Madame Valmonde was the loving adoptive mother of Désirée, a child that was found abandoned one night, in the shadows of a big stone pillar, in the Valmonde’s plantation state in South Texas. The whole story takes place before the abolition of slavery in the United States. Madame Valmonde is a middle-aged married, rich, white woman who lives alone with her husband due to the fact that she cannot bear children of her own. Her role in the story represents tolerance, understanding of society at that specific time and unconditional love for a child that was not her own, probably due to the fact that she was sterile.

Madame Valmonde was born in a time where roots and skin color played two main roles in the lives of everybody. Upper class white people had vast plantations of cotton where dozens or hundreds of slaves worked the field and they were seen as property and not human beings. It was a society with deep racial prejudices and high moral standards that did not consider colored people or people without acceptable backgrounds (born within marriage between two white persons) as part of the …show more content…
She notices his skin color and features are those of a mixed race baby and of course attributes it to the fact that her daughter’s background must have included a black mother or father. She knows that because of the way society carries itself at that time, Mr. Armand will reject the baby and probably even Désirée since she is obviously of mixed race. She also knows that a single mother of a mixed baby will probably end up being a slave herself. Background plays an important role in people’s lives at that time. Even if the skin color is the “right” one, the “wrong” background will probably doom the person attached to it. Although a person may “seem” white, if she comes from a black heritage, she will also become a slave that is her