NAMING AS POWER: A CRITICAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS OFRACIAL IDEOLOGY, GENDER, AND LINGUISTIC AUTHORITY INKATE 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 counterdiscursive 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.