Desiree\'s Baby by Kate Chopin

Desiree's Baby By Kate Chopin

Readers know something important about Armand Aubigny's character by the third paragraph of Kate Chopin's short story Desiree's Baby. Eighteen years after Desiree had been found as a toddler, sleeping in the shadow of a stone pillar, she is found again, only this time by Aubigny, who fell in love with Desiree "...as if struck by a pistol shot." Her beauty awoke a "passion" in Aubigny, Chopin writes in that third paragraph, a passion that "swept along like an avalanche, or like a prairie fire..." And so this is pretty obvious foreshadowing for the reader, because as the paragraphs unfold, Aubigny is shown to be as cold as the steel that makes up a pistol, with a racist fire inside him rivaling a hot bullet or a prairie fire. Indeed, he overwhelms Desiree with the suffocating wrath of an avalanche.

Chopin chooses her words very carefully, of course, as any author of a short story must; but the choice of "avalanche" is not by chance, because an avalanche of snow is about as white an image as there is, and Aubigny is all about being white and hating what is black. As the first sign of his dominating personality, Aubigny gave Desiree his name, "one of the oldest and proudest in Louisiana." Aubigny was a slave master, which was not all that unusual for the time in which this story takes place (the antebellum south); but by the fifth paragraph in the story, readers learn that Aubigny was cruel to his slaves. His "negroes had forgotten how to be gay," the way they were when Aubigny's father had been in charge.

But wait, when Desiree has a baby boy, Aubigny is initially so pleased to have a son that he begins to treat his slaves with a bit more humanity; "...he hasn't punished one of them - not one of them - since baby is born." This is how the birth of a child is normally expected to affect a father. "Marriage, and later the birth of his son, had softened Armand Aubigny's imperious and exacting nature greatly," Chopin writes. This would appear to be a character change the reader may take as meaning that the cruelty of Aubigny mellowing. It may mean that the charms and maternal power of a woman can make even the harshest male personality Chopin has a knack for leading the reader into false sense of theme change. Still, the dark side of Aubigny is ever-present in this story. By showing the reader that when Aubigny smiled Desiree "asked no greater blessing of God," Chopin is creating a sense that not only are Aubigny's smiles rare, but also Desiree is under this man's spell.

Desiree "loved [Aubigny] desperately" but when his face made a frown "she trembled"; this can only be a situation in which a wife is terrified of what might happen following the frown of her dominating, horribly cruel husband.

When the baby was three months old, Aubigny was beginning to see signs that the child was not a white child. The "very spirit of Satan seemed suddenly to take hold of him in his dealings with the slaves," the narrator explains; this line is a bit ironic in describing Aubigny because he hasn't exactly been an endearing character up until this point, the third page of the story. Now, Aubigny isn't looking at her anymore; he is avoiding the baby; the slaves are acting kind of restless; and as another sign of her fear of her husband, "...she dared not ask him to explain."

Armand Aubigny is not very human at all, readers suspect throughout the first pages of the story; and the narrator assures readers that they are correct when husband, wife, and baby are in the same room and Aubigny is obviously agitated. Desiree calls to him, "in a voice that must have stabbed him, if he was human. But he did not notice." When asked what the baby's dark physical features mean Aubigny pulls Desiree's clutching fingers from his arm "and thrust the hand away from him"; it means "...that the child is not white," Aubigny answers, adding that by implication Desiree herself is not purely white either.

Rather than embrace the child and reassure one's wife, the way an average man would likely do, Aubigny leaves Desiree and child alone and retreats into his dark world. He was so racist and hateful of any color of skin not his own, he felt that Desiree had brought shame and injury upon his family name. What kind of a man would fall in love so quickly, and then brutally dominate his pretty, soft, feminine wife (taking advantage of her sweetness in order to have a son so his name can be carried on), only to push her away when the child she bore for him did not live up to his expectations? The answer is Aubigny is a man from a culture where patriarchal and bigoted behavior is acceptable. Yes, contemptible to those with grace and loving personalities, but acceptable because for many individuals, that is just how life was in the south prior to the Civil War.

As if it wasn't enough that his wife committed suicide, her heart broken beyond repair, but in the final paragraphs readers are again reminded of the meanness and inhumane personality of Aubigny. The gothic horror that Chopin is capable of creating comes through in Aubigny's act of burning the cradle that the baby was born in. He also burned the lovely gowns that Desiree had owned and worn. "...Silk gowns, and velvet and satin ones added to these; laces, too, and embroideries" along with Desiree's bonnets. Oh Aubigny must have enjoyed seeing all those items go up in flames and smoke, but he wasn't the person to actually place the items in the fire; "...it was he who dealt out to a half dozen negroes the material which kept this fire ablaze." The man, who hated black people, punished them cruelly and brutally, now demands that they do the dirty work of throwing his late wife's clothes on to a fire.