Themes and Literary Classification
Though Kate Chopin is usually considered to be a writer of American realism and naturalism, the story is difficult to classify, in part because it is extremely short. The fact that the story leaves the moral statement up to the reader would suggest that it is of naturalism, but the fairytale-like elements of the love story are inconsistent with either naturalism or realism. Furthermore the atmosphere of the story and the characterization of Armand create gothic undertones.
The themes in Désirée’s Baby include American slavery, miscegenation, and the difficulty of assigning race. It could also be argued that the story is a work of early feminism.
The story also seems to be a transposition of De Maupassant's "The Story of A Farm Girl."
Read more about this topic: Desiree's Baby
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“I suppose you think that persons who are as old as your father and myself are always thinking about very grave things, but I know that we are meditating the same old themes that we did when we were ten years old, only we go more gravely about it.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
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