To some people a baby can be the best thing that ever happened to them, but then there are others who have decisions to make. They will go through an important stage in any relationship, the make it or break it stage. The two stories that I will be analyzing will be “Desiree’s Baby” by Kate Chopin and “Hills like White Elephants” by Earnest Hemingway. In both stories the characters found out how babies can be a deciding factor in a relationship, and that’s what I will be focusing on. In “Desiree’s Baby” the morale of the story is “we often get into trouble when we assume” (Mayer, Gary H.).
The husband even though he claimed to have loved his wife rejected her in a time of need, the result of it he ends up losing his wife and son. When the husband found out that everything he knew about his wife was a lie, he forgot about everything he said and just abandoned his family, in the text it said, “He could give her one of the oldest and proudest names in Louisiana” (Paragraph 4, line 4).
Armand let judgment deter him from what’s really important which is even if he and Desiree did not last he should still be there for his child. Even though “Desiree’s Baby” dealt with race I look at it as a deciding moment in a relationship, especially if the couple is married to know that you are going to stay together. The baby wasn’t the reason why the couple didn’t make it but the baby was the start of why they didn’t work. In “Hills like White Elephants” it shows the struggle one couple faced with deciding whether or not they wanted to tackle parenthood. The couple, “the American” and “the girl” both are unsure of their fate. The American just wants to walk away and the girl just wants to make him happy, “American male protagonist dominates the meeker, weaker-sexed jig of her femaleness” (Busch, Frederick; 234).
The Essay on Critical Analysis of Updike’s Story, “Wife Wooing”
The story's framework is simple: the protagonist/narrator has gone to a diner and gotten take-out hamburgers and fries for his wife and children; now they are at home, seated in front of the fire, eating. The narrator looks at his wife and realizes that even after seven years and three small children, he still loves his wife and finds her sexually exciting, despite the fact she has put on a ...
There are lots of people that the man still has the bigger role in the relationship, but in those relationships comes a lot of animosity to the companion later. In one part of the story the couple were going back and forth about whether or not they should go through with it and to end it off Jig decides that she will, “just do it”[ because she doesn’t care about herself]. Never in anybody’s time should you ever put someone else first before over yourself.
Doing that just leads down a road of destruction, and then the fact that this whole conversation is about abortion they probably should just get rid of it because she could just end up alone. Jig sounds as if she has no will or fight in her so she probably shouldn’t take care of a child. The baby in this story played a huge role for its future possible parents. The couple had to make a decision that if it were the wrong one could have broken them up, or made their relationship a happy one. Both “Desiree’s Baby” and “Hills like White Elephant” realized their mistakes and tried and wished they could have corrected them. Babies shouldn’t be left the burden on people lives but that’s where they are placed at times. But it just makes you think to times where it wasn’t a good time to have kids or the situations that these people were placed in that made their children a downfall and a burden instead of a gift or a miracle.
Bibliography
Busch, Frederick. “On Hills Like White Elephants.” Norton Anthology of Short Fiction. Ed. R. V. Cassill et al. 6th ed. New York: Norton, 2000. 761–62. Mayer, Gary H. “A Matter of Behavior a Semantic Analysis of Five Kate Chopin Stories.” January 2010. 94-100 Rankin, Paul. “Hemingway’s Hills like White Elephants.” Hinds Community College. Heldref Publication
