Gilman and Chopin

When reading The Yellow Wallpaper non of my habits changed, because I read that story in high school so I already knew what it was going to be about. I can guarantee that if I didn’t already know the story that I would have had to slow down or maybe even read it twice. It is confusing when the main character says ‘[she] peeled off all the paper [she] could reach standing on the floor…” and then somehow she is not the women peeling wall paper she is now wondering “if they all came out of that wall paper as [she] did…” implying that she was the women in the wall paper the whole time (Gilman 515). In class we went back and read the text more clearly and picked out evidence that she was dead the whole time. For a first time reader these clues were hard to pick up, and I remember reading this for the first time and being astonished when my teacher made so much meaning out of it. It is because of this that when I set out to read Desiree’s Baby by Kate Chopin, I decided to go about it differently. I read it once really slow, and still by the time I got to the end I was shocked! I don’t think there was any evidence that Armand Aubingy’s “mother, who adores him, belongs to the race that is cursed with the brand of slavery” (Chopin 521). It threw me off when I read the last paragraph for the first time so I had to read it more than once before I realized what it was saying. All in all, I don’t think all short stories have hidden meaning, and if they do then it is definitely not easy to pick it out. I think some of them are just good stories written to surprise you. I also don’t think it makes a difference how you read a short story but rather how many times you read it. The first time I read Gilman’s story, I don’t care how slow I read it, it did not make any sense! It is the second and third time you go back and read these stories that you can pick up on the clues to the ending. For example, in Desiree’s Baby Madame Valmonde exclaims “This is not the baby!” when she sees him for the first time in awhile (Chopin 518). She even “walked with it over to the window that was lightest” to look at the child. Now I can see these hints that the child was mixed but I do not think there were any hints that it was Armand who had African American heritage.