Desiree's Baby

At the beginning of “Desiree’s Baby” by Kate Chopin, we see that the point of view is third person. We can determine this by asking Perrine’s question”Who tells the story?”(Arp 253). Starting with “As the day was pleasant, Madame Valmonte drove over to L’Abri to see Desiree and the baby”(Chopin), you can see that this story is a third person point of view, and that the story is being told by a narrator, rather than one of the characters listed. This same idea of a narrator can be clearly seen throughout the paper by keywords such as “...he could give her one of the oldest and proudest...”(Chopin) rather than I or we; which would indicate first person. As we delve further into the different types of third person point of view, we ask Perrine’s second question “How much is this person allowed to know?”(Arp 253). In the second paragraph, the narrator is allowed to see an old memory that belongs to Madame Valmonte. This is displayed when Chopin writes, “It made her laugh to think of Desiree with a baby”(Chopin). Madame Valmonte’s thought was known and portrayed by the narrator.

On the first page of “Desiree’s Baby”, Madame Valmonte is thinking into the past and remembers when Desiree was “of toddling age” then proceeds to talk about “a party of Texans, whose canvas-covered wagon, late in the day, had crossed had crossed the ferry that coton Mais kept, just below the plantation”(Chopin). A party of Texans appear unrelated to Madame Valmonte’s flashback. Thought processes like this, are called stream of consciousness. “Stream of consciousness presents the apparently random thoughts going through a character’s head within a certain period of time”(Arp 256). Effects like this create an insight into how the character thinks, and can create an element of interest and understanding of the time period in the