Desiree's Baby Kate Chopin Character Analysis

Professor Lavender’s “Notes on the Cult of Domesticity and True Womanhood” states that the ideal woman should have four qualities embodied in her: Piety, Purity, Domesticity, and Submissiveness. This was of course related to the times around the industrial age rather than the modern. Kate Chopin’s primary character in “Desiree’s Baby”, Desiree, meets these standards for the ideal woman of that time.

Women were supposed to bring their husbands and children to the light of God. Desiree’s husband Armand was humiliated and ashamed when he realized his son was mixed with a race that was “cursed with the brand of slavery”. His way of getting “back at God for dealing cruelly with him” was through hurting his wife, showing that

he associated his link to God with her. While the men in the 19th century were expected to be religious, it was no where near on the level of piety that women were expected to be.
Purity in terms of sex was also an “ideal standard” for women of this age. Though there wasn’t much mention in the story about Desiree’s virginity, there are little hints to pick up on. Desiree had no children before Armand, and that Desiree was the “Idol of Valmonde”, which she couldn’t well be in that time if she was impure. If readers think about purity in terms of bloodline rather than sex, it shows a bigger relevance to “Desiree’s Baby” in that no one knew where Desiree came from, so when her child was dark the assumption was that she was also “impure” in blood.
Although it may not have seemed like domesticity was one of Desiree’s qualities, readers can see how she was always fighting for a brighter atmosphere. Armand was known as a cruel man, but “marriage, and later the birth of his son had softened Armand Aubigny’s imperious and exacting nature greatly”. The author also writes of Desiree boasting of how happy she was that Armand hadn’t hurt a single slave since the birth of his child. In addition to this, upon marriage Desiree had been moved into the Aubigny’s house, which is described as “a sad looking place, which had not known the gentle presence of a woman”. Readers can see upon deeper inspection of the story that Desiree was doing the best with the hand she had been dealt, and could have shown her domesticity more if her life had gone as she had planned.
The “ideal standard” that shines through Desiree the strongest is her submissiveness. This is shown near the beginning, when Chopin writes “When he frowned, she trembled. When he smiled, she asked no greater blessing of God.” Further, when Armand had realized his son was a “quadroon”, Desiree noticed “an awful change in her husband’s mood, which she dared not ask him explain.” Even when Desiree’s mother wrote Desiree to return home and bring her child, Desiree first gave the note to her husband, asking his permission to stay or go.
If we’re looking at the standards of women through “The Cult of Domesticity”, modern stories of women wouldn’t be as “ideal.” Kate Chopin made sure that Desiree from her short story “Desiree’s Baby” had shown the characteristics of all four of those rules: piety, purity, domesticity, and submissiveness.