Divorce In Kate Chopin's The Story Of An Hour

In current times, men and women typically get married because they love each other. They make a promise to honor, respect, and spend the rest of their lives together because that is what their heart desires. This, however, was not always the case in the past. Arranged marriages were common, and women were married off to men that they did not love for their families social standing or monetary gain. They were raised to be genteel ladies and were expected to conform to the rules of society and their husbands rule. Women were often unhappy and trapped in a marriage from which there was no escape because divorce was not acceptable. This is referred to as marital oppression and an example of this is shown in Kate Chopin’s, “The Story of an Hour.” It is a tale about a young woman who, after she receives news of her husband’s death, is exhilarated at the thought of freedom only to have it ripped away less than an hour later when he walks through the front door. Mrs. Mallard’s marriage is portrayed as nothing more than a binding force

Mallards’ heart stopped working due to the overwhelming joy that she might have felt at the realization that her husband had not perished, it is not the case. Mrs. Mallard, in fact, collapsed and died to the shock and disappointment from learning that she was not free from her marriage, and that the exhilaration and hope that she’d been feeling was not a possibility for her future. In “Fatal Self-Assertion in Kate Chopin’s ‘The Story of an Hour’”, the author Lawrence I. Berkove surmises that it “has long been recognized that the story’s last line is ironic, but it is even more ironic than previously been surmised…She did die ‘of joy that