Symbolism In Desiree's Baby

People all over the world get judged based on their race or skin color every hour of every day. A person’s color on the outside does not make them who they are. In Kate Chopin’s “Desiree’s Baby,” color defines who a person is. It decides whether someone is a slave or a slave master who can treat the slaves however they want. The people in the United States of America have come a long way since slavery, but they still have a long way to go. Even though slavery was abolished many years ago, there are people that instantly assume something of someone just because of what they might look like on the outside. When people judge others because of their skin color, it can lead to many horrible situations. This happened in “Desiree’s Baby” when Armand

Armand, who is a slave owner, lived in Paris until he was eight years old. After living in Paris, they moved to Louisiana after his mother died in Paris. One day, he saw a woman and immediately fell in love with her. This woman was Desiree, she does not know who or where her real family is. Armand is madly in love and does not care where she came from. He does not care what her real name is, “when he could give her one of the oldest and the proudest in Louisiana.” When they had a baby boy, Armand was so proud and overjoyed that someone could carry on his name and his legacy. Even Desiree could see this in Armand; he “is the proudest father in the parish, I believe, chiefly because it is a boy, to bear his name; though he says not—that he would have loved a girl as well. But I know it isn’t true.” As the baby grows, he starts to show signs of being mulatto, which is a child who has one white and one black parent; this makes Armand furious. He wonders how Desiree could betray him like this. Desiree foreshadows that she was not the one who passed the colored genes on to the child; she said, “It is a lie; it is not true, I am white! Look at my hair, it is brown; and my eyes are gray, Armand, you know they are gray. And my skin is fair . . . look at my hand; whiter than yours, Armand.” If people had found out that Armand had a colored child, he would never have been able to own the slaves, because he was no better than them, even Armand could be a slave. He no longer loves Desiree; he told her to leave, along with the child, because she has disgraced his family name. Armand later finds a letter from his mother to his father telling him that she is grateful that Armand will never know she was the same race as the slaves. This destroys Armand: he now knows that he just assumed that Desiree was the one with the genes that did this, since they do not know where she came from, and “unfortunately, making some inferences can have