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Dr. Ali
English XXXX
Date
‘Desiree’s Baby’ Reflection Paper
‘Desiree’s Baby’ by Kate Chopin takes place in Louisiana in 1894, where there was slavery but also a big divide in class. The main theme here would have to be classism. Since Desiree is towards the bottom of the class chain and Armand is towards the top owning a plantation and having money, she thinks it’s fine if he treats her and other people anyway he wants, as shown throughout the story. The real problem is not racism in the story, it is classism.
The story of ‘Desiree’s Baby’ is about a woman named Desiree, her husband Armand, and their baby. When their baby’s heritage is questioned, Armand blames Desiree for the baby’s mixed heritage since no one knows Desiree’s background because she was abandoned as a baby. Desiree and her baby are turned away and are never seen again after. Armand later finds out that the reason the baby was of mixed heritage was because his mother was black, the same race he considers below him. Since it was his baby, having a person he considered lower than him as a son would have been a big disgrace. But even if the baby wasn’t of mixed heritage and was instead disabled, physical or mentally, Armand would still have considered the baby to be a disgrace. Armand considered himself higher than others, so if the baby had any disabilities, he would have blamed it on Desiree because he, in his eyes, was better than her in class and family name. Desiree, being a nobody and having no family name, instantly makes any problems the baby might have her fault. Through the story context, you can see that Armand thinks he is better than everyone else by the way he treats his slaves and how he treats his wife and baby after he questions the baby of mixed heritage. He turns on her and sends her and the baby away, saying that she has brought shame on him and his family name. After Armand turns Desiree away, she takes her baby and goes off into the bayou, not able to live with the shame of being turned away by someone of a higher class. She is also afraid that if she goes back to live with her adopted mother, her and her baby would never be accepted back into society. Class is a big part of the story of ‘Desiree’s baby’ as it is told throughout the story.
What I learned from the story is that class during the late eighteen hundreds was important to the people at the time. Everyone had their class and they were rated on how important they were based off it. The people in the story allow themselves to be treated, or act off, by how high or low they consider themselves to be in class. People treating each other on how high or low they considered themselves happened when this story takes place and it still happens today. Some people think just because they are richer or more popular that their lives matter more than other people. Just like what happened in this story since Armand considers himself to be richer and higher in class than Desiree and the slaves that he can treat them whatever way he wants. He also believes that nothing is ever his fault because of his class standing, and that it is always someone else’s fault. Even after he finds out that his baby was mixed heritage because of his side of the family, just being the kind of person that he is, he probably threw the letter into the fire, along with Desiree’s belongings, and never told anyone that it was his fault that the baby was not what they considered high of class. I believe that we should not judge someone off of how rich or popular they are, but on how good of a person they are on the inside. If Desiree had done that when she was deciding on whether or not she wanted to marry Armand, she would have saved herself a lot of grief and would have not ended up killing herself in the end.
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