Kate Chopin depicts miscegenation in her story, but this is concept is introduced differently in the film based upon it. The main character Chopin wrote about, Armand, she describes as being half- black and half-white, and this lineage is plausible considering, as Chopin establishes, his parents met in France, and in France at the time, there was not the problem of segregation. When he came to America to become a slave owner, he marries a woman who does not know her original roots, and so this seems perfect for him. This enables him to blame her for the problems he has because of his color in America. Instead of his white wife being the dominate member of the relationship, as prejudice would assume, Armand, instead, is the aggressive, dominating spouse. When she has his baby, the baby is born black. He accuses her of sleeping with a slave. The movie version shows that the dysfunction came from the white couples who were having marital issues in the film because Warren Maxwell seemed to have more feeling for the black women that he slept with than for his white partner.
             The status of white women in both the film and the story compared to that of black women is that white women could not be allowed to do anything, and if they did something that their husbands did not approve of, the would be punished for it. For example, the white women were like puppets, and their husbands the ones pulling the strings. As for black women in the book and in the film, they did not have any choice either, and they had to do what their masters asked for because if they did not, they would be punished worse then these men punished their white wives. In the story of "Desiree's Baby," the white woman maintained more control over her husband than in the the movie. She did exactly what her husband told her to do in the movie. For example, when she had her baby and her baby was black, in the movie, her husband told her that to go to the swamp and drown ...