Ideally, the marriage institution depicts love between two people and their desire to spend the rest of their lives with each other. Kate Chopin’s works portray a different view as the ideologies of marriage in the fiction stories “Désirée’s Baby” and “The Story of an Hour” are more detrimental that advantageous for the women. Chopin’s “The Story of an Hour” relays the story of a woman who is ecstatic after learning that her husband is dead, only for her to die when the man returns unharmed. Concurrently, “Désirée’s Baby” constitutes racism in which the biracial genes of the protagonist’s baby become a question of the woman’s paternity yet readers learn the husband’s mother was a slave. The narrators in both texts utilize a simple writing style, but the emotions in each are palpable. Naturally, the women love their husbands to such an extent that their happiness solely depend on the men’s mood swings and their whims. Hence, through Désirée Aubigny in “Désirée’s Baby” and Louise Mallard in “The Story of an Hour”, Kate Chopin illustrates restrictions on female autonomy through the women's dependence on their marriages.
First, in “Désirée’s Baby”, Désirée’s upbringing and background make her completely dependent on Armand, her husband. After the birth of her son, Désirée’s face is apparently “suffused with a glow that was happiness itself” when Madame Valmonde asks about Armand’s reaction to the child (Chopin 233). Now, Armand was not always a happy man, and his mistreatment of the slaves is evidence to his apparently angry nature. However, after marrying Désirée and the birth of their child, his character is “softened” from his previously “imperious and exacting nature” (Chopin 233). Concurrently, when it turns out that the baby is biracial, everything changes because based on the narration slavery and racial bigotry governed social norms. At that point, the issue of Désirée’s unknown background reflects the possibility that she has mixed blood and Armand pounces on that idea without considering his ancestral history. According to Wolff, Chopin shows the character’s dependence through “social caste and even more damning implications” that ethnicity have on the “value of one's identity” (127). In other words, Armand is the epitome of Désirée’s world, and since she does not know her biological parents, their offspring becomes the only known foundation of the woman’s existence. Consequently, when her mysterious origins question the legitimacy of her marriage and that of her child’s racial profile, Désirée loses her identity. Her dependency on her husband becomes eerily apparent when she disappears and leaves readers speculating on what happens to her and the baby.
Similarly, “The Story of an Hour” shows how much Louise depends on her marriage, albeit in a different manner. Louise Mallard’s realization that her happiness depended on her husband manifests itself when she learns of his supposed death and discovers she lacked any form of autonomy in the marriage. When news of Brentley’s death arrives, Louise begins to analyze her real feelings towards the possibility of widowhood and the results are the continued whispers of “Free! Body and soul free!” (Chopin 237). On that note, Louise’s love for her husband was inconsistent and that warrants her views of “self-assertion” that triumphing over the “mystery” of love (237). Xuemei Wan sheds more lights on Louise Mallard’s apparent joy despite the readers’ expectations of grief following the news of a tragic accident that claimed the life of her husband. The author reckons that Kate Chopin’s view of life denounces “idealism, socio-economic determinism, and even religion” in favor of “existentialism” and Louise’s character is proof (Wan 168). Wan goes on to explain that Chopin follows personal laws when her lead character portrays “conscious choice” and creates her “an autonomous self” contrary to cultural norms (168). Wan’s findings are well founded in light of Louise’s death after she sees her husband walk through the door. The cause of death is apparently heart disease or as the community puts it, “joy that kills” (Chopin 237). The irony of the situation, she did not die because her heart could not handle the joy of seeing her husband alive; rather, she died because she lost the momentary happiness of her supposed widowhood. In that sense, Louise’s dependence on her marriage kills her by robbing her of her happiness.
Evidently, in Chopin’s views, the lack of self-autonomy for the female gender is more detrimental than it is advantageous. It is significant to note that the plots are different, and the author utilizes various societal truths to manipulate her characters and the major themes. In “The Story of an Hour”, the woman relishes the idea of her husband’s death and through that, readers become aware of male dominance and its effects on the females. The storyline of “Désirée’s Baby” is slightly different because of the apparent love between Désirée and her husband; however, white supremacy serves as a revealing agent as Armand’s real feelings emerge. Either way, the stories end tragically because the women do not know how to survive without the men amid the constricting cultural norms. Louise Mallard did not consider a divorce, and Désirée Aubigny had the option of going back to her adoptive parents but did not consider that possibility. It is no wonder Kate Chopin’s work carries an air of feminism since the women obviously needed help.
Work Cited
Chopin, Kate. "Désirée’s Baby." The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction. 7th. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2006. 231-235. Print.
Chopin, Kate. "The Story of an Hour." The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction. Ed. Richard Bausch and R. V. Cassill. 7th . New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2006. 236-237. Print.
Wan, Xuemei. "Kate Chopin’s View on Death and Freedom in The Story of an Hour." English Language Teaching 2.4 (2009): 167-170. Print.
Wolff, Cynthia Griffin. "Kate Chopin and the Fiction of Limits: "Désirée's Baby"." The Southern Literary Journal 10.2 (1978): 123-133. Print.
