Masters of Suspense: Chopin & Gilman

One of the greatest strengths of any writer is the ability to not only capture an audience’s attention, but also to keep it.  To write a story that endures for so many years, such as Kate Chopin’s “Desiree’s Baby” and Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper,” one must be a master of suspense, and know how to utilize the proper literary tools to achieve that suspense.  In both stories through the use of foreshadowing, Chopin and Gilman capture their audience’s attention and evoke emotions of excitement, surprise and anxiety.  By their masterful use of this specific literary tool, the two authors create enduring stories that captivate and excite.

In Kate Chopin’s “Desiree’s Baby,” Chopin tells the story of a young woman having her first child with her husband during the 1800’s, a time when slavery was still existing in the South.  The child, as it slowly gets older, begins to look less and less white and more like the color of their slaves.  The young woman was initially found as a baby, so they do not know her exact origin, and her husband immediately assumes that it is she who isn’t white.  The story is told from the third person omniscient point of view, and is effective in it’s use of foreshadowing by leaking a little information at a time.  Right from the beginning of the story, the similes used to describe Armand Abuginy falling in love with Desiree and the overall gloomy atmosphere of his estate convey a sense of impending doom, foreshadowing the tragic events to come.  In the fourth paragraph, Armand’s intense feelings towards falling in love with Desiree are described in destructive terms: “he fell in love, as if struck by a pistol shot, like all the Aubignys; his passion swept along like an avalanche, or like a prairie fire, or like anything that drives headlong over all obstacles” (240).  Armand’s house is pictured as a “sad looking place which made Madame Valmondé shudder when she approached it, for its roof came down steep and black like a cowl, and the far-reaching branches of the solemn oaks which grew close to it shadowed it like a pall” (241). 

In the first dialogue of the story, Madame Valmonde is surprised when she sees the baby for the first time in four weeks.  Though nothing is explicitly stated, Madame Valmonde exclaims in “startled tones,”  “This is not the baby!” (241), then walking the baby over into the light of the window to examine its skin, asks how her husband Armand feels.  Desiree however, is anything but suspicious, and remains cheerful and glowing about her newborn child.  Her response to Madame Valmonde’s surprise is “I knew you would be astonished… at the way he has grown” (241), and the young mother is completely innocent in the assessment that everything about the child is normal.  

Chopin is never obvious about anything however, and the way she utilizes foreshadowing techniques is demonstrative of a writer fully in control of her craft.  As Teresa Gilbert aptly puts it, 

“Chopin’s foreshadowing techniques tend to disquiet her readers just as her hints arouse their curiosity, but she always takes care not to make her clues so obvious that her audience might lose interest by prematurely envisaging the answers to the questions posed throughout the story. For example, in the above-cited dialogue between Madame Valmondé and Désirée, the latter naïvely mentions two circumstances whose importance may be easily overlooked. Désirée tells her foster mother that Zandrine, the baby’s yellow nurse, has cut the infants nails. Since Kate Chopin’s contemporary audience was familiar with the then current assumption that fingernails would clearly indicate peoples black ancestry no matter how white they might look, most nineteenth-century readers would grasp the semiotic load of this detail.  When the race of the child becomes an issue, Désirée’s casual remark can be fully understood. Madame Valmondé looks as searchingly at Zandrine because she thinks that, having cut the boys fingernails, the nurse must have detected his racial origin” (Gilbert 3).

There is a lot of detail that is lost because of the context of the modern era, but upon minimal analysis it is clear that Chopin is a master of suspense.  While there are hints everywhere, you don’t fully know the reality of the situation (with an added twist) until the final page.  It is a story where not everything comes at once, and it is just as much about what Chopin doesn’t say as much as what she does.  By withholding certain information and not presenting things in a chronological manner, Chopin pulls the reader along until she is ready to give all of the sordid details.  It is not until later in the story that readers are privy even to the issue at all, which is the child’s race, until Desiree’s husband puts it bluntly “the child is not white; it means that you are not white” (243), immediately blaming his wife’s unknown past as the reason to their child being multiracial.  Of course, the audience is blindsided by the uncovering of letters between Armand’s mother and father that he in fact, was born from a black woman and therefore is the reason for their child being multiracial.  

Though different in terms of style, content and point of view, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” is similar to “Desiree’s Baby” in that it creates suspense through the literary method of foreshadowing.  The frequent and fervent descriptions of the yellow wallpaper represent the narrator’s deteriorating mental condition, and foreshadow her eventual breakdown.  On the second page, the first instance occurs, the narrator reflecting “it is dull enough to confuse the eye in following, pronounced enough to constantly irritate and provoke study, and when you follow the lame uncertain curves for a little distance they suddenly commit suicide- plunge off at outrageous angles, destroy themselves in unheard of contradictions.  The color is repellent, almost revolting; a smouldering unclean yellow, strangely faded by the slow-turning sunlight.  It is a dull yet lurid orange in some places, a sickly Sulphur tint in others” (2).  The choice to describe the curves of the design as “committing suicide” and “plunging off” are not merely decorative, and foreshadow the eventual mental breakdown that is to come.  

She goes on later to describe “on a pattern like this, by daylight, there is a lack of sequence, a defiance of law, that is a constant irritant to a normal mind.  The color is hideous enough, and unreliable enough, and infuriating enough, but the pattern is torturing.  You think you have mastered it, but just as you get well underway in following, it turns a back somersault and there you are.  It slaps you in the face, knocks you down, and tramples upon you.  It is like a bad dream” (6).  The dreamlike quality of her descriptions and the haunting nature of the wallpaper point to something ominous, the descriptions themselves being an intended literary technique to enhance the foreshadowing nature of the story.  Gilman builds upon her descriptions and uses different sensory passages to entice the reader, beginning first visually, then with smell: “it creeps all over the house.  I find it hovering in the dining-room, skulking in the parlor, hiding in the hall, lying in wait for me on the stairs.  It gets into my hair.  Even when I go to ride, If I turn my head suddenly and surprise it- there is that smell!  Such a peculiar odor, too!  I have spent hours in trying to analyze it, to find what it smelled like.  It is not bad- at first, and very gentle, but quite the subtlest, most enduring odor I ever met” (7).  At the conclusion of the story, Gilman has moved onto the sense of touch, with the narrator creeping around the room and “through” the wallpaper, the bridge between reality and dreams conflicted.

Gilman’s story differs from Chopin’s mainly because she writes from a different point of view (first person narrative), and rather than excluding details, she delves deep into them.  In “The Yellow Wallpaper,” the eerie, expressionistic descriptions are what really provide foreshadowing in the story.  As the story progresses, the descriptions begin to get more and more macabre, “the outside pattern is a florid arabesque, reminding one of a fungus.  If you can imagine a toadstool in joints, an interminable string of toadstools, budding and sprouting in endless convolutions- why, that is something like it (6)”.  The story is concluded by the feverish scratching of the wallpaper, “then I peeled off all the paper I could reach standing on the floor.  It sticks horribly and the pattern just enjoys it!  All those strangled heads and bulbous eyes and waddling fungus growths just shriek with derision!” (9), and the narrator creeping around the room, stepping over her fainted husband and peeling off the yellow wallpaper.  Where Chopin lets the absence of information provide the ominous foreshadowing in her story, Gilman lets her descriptions build until they break.  

Although different, both Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Kate Chopin use the literary method of foreshadowing to make their stories captivating, build tension, shape plot and provide a startling conclusion.  By using this specific literary tool they captured the reader’s attention and provided us with stories that have stood the test of time, both authors equally masterful in their execution of foreshadowing.  By sticking to a specific literary technique, the stories are enforced stronger than if a wider variety had been employed.  Of course, these stories do employ other techniques, but the one that is the most sharply honed is foreshadowing.  By enforcing this specific technique, the stories have become classics in the literary world.  Had they not been so adept at building suspense, opinion suggests that the stories would have held as much interest with the reader and lasted for such a long time.    

Works Cited

Chopin, Kate. The Awakening and Other Short Stories. New York, NY: Bantam Classic, 2003. Print.

Gilman, Charlotte. "The Yellow Wallpaper." The New England Magazine Jan. 1892: Print. 

Gibert, Tessa. "Textual, Contextual and Critical Surprises in Desiree’s Baby." Universitat Tubingen, 2004. Web. 2 Aug. 2013. <http://www.uni-tuebingen.de/connotations/gibert1413.htm#>.