Symbolic Elements in Desiree’s Baby by Chopin and Sweat by Hurston

I choose symbolism for the stories Desiree’s Baby and Sweat. For Desirees’ Baby , I choose the stone pillar, Armand’s bonfire, the yellow nurse, and L’ Abri. The stone pillar symbolizes Desiree’s unknown past and future; Armand’s bonfire symbolizes Armand’s act of erasing everything of Desiree and their baby; the yellow nurse symbolizes the color of the mixed baby; and finally L’Abri, symbolizes the secrecy of the plantation and of Armand’s past. The symbols I choose for Sweat are white clothes, the snake, the whip and slavery.
Desiree’s Baby starts out with Desiree and the baby not being seen by Madame Valmonde. They were gone for four weeks. They come back and Desiree goes to sleep with the baby in her arms. Madame takes a look at the baby and says, “This is not the baby!” (903). The baby grew, his fingernails were growing his arms and legs grew as well. (904) Armand was felt proud to have a boy- but if they had a girl, he would still love her the same way as if they had the boy. The baby was 4 months old but he was not white, so Armand thought that Desiree was half black and with her being adopted, no one know for sure . So he throws the baby and Desiree out of the house. “He thought Almighty God had dealt cruelly and unjustly with him; and felt, somehow, that he was paying Him back in kind when he stabbed thus into his wife's soul. Moreover he no longer loved her, because of the unconscious injury she had brought upon his home and his name.” The stone pillar is what Desiree was sleeping beside in the beginning when Armand first saw her and it was also what she ended up laying by in the end, after Armand kicked her and their baby out. The stone pillar is a symbol of Desiree’s unknown past and soon-to-be future of...

... middle of paper ...

...eating on her with a lady named Bertha, who delia said is not coming into the house, then he said that “she better stop getting under his skin otherwise shed be toted out.” (1090) Sykes hates skinny woman, but loves fat people. He has been with a big girl before in the past. He was going to send a lot of pecans to his wife, but was told to send them right back because “Delia works really hard over that wash tub that she thinks the whole place tastes like sweat and soap bubbles.” (1091) Then as the story comes to an end, Delia wraps around the chinaberry tree, where the sun gets brighter and brighter which represents Adam and Eve, only backwards. The snake is loose in the house and Sykes is in the dark and hears a rattle of the snake and tries to find a match for some light, but knocks a lid on the ground, and the snake bit Sykes in the neck and he dies.
.