[In the following essay, Foy asserts that “Désirée's Baby” is an exploration of the dark side of the protagonist's personality.]

In Kate Chopin's “Désirée's Baby,” Armand's ruthlessness is more psychologically complicated than it appears on first reading. His cruelty toward the slaves, and ultimately toward his wife and child, is not simply a product of nineteenth-century racism. The story transcends its social implications to explore the dark side of personality.

Armand is a man who must deal with a demanding social climate, uphold a position of noblesse oblige, and eventually come to terms with his own heritage. Early in the story, Chopin reveals that Armand was eight years old at the crucial turning point in his life when his mother died and he left Paris with his father. She states that Armand's mother had “loved her own land too well ever to leave it”¹ but intimates that there was a reason why she never served as mistress of L'Abri.

Armand was certainly old enough to remember his mother, but circumstances have caused him to suppress the past. Although Chopin offers these clues to Armand's dark side and to his psychological confusion, she leaves it to the reader to decide whether Armand's cruelty springs from social forces and prejudice or whether it is in reality a distant memory of his mother—a repressed, unconscious remembrance of his own past.

Contrasting his father's easygoing and indulgent manner toward the negroes with the strict rule of Armand, Chopin warns of a tragic outcome but does not enlighten us until the very end. With racial prejudice and psychological confusion as the sources of his cruelty, Armand has no choice but to turn from Désirée and the baby. Acting out of his passion for her and the child, Armand experiences an ironic misunderstanding of his duty that takes him to almost tragic proportions. His hatred is the opposite extreme of love. By casting out the passion, he has in a way ended the cruelty and finally must come face to face with himself, the true source of his hatred, anger, and emotional distress. Armand hates the very thing that he is.

Although Armand is ruled by time and place, Chopin clearly indicates that there is much more disturbing this man that eventually permits him to harm his wife and his own flesh. In the brief but poignant story, Chopin delivers a flawed character whose dark side struggles to be set free. The birth of his child and the love of his wife soften him temporarily and perhaps offer him a psychological reprieve, but his actions clearly indicate that he is a man filled with torment and confusion. When Armand reads his mother's letter, he is finally purged of his painful past but is now left to face an uncertain and tragic future.

Kate Chopin stated that the only true subject for great fiction is “human existence in its subtle, complex, true meaning, stripped of the veil with which ethical and conventional standards have draped it.”² Armand moves out of the conventions that have governed his life, and Chopin strips him of the veils that have hidden his real self. In “Désirée's Baby,” the complexity of human existence comes face to face with reality.

Notes

1. Kate Chopin, “Désirée's Baby,” The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction, ed. R. V. Cassill (New York: Norton, 1986) 221.

2. Cynthia Griffin Wolff, ed., Classic American Women Writers (New York: Harper, 1980) 2.