A Theme Of Race And Love In Kate Chopin’s Desiree’s Baby
Kate Chopin, in her short story titled Desiree’s Baby, speaks of the various shades of love that exist between people. In many cases, it us usually conditional and threatens the foundation of families. Unconditional love is hard to come by. In this story, the greatest divider is race. It is set in the pre-20th century America in a French family setting. Blacks are treated as being lesser human beings who are unworthy of love and association. Chopin brings the issue of conditional versus unconditional love as a matter of perspective. Madame Valmonde loved her adopted child, Desiree, without regards to her ancestral history. Conversely, Armand’s love for the same girl is threatened by the possibility that may have Black ancestry. The primary theme that Chopin communicates is that racial divisions are nonsensical and are based on skin-deep perceptions instead of the love for an individual’s human attributes.
Armand views people as property as an object that he can possess and dispose of at his will. He falls in love with Desiree because of the notion that Whiteness equals beauty and acceptance, and by this thinking, upholds racism and sexuality. The time in which the story is set is one in which the Black people, regarded as being of lower human value, were considered as slaves and women were referred to as the weaker gender. Armand, unlike his father, wields strong desire for power and domination and mistreats his slaves. Desiree confesses this fact to Madame Valmonde, saying that since the child’s birth, he had grown softer and was no longer treating his slaves with contempt and prejudice. This prejudice was shown to the slaves because he owned them. In a similar manner, Armand places Desire in a similar way through the gifts and wealth that he provided her at the start of their relationship. He begins to take them away in a manner that indicates that she has lost value. She was still the same person with whom he had fallen in love but after the birth of their child, he feels ashamed of having married someone who could possibly be Black and begins to disrespect her. These actions come indirectly when he begins to ignore her. At first, her beauty had charmed its way into his heart that he thought the reason for her adoption was due to the poverty of her parents. However, when his child is born with a dark skin, he believes that Desire’s parents were not only poor but also Black. This intersectionality between classism and race places Desiree at the lash of Armand’s shame and contempt.
Perspective comes out of the story as the major distinguishing factor in terms of love. Desiree is the central character around whom all events in the story take place. Chopin presents two sides of love: one that is skin-deep while the other regards a person for the good qualities that he or she has as a human being. Madame Valmonde is Desiree’s foster mother. She adopted her without considering the details of her mysterious past. She was a beautiful child whose meeting, Valmonde interpreted to have been instigated by divine providence. Monsieur Desiree found her in a shadow created by a stone pillar, with the former symbolizing her mysterious and uncertain past while the pillar indicated the strong support and love that the Valmondes would show to her. They treated her as their own daughter and introduced her into a life of wealth and privilege. The Valmondes may have chosen to interpret the presence of an unclaimed baby as a sign of ill fate but instead chose to believe that it was a blessing rather than a curse. Armand, on the other hand, is faced with the same situation regarding a similar question of the girl whose past was mysterious and he chooses her only due to her affiliation to the wealthy Valmondes and her skin-deep beauty and Whiteness but fails to develop unconditional love. He interprets his association with a person who could possibly be black as a curse and something that brought shame.
The relationship between Armand and Desire reveals the kind of misjudgments and irony that existed during the period of slavery with regards to the color of the skin. Desire is a beautiful lady who is innocent and good at heart. She is kind and sees the world from the vantage point of innocence. Armand falls in love with her because of her beauty and, subconsciously, because of her White skin color. There is no indication of his love for her in any other way apart from the surface-level affection. Armand comes from a wealthy family of privilege and he is used to getting whatever he wants. Therefore, he woos Desiree by offering her material gifts. This However, the birth of Desiree’s baby marks the turning point of this love because he thinks less of her, thinking that she belonged to the ‘lesser’ race. It is ironical that Armand feels ashamed having married Desire, given her apparent Black race affiliation while he goes ahead to have an affair with La Blanche, whose heritage is established as being Black. Desire, despite her innocent view of the world, becomes a victim of sexism and racial assumption from her husband, which, due to her immense love for him, makes her shameful of having been classified into a ‘lesser’ race.
