Term Paper on "Character Analysis of Armand Aubigny in the Desiree's Baby by Cate Chopin"

Term Paper 3 pages (1196 words) Sources: 1

[EXCERPT] . . . .

Desiree's Baby By Kate Chopin

Readers know something important about Armand Aubigny's character by the third paragraph of Kate Chopin's short story Desiree's Baby. Eighteen years after Desiree had been found as a toddler, sleeping in the shadow of a stone pillar, she is found again, only this time by Aubigny, who fell in love with Desiree "...as if struck by a pistol shot." Her beauty awoke a "passion" in Aubigny, Chopin writes in that third paragraph, a passion that "swept along like an avalanche, or like a prairie fire..." And so this is pretty obvious foreshadowing for the reader, because as the paragraphs unfold, Aubigny is shown to be as cold as the steel that makes up a pistol, with a racist fire inside him rivaling a hot bullet or a prairie fire. Indeed, he overwhelms Desiree with the suffocating wrath of an avalanche.

Chopin chooses her words very carefully, of course, as any author of a short story must; but the choice of "avalanche" is not by chance, because an avalanche of snow is about as white an image as there is, and Aubigny is all about being white and hating what is black. As the first sign of his dominating personality, Aubigny gave Desiree his name, "one of the oldest and proudest in Louisiana." Aubigny was a slave master, which was not all that unusual for the time in which this story takes place (the antebellum south); but by the fifth paragraph in the story, readers learn that Aubigny was cruel to his slaves. His "negroes had forgotten how to be gay," the way they were when Aubigny's father had been in charge.

But wait, when Desiree has a baby boy, Aubigny is initially so pleased to have a son that he begins to treat his slaves with a bit more humanity; "...he hasn't punished one of them - not one of them - since baby is born." This is how the birth of a child is normally expected to affect a father. "Marriage, and later the birth of his son, had softened Armand Aubigny's imperious and exacting nature greatly," Chopin writes. This would appear to be a character change the reader may take as meaning that the cruelty of Aubigny mellowing. It may mean that the charms and maternal power of a woman can make even the harshest male personality Chopin has a knack for leading the reader into false sense of theme change. Still, the dark side of Aubigny is ever-present in this story. By showing the reader that when Aubigny smiled Desiree "asked no greater blessing of God," Chopin is creating a sense that not only are Aubigny's smiles rare, but also Desiree is under this man's spell.

Desiree "loved [Aubigny] desperately" but when his face made a frown "she trembled"; this can only be a situation in which a wife is terrified of what might happen following the frown of her dominating, horribly cruel husband.

When the baby was three months old, Aubigny was beginning to see signs that the child was not a white child. The "very spirit of Satan seemed suddenly to take hold of him in his dealings with the slaves," the narrator explains; this line is a bit ironic in describing Aubigny because he hasn't exactly been an endearing character up until this point, the third page of the story. Now, Aubigny isn't looking at her anymore; he is avoiding the baby; the slaves are acting kind of restless; and as another sign of her fear of her husband, "...she dared not ask him to explain."

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