NAMING AS POWER: A CRITICAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS OF RACIAL IDEOLOGY, GENDER, AND LINGUISTIC AUTHORITY IN KATE CHOPIN’S “DÉSIRÉE’S BABY”

Abstract

This paper applies Norman Fairclough’s (1989, 1995, 2003) three-dimensional Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) framework to Kate Chopin’s short story “Désirée’s Baby” (1893) to examine how racial authority is constructed, naturalized, and performed through language. While previous studies have explored the story’s themes of race, gender, and irony, no study has systematically analysed the linguistic micro-architecture through which Armand Aubigny’s speech acts constitute racial power. Drawing additionally on Teun van Dijk’s (1993, 2008) ideological square, Kimberlé Crenshaw’s (1991) concept of intersectionality, J. L. Austin’s (1962) and John Searle’s (1969) speech act theory and Judith Butler’s (1997) performativity framework, this study argues that Armand’s discourse pattern characterized by declarative assertions, imperative syntax, agentless constructions, and the studied absence of questions functions as a technology of racial expulsion. By contrast, Désirée’s counter-discourse is structured entirely through interrogatives, body-evidence appeals, and appeals to relational authority, all of which the text systematically denies a hearing. The study introduces three novel analytical arguments not previously advanced in studies on Chopin: that the fire scene enacts a Foucauldian destruction of counter-discursive archives; that Armand’s naming of Désirée constitutes an ontological performative that brings her into social existence only to subsequently annihilate it; and that the bayou functions as a racialized spatial discourse that materializes the ideological boundary between legible and illegible subjects. The closing letter, which reverses racial attribution, is read as a Faircloughian moment of discursive disruption that retroactively exposes the arbitrary construction of the racial-patriarchal discourse system the story had spent its length enacting. This analysis contributes to the emerging field of literary CDA by demonstrating that grammatical and syntactic analysis of canonical texts produces ideological findings unavailable through thematic or character-based reading alone. The analysis reveals that Chopin constructs silence not as absence but as active ideological labour that simultaneously produces and polices racial meaning.