Gender Roles In Desiree's Baby By Kate Chopin

"Desiree's Baby" is Kate Chopin's emotional short story and most well-reputed piece of work. The story takes place in southern Louisiana and her writing reflects her Creole-French heritage. She was a southern feminist who often related her stories back to the issues of discrimination and oppression. Throughout "Desiree's Baby", Chopin uses symbolism imbibe the seemingly simple imagery of the darkness surrounding L’Abri, the field in which Desiree and the baby departed, and the fire which consumed the evidence of their existence with deep, powerful connotations to convey her themes of the injustice of racial prejudice and inequality gender roles. Early in the story, Chopin describes the home of Armand with a wonderfully symbolic quote, "when she reached L'Abri she shuddered at the first sight of it…It was a sad looking place...Big solemn

This very fire represents the rage Armand felt and the hatred he possessed at the thought of the ‘inferior race’ invading his family’s home as well as the historical occurrence of white men re-writing history for their own benefit and tailoring it to their own needs. We may see another hint at this revision of history by considering Armand’s position here. ‘Armand Aubigny sat in the wide hallway that commanded a view of the spectacle; and it was he who dealt out to a half a dozen negroes the material which kept this fire ablaze.’ (83) He was the overseer, the commander, the dictator giving the orders to burn all the evidence in an attempt to re-write history. Here, Chopin is clearly highlighting the white patriarchy’s historically deceptive performance of historical negationism in which books may be burned and history re-written in order to obscure the truth and shift the blame from the ‘superior class’. Such is the white colonialist tendency to free itself from blame of the most horrid of