Excerpt from Dissertation:
Chopin
Kate Chopin’s Desiree’s Baby explores the intersections among race, gender, and social status. Being adopted, Desiree is deprived of the understanding of her individual ancestry. Not knowing her ancestral roots is an ironic way to obtain power to get Desiree. On the one hand, she can easily assume what ever identity the lady chooses. On the other hand, her identity is whatever others project onto her. The central conflict of Chopin’s tale is in fact between your differences in created identities: those that are self-constructed and self-generated through personal power, and those that are created via cultural norms, prejudices, and current values.
Desiree is not really the one with an id conflict in Chopin’s tale. The real central conflict targets Armand, who have although begins as a loving companion to get the titular Desiree, degenerates into the sign of patriarchal power as well as the racial hierarchies of the To the south. Especially in the exclusive subculture of Louisiana, being of merged ancestry gives unique identification crises. The idea of chastity, and the value judgments that notion brings out in Armand, are not Desiree’s problem. Desiree remains good and untouched spiritually; the very fact that her adopted father and mother summon her home underscores the fact that she has recently been taught to love himself and that she cares not about the prejudicial underpinnings of the world looming around her.
Chopin is determined to delineate, illustrate, and also subvert the variations drawn among different ethnicity categories in antebellum Louisiana. Creole traditions created a interpersonal hierarchy based upon race, that has been fluid because the bayou itself. Like a “foundling, ” Desiree officially escapes the kinds of judgments that will befall an individual of known ancestry. Yet the appearance of her baby marks her as if by a scarlet notification. She cares for you not for the stigma, although Armand becomes consumed with a type of disgrace only paid for from racism. It is highly likely that Armand is definitely himself of mixed backdrop. His refusal of this opportunity suggests that his love for Desiree was all a sham anyhow, predicated in the presumption of her getting white.
The simple fact that practically no one in her ethnic milieu can claim nearly anything close to ethnicity purity is an important fact to get Desiree, and one that will keep her good throughout the history. There are just continuums of social status, with recognized race being a key characteristic of position. Because the lady passes while white, Desiree can float among the elite; because her baby has more of
