Q: Should I have seen that ending coming?Ī: There are some suggestions that point to it. “The Storm,” “The Story of an Hour,” “Fedora,” and “A Respectable Woman,” among other short stories, also have brilliant last sentences. It stunned me! Is this typical of Kate Chopin?Ī: Chopin handles closings as well as any writer. Q: I was totally unprepared for the ending. In 1936, critic Arthur Hobson Quinn called it “one of the greatest short stories in the language,” and many readers over the decades have shared his opinion. It’s been reprinted countless times since 1929 and was Chopin’s best-known work before The Awakening was revived in the 1960s and 1970s. Chopin presents these three reasons-unconsciousness, negativeness, and lack of solidarity-to help explain why Désirée does reveal her society’s lack of knowledge but fails to change its ideological values, much less its actual power hierarchies.” Ellen Peel Questions and answers about “Désirée’s Baby” “Désirée is disruptive, not because she produces flaws in the signifying system but because she reveals flaws that were already there. When I looked up, I observed that many people in front of the sign were darker than many of those behind it.”
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recalls first reading “Désirée’s Baby” as a high-school student in 1956 on a New Orleans streetcar, at a time when your seat was designated by your skin color, when a sign directed white people to the front of the streetcar and African Americans to the back: “I felt embarrassment at what I had read-feeling that everyone about me knew that I had experienced something forbidden.
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In her fiction, she confronts the “bleak fact” that life is uncertain, unsettled, full of “tenuous stabilities.” Cynthia Griffin Wolff “Human situations can never be as clear as ‘black’ and ‘white.’” That’s one of Kate Chopin’s major themes. He has been “passing,” that is, presenting himself as white. He has been aware all along of what the letter at the end of the story says. “The reader must come to see the one indisputable fact-Désirée’s total powerlessness-the result of the life-and-death power of the husband in her society.” Anna Shannon ElfenbeinĮvidence in the story shows that Armand Aubigny knows about his racial heritage. “The antidote to the poison of racial abstraction that destroys Désirée, the baby, and Armand is love, a deeply personal relationship which denies the dehumanizing and impersonal categorization of people into racial groups.” Robert D.
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