Social Role Play and the Search For Identity in Chopin’s...

Social Role Play and the Search For Identity in Chopin’s Desiree’s Baby When I think about women’s role in our society, especially nowadays, the first word that comes to my mind is ‘exhausted’. What I mean is that this subject is exhausted. There are so many literary and sociological interpretations of the physical and psychological female image that whatever I say or prove would be just another attempt to understand the ‘incomprehensible’. It’s not because I am a woman, or may be exactly because I am. But here the important expression is ‘I am’ and the extension can be endless. And what a human life is but an everlasting search for the right word that would complete the sentence. As if we could complete it, our personality†¦show more content†¦The story also questions the potential fulfillment of womans identity, as Chopin, herself, termed it ‘mother-woman’. In her portrayal of Dà ©sirà ©e, a woman whose self-worth and self-exploration is intrinsically linked to that of her husband, Chopin opened the door to her lifelong query into a womans struggle for a place where she could fully belong. Chopin began her literary career in the 1880s in St. Louis, although many of her stories take place in Louisiana, where she had lived for over a decade (Taylor, qtd. by Sterling). In this society women were almost exclusively defined by their spousal and maternal roles. According to Sterling , Kate Chopin created female characters that test the boundaries of acceptable behavior for women and explore the psychological and societal ramifications of their actions and desires. They are forced to make existential choices based on the few avenues available for them to create and maintain autonomous identities outside of wife and mother in the late nineteenth-century American South. Chopin’s protagonists attempt to physically or spiritually transcend these limitations but often meet with crushing results. Chopin does not guarantee her characters an admirable place within their society, but she portrays them with dignity and sympathy. She clearly espouses their need to find and assert identities both as individuals and as women. In Desiree’s Baby we can also