Kate Chopin was born in 1850 and died in 1899 she was an American writer known for her depictions of culture in New Orleans, Louisiana, and of woman’s struggles she was brought up in an all woman’s household with her mother, grandmother and great grandmother. Her farther died in a train crash when she was very young. Her experience of her upbringing comes across in the story, as she seems very close in to her adopted mother. She had five sons and one daughter with her husband Oscar Chopin who she married in 1870. Oscar worked in the cotton business similar to the cotton plantation of Valmondee where Negroes worked as slaves. They lived in New Orleans where the story was set.
After Oscar’s death she took over the running of the cotton plantation and carried on the notarise romance with a neighbour. She later started her literacy career and published over 100 short stories, poems, and plays. She wrote two major stories, the last of which was widely commended and published when she died in 1894.
In the beginning of the story my first impression of Desiree is that she was an unloved deserted chid who was believed “to have been left purposely by a party of Texans”. This is used to great effect by the writer as straight away she creates a lot of sympathy for Desiree. We are told she was abandoned; in another line in the paragraph it says, “ the little one woke in his arms and began to cry for “dada”, that was as much as she could do or say” this creates sympathy cause it illustrates just how helpless she is. As well as creating sympathy Kate chopping has added the element of mystery, as no one really knows where Desiree has come from, it gives the impression as if something terrible is going to happen. As Desiree grows into a woman she becomes beautiful and gentle, affectionate and sincere. Desiree ends up marrying Armand who loves here deeply. They soon have a baby; Armand now cares about nothing apart from her and the baby.
Later in the story we start to see a darker side to Armand this starts us thinking if whether he really was the wonderful love Desiree thought he would be. “He only spoke to her with his eyes averted, from which the love-light had seemed to have gone out” is one of the ways Kate Chopin described his attitude towards Desiree. To show the reader just how much Armand attitude had changed Kate Chopin contradicts her first view of Armand, of being a perfect understanding husband by calling his new attitude devil like “and the very spirit of Satan seemed suddenly to take over him in his dealing with the slaves”. The calm kind Armand from when the baby was first born had gone forever.
L’abri was described as a cold, dark place that just felt sad. Kate Chopin describes the house as “being like a cowl”. To show the impact the place has Madame Valmondee “shudders at the first sight of it”. The house was said to have looked like a cowl. It was generally not a very nice place to live, and was certainly not the place to bring a child. There was an unspoken factor of the Desiree was doomed from the start.
When eventually, Desiree realizes that the baby is of mixed race, she is obviously upset “Ah! It was a cry that she could not help, which she was not conscious of having uttered. Blood turned to ice in her veins, and a clammy moisture gathered upon her face” showing how distressed and confused she is. She doesn’t feel that she has done anything wrong but knows that something definitely is. Because there is such an uncertainty it makes us feel deeply sorry for her. When she next sees Armand he doesn’t want to touch her, as if she’s dirty, because he thinks that maybe she has lied to him or even that she has gone astray with a black man. He shuts her out and refuses to have any contact with her at all.
When Kate Chopin give us the description of Desiree leaving L’abri it tells us of her taking a different rote across a deserted field where she walks undeterred into the bayou, through the willow and does not come out again she is leaving the readers shocked and amazed, this is because it is unknown until the very last minute that she is committing suicide. At this point we feel the most sympathy for her, as she is so depressed and upset because of the attitude from Armand that she would commit suicide.
In the ending when we find out that it is Armand fault that the baby is of mixed race, is truly saddening because all of desires pain and suffering leading to her eventual suicide was all for nothing because absolutely none of it was her fault.
My views of Desiree are that she has had a hard, tragic life thought. Straight from birth she was abandoned and just before she died she was abandoned again. She also committed suicide for nothing leaving her life to come to such an unnecessary end. My thought on Armand are that he is definitely two faced he said that he didn’t care one bit about desires obscure origins but when push came to shove he didn’t support her in the slightest, it was the one time when she desperately needed him he threw her out. The message that I think that Kate chopping wanted to get across in the story was that things are not always what they first seem, and even if things get bad that there is no need to end your life because nothing cannot be fixed.
