Desiree's Baby C

Desiree's Baby C

Audio cassette
4.05

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Description

From Library Journal With contemporary authors such as Robert Antoni, Margaret Cezair-Thompson, and Patricia Powell exploring the rich vein of Caribbean dialects, these stories, which sparkle with Cajun and Creole patois, seem as if they could have been written yesterday. Actually, most of them are a century old. Chopin, revered as an early feminist for her novel The Awakening (1899), is not a major writer, and these bittersweet sketches about the joys and disillusionments of love in Louisiana are fairly slight. They do, however, support the contention that her voice is an interesting one, and the title story, the most effective in the collection, is a searing-and ironic-indictment of racial prejudice. The program is especially entertaining due to narrator Jacqueline Kinlow, who shifts from Southern elegance to a gritty French Creole without missing a beat, avoiding the vocal exaggeration that might have ensnared a lesser talent. Sound Room should be commended for adding these neglected works to its international library of short fiction. Recommended.Peter Josyph, New YorkCopyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc. Product description A collection of eight of Chopin's best stories of Louisiana, including Desiree's Baby, which is concerned with slavery and racism, and the intriguing story, The Godmother, of a murder and an older woman's attempt to protect the son of the man she had loved. Unabridged

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“Desiree’s Baby” was first published in 1893 in Vogue Magazine in a section called Character Studies. It tells the story of an abandoned baby growing up on a slave plantation and later marrying into aristocracy only to be condemned by her husband due to their first-born showing signs of black ancestry. Though short, the story raises questions that plagued the American South in the 19th century, such as the pervasive institutionalized racism in the society and the fulfilment of women’s identities outside of marriage and motherhood. And the poetic justice is so well refined and clever, it rendered me speechless.

4

A racist husband belittles / shames his wife for having a baby that appears to be ethnically mixed. Outraged, he tells her to leave, and so she tailspins mentally. Her dread is all-consuming that he won't believe her when she says she's white. Plot twist and the end that makes the ending superb / spectacular.

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