Kate Chopin was a literary visionary. Her insights and sensitivity to the confinement as well as emancipation of women were a precursor to rights for women in the twentieth century. Throughout her works she masterfully explores the plight of the Southern woman at a time when women were not allowed to be vocal about their position in society. Her work has endured for over one hundred years and yet its poignancy and beauty is as relevant to modern readers as it was to her contemporaries. Although Kate Chopin is most widely known for the novella, The Awakening, three of her short stories ("Desiree's Baby," "Regret," and "The Story of an Hour") also reveal awakenings of women through attention to setting, views about marriage and lack of love. These elements, along with her ability to effectively reveal the souls of her characters, have made her work timeless, a mark of true literary classics.
             Each short story manifests individual ideas about the lives of women in the antebellum south. In "Desiree's Baby" Desiree, a young, innocent orphan, marries Armand, a stern man with a "dark, handsome face" (Seyersted 242). Conflict arises when their newborn child exhibits the same yellow skin color as that of the slaves. Armand accuses Desiree of a false background, and she succumbs to a life of mere coexistence with him. However, when cast away by Armand, Desiree "disappear(s) among the reeds and willows that grew thick along the banks of the deep, sluggish bayou...and (does) not come back again" (Seyersted 244). Armand then experiences "the natural consequence of life" when he reads a letter and discovers that he himself bears black roots (Wolff 5999).
             Void of the institution of marriage altogether, "Regret" spins the tale of a fifty-year-old woman who has built a life of independence and solitary duty. Mamzelle Aurelie looks forward at all time...