “without child of the flesh.” Further, Armand, her eventual husband, falls in love with her “the way all Aubignys fell in love, as if struck by a pistol shot…swept along like an avalanche, or like a prairie fire, or like anything that drives headlong over all obstacles.” Despite her natural born family being of unknown origin, Armand “looked into her eyes and did not care.”

This unconditional love, however, comes to bear condition upon the arrival of Armand and Désirée’s titular child. Madame Valmondé, Désirée’s adopted mother, is the first to take particular notice of the baby. She visits the new mother and her baby after a month away, unable to “[remove] her eyes from the child” upon seeing him, bringing him into the light in order to take note of his features, before looking “searchingly at Zandrine,” the light-skinned slave serving as Désirée’s nurse.

Désirée does not come to the inevitable conclusion as quickly as her mother. It is another two months before she notices, when looking at the child of the mixed-race slave La Blanche, the undeniable similarities between her child and the enslaved boy. Désirée, “blood turned like in her veins,” goes to her husband and asks him desperately to look at their child and tell her what it means. It is then that Armand’s unexplainably cruel behavior towards his wife becomes clear, that the “something in the air menacing [Désirée’s] peace” materializes. Armand tells his wife that their child is not white, and that by extension, she herself is not white, though her skin may be “as white as La Blanche’s.”

Désirée writes to her mother, begging that Madame Valmondé tell her that she is, in fact white, as she “cannot be so unhappy and live.” Though Madame Valmondé pleads in response with Désirée to return “back to [her] mother who loves [her],” the young woman instead takes her child in arm and disappears at sundown into the nearby bayou, never to be seen again, Armand having “stabbed thus into his wife’s soul” by affirming his desire for her to go.

While Désirée’s disappearance is tragic for its own sake, Chopin adds unexpected nuance with the final section of her short story. Armand, having accepted the loss of his wife and child, is burning all of their things. Finally, he burns a collection of letters, most of which are from Désirée. However, amongst the scraps is a particularly meaningful piece of information, collected from “an old letter from his mother to his father,” which reveals Armand’s personal history, that his mother “belongs to the race that is cursed with the brand of slavery.” Armand, just like Désirée, is not white, though he passes as so. Désirée’s apparent suicide, brought on by the heartbreak of her husband’s dismissal, thus becomes even more upsetting. Some have speculated as to whether Armand knew of his lineage before reading the lines penned by his mother, but most assume that he was unwittingly the cause of his wife and child’s demise.

Through this short story, Chopin makes very bold statements about race for her time. By portraying Désirée as almost angelic in nature—the sole object of her mother’s affection, lovely enough to make a distinguished man forget the importance of pedigree—she draws attention to the gross dehumanization which is brought upon by racism, and the completely arbitrary nature by which people of her time discounted their fellow man. Désirée, otherwise perfect, is mixed race; in Armand’s eyes, she has thus brought some terrible “unconscious injury…upon his home and his name.” Yet we come to find out that this life-and-love-altering condition is one that he also shares. The irony is tragically palpable.

Our discussion of “Désirée’s Baby” has left me little time and space for “Ma’ame Pelagie,” so I will only speak on our second story briefly. “Ma’ame Pelagie” provides us with a haunting commentary from Chopin about the declining aristocracy of the post Civil-War era South and those who could not move forward into a new American future. Ma’ame Pelagie, wholly consumed by the ghosts of the past, is entirely unwilling (or perhaps unable) to forget her former life at Cote Joyeuse. The appearance of La Petite in Ma’ame Pelagie’s and Pauline’s lives forces the elder sister to modernize the property on which they live, ridding the grounds of the ruined mansion that had been destroyed in the Civil War. We catch glimpses of the splendor which Ma’ame Pelagie so longs for through the aging woman’s visions, but inevitably she must let go of her longing for the past in order to appease her sister, whom she so loves.

Despite this new life that is brought into Cote Joyeuse through La Petite and the post-war era—“the outward pressure of a young joyous existence [which] had forced her footsteps into the light”—Ma’ame Pelagie finds herself perpetually caught in the past, “her soul [having] stayed in the shadow of the ruin.” Through “Ma’ame Pelagie,” Chopin warns readers what might happen if one stays too fixated on what is behind as opposed to what is ahead.

I so hope you enjoyed reading these short stories by Kate Chopin. The widespread civic and social unrest we are feeling as a country right now is not by any means unfamiliar to American history. Particularly now, when tensions regarding racial injustice and violence are at an all time high, I think there is much to be gained by revisiting the authors who wrote during and around our nation’s critical fracturing point, the Civil War. Many of Chopin’s short stories don’t deal directly with race or one’s ability to adapt to a changing social environment, but the inclusion of these short stories in her body of work shows that she was making a conscious effort to understand her rapidly changing American environment. We can certainly all learn something from that.

If you’d like to read more of Chopin’s work, please explore what we have to offer in our collection.

Next week, we’ll be reading “The Thing Around Your Neck” by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, which can be found in the short story collection of the same name. You might be familiar with Adichie’s TED Talk We Should All Be Feminists which was sampled for Beyonce’s 2013 track “****Flawless,” where she explains that “we teach girls to shrink themselves, to make themselves smaller” by insisting their value is directly correlated to their ability to marry. In “The Thing Around Your Neck,” we follow Akunna, a young woman and Nigerian immigrant, and see the American experience through her eyes.

You can read “The Thing Around Your Neck” online or in our collection. “The Thing Around Your Neck” is also available on CD.