Character Analysis of Armand Aubigny in Désirée's Baby
This essay analyzes the character of Armand Aubigny in Kate Chopin's short story "Désirée's Baby," tracing how Chopin uses careful word choice, foreshadowing, and irony to expose Aubigny as a cruel, domineering, and deeply racist man. From the story's opening description of his consuming passion to his cold rejection of his wife and child and his final act of burning Désirée's belongings, the essay argues that Aubigny embodies the patriarchal and racially bigoted culture of the antebellum South. The analysis concludes with Chopin's devastating ironic reversal: the discovery that Aubigny himself is of mixed racial heritage, making his cruelty a form of self-condemnation.
- Introduction: Foreshadowing Aubigny's Character: Chopin's opening imagery foreshadows Aubigny's cruelty
- Aubigny as Slave Master and Dominating Husband: Aubigny's racial cruelty and dominance established
- The Birth of the Son: A Brief Softening: Child's birth briefly moderates Aubigny's harshness
- Aubigny's Rejection of Wife and Child: Aubigny rejects family over perceived racial impurity
- Burning the Past: Aubigny's Inhumanity Confirmed: Aubigny burns Désirée's belongings after her death
- Karma and Ironic Reversal: Aubigny's own mixed heritage is revealed
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What makes this paper effective
- The essay anchors each analytical claim in specific textual evidence, quoting directly from Chopin's story to support observations about Aubigny's character.
- The writer tracks Aubigny's behavior chronologically through the story, showing how each scene reinforces and deepens the portrait of cruelty established from the opening paragraphs.
- The analysis of Chopin's word choices — particularly "avalanche," "pistol shot," and "prairie fire" — demonstrates close reading skills appropriate for a literary essay.
Key academic technique demonstrated
The paper demonstrates foreshadowing analysis as a literary technique. The writer identifies how Chopin's opening imagery (avalanche, fire, pistol shot) encodes Aubigny's character before his actions confirm it, then returns to that imagery throughout the essay to show how the text sustains its thematic signals. This creates a coherent interpretive thread from introduction to conclusion.
Structure breakdown
The essay moves sequentially through the story's plot, using each narrative moment as an opportunity for character analysis. It opens with a close reading of Chopin's descriptive language, moves through Aubigny's behavior as slave master, husband, and father, and closes with the story's ironic reversal. The conclusion frames Aubigny's fate as a moral lesson about karma and social justice in the antebellum South.
Introduction: Foreshadowing Aubigny's Character
Readers learn something important about Armand Aubigny's character by the third paragraph of Kate Chopin's short story "Désirée's Baby." Eighteen years after Désirée had been found as a toddler sleeping in the shadow of a stone pillar, she is found again — this time by Aubigny, who fell in love with her "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." This is fairly obvious foreshadowing, because as the story unfolds, Aubigny is shown to be as cold as the steel of a pistol, with a racist fire inside him rivaling a hot bullet or a prairie fire. Indeed, he overwhelms Désirée with the suffocating wrath of an avalanche.
Chopin chooses her words very carefully, as any short story author must. The choice of "avalanche" is not by chance: an avalanche of snow is about as white an image as there is, and Aubigny is entirely consumed by whiteness and by hatred of what is black.
Aubigny as Slave Master and Dominating Husband
As the first sign of his dominating personality, Aubigny gave Désirée his name — "one of the oldest and proudest in Louisiana." Aubigny was a slave master, which was not unusual for the time and place in which this story is set (the antebellum South). By the fifth paragraph, however, readers learn that Aubigny was cruel to his slaves. His "negroes had forgotten how to be gay," the way they had been when Aubigny's father was in charge.
Works Cited
Chopin, Kate. "Desiree's Baby." Complete Novels & Stories: Bayou Folk. New York: The Library of America, 2002, pp. 242–247.
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