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She looked from her child to the boy who stood beside him, and back again, over and over. “Ah!” It was a cry that she could not help, which she was not conscious of having uttered. The blood turned like ice in her veins, and a clammy moisture gathered upon her face.
This is the moment of dramatic reversal, when everything Désirée had regarded as solid and trustworthy begins to crumble. She thought she knew who she was—the beloved young wife of a proud, handsome man. She thought her son was the heir her husband needed and wanted. Her life and future had seemed secure and her identity within her home had seemed sure. Now the truth that occurs to her so unmoors her that she cannot put it into words, so she begs Armand to explain it. Denial and panic follow as Désirée’s sense of self and of place in her family and community unravel. Her physical reaction—sensations of damp, cold, ice, and moisture—not only suggest how devastating her loss of identity is for her, but may foreshadow her death in the bayou.
“My mother, they tell me I am not white. Armand has told me I am not white. For God’s sake tell them it is not true. You must know it is not true. I shall die. I must die.”
The answer that came was as brief:
“My own Désirée: Come home to Valmondé; back to your mother who loves you. Come with your child.”
The exchange of letters between daughter and mother illustrates the human need to establish and trust one’s identity. The sources from which Désirée has drawn her identity—her society (“they”) and her husband, whose name she bears—have withdrawn their approval of her. She turns for comfort and confirmation to her mother, but her mother gives her something different than what she asks for. Love, Madame Valmondé, suggests, is the true and trusted source of identity. Madame Valmondé loves and will always love her daughter, though she cannot know her daughter’s background, and she extends the same love to the son whom society rejects. Unfortunately, Désirée is not in a frame of mind to understand love as the ground of her identity. Instead, like most women in her culture, she understands her value to her husband to be based on her worthiness to provide him with heirs and to manage the plantation by his side as its mistress. Once she believes that she is of mixed heritage, she devalues herself as Armand devalues her. “I must die,” she writes to her mother, if her identity is not what she thought it was and what Armand assumed it was when he married her.
