Oppression In Kate Chopin's The Story Of An Hour

The main theme in “The Story of an Hour” is a woman’s freedom from oppression. Mrs. Mallard does not react accordingly to the news of her husband’s death; in the third paragraph it states, “she wept at once, with sudden, wild abandonment.” After her initial wave of shock and sadness has passed, however, she becomes elated with the thought of finally being free of her husband. Originally, she is described as being “pressed down by a physical exhaustion that haunted her body” and having lines that “bespoke repression”; in an attempt to be a perfect wife to a man whom she did not even love, Mrs. Mallard has been masking her true self. Once she realizes that she has finally gained the freedom that she has been longing for, Mrs. Mallard begins to

Sommers had to forgo the lifestyle she was accustomed to when she got married and had children. In paragraph four, the author states “the neighbors sometimes talked of certain ‘better days’ that little Mrs. Sommers had known before she had ever thought of being Mrs. Sommers”; before getting married, Mrs. Sommers had lived much more comfortably. Now that she is a mother and has a seemingly absent husband, her desperation to return to her former life and feel like her old self has greatly increased. The money gives her a “feeling of importance such as she had not enjoyed for years”, and the feeling of having wealth again gives her a sense of freedom that she has not experienced for a long time. When she buys the stockings, she sees them as “lost in the depths of her shabby old shopping-bag”; to her, the stockings symbolize a small object of wealth and her old life lost in the responsibilities and poverty of her new life. Mrs. Sommers does not attempt to justify her actions; as stated in the story, “she seemed for the time to be taking a rest from that laborious and fatiguing function…and freed her of responsibility.” At the end of the story, the author states that Mrs. Sommers had a “powerful longing that the cable car would never stop anywhere, but go on and on with her forever.” The cable car is transporting her back to her responsibilities, and she knows that once she returns home, her former lifestyle will fade once again and she will be left to deal with her present