A Suffering Heart In Kate Chopin's The Story Of An Hour

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To pray without a hopeful heart is not praying at all. Breathing, yet not truly living today because of wishing for tomorrow, is not living at all. Alive, yet dead in spirit, Mrs. Mallard believes to have found her life after hearing that the life of her husband has presumably ended. From a bolted door to an open window, Mrs. Mallard perceives her husband’s apparent death as a release from the chains of marriage. In “The Story of an Hour,” Kate Chopin breathes a glimmer of life into Mrs. Mallard through death. Although Mrs. Mallard is physically alive and breathing, by analyzing both her triumphant cries for freedom and the vivid descriptions of her fantasies, we sense Mrs. Mallard has a beating heart yet a dead spirit. Mrs. Mallard wallows …show more content…

Mallard, with “a fair, calm face, paired with a “dull stare in her eyes” as her deliberations and eyes fix on “the tops of trees that were all aquiver with new spring life,” splatters an image of Mrs. Mallard’s soul (Chopin 13). Mrs. Mallard has a calm face, despite receiving the news that her husband has died unexpectedly. Instead of being stricken with pain and grief as most would, she is dully gazing out of the window, numb to pain and her inhumane ways. Her dull gaze is not absent-minded. “It was not a glance of reflection, but rather indicated a suspension of intelligent thought” (Chopin 13). Consciously fantasizing her future while beholding the “patches of blue sky” (Chopin 13). No longer seeing the blue hues as sky, but as freedom. Desperately trying to escape the burdens of her present life, Mrs. Mallard is mentally receiving a future that is radiant with patches of new life to come. Mrs. Mallard is desensitized to her husband’s death. Rather that dealing with the present moment and grieving the death of her life-partner, Chopin brushstrokes a discontent soul brimming with hope for what is to come. Chopin, crafting the image of Mrs. Mallard seeing through her open window “the clouds that had met and piled one above the other,” immediately paints a vivid parallel with Mrs. Mallard’s life (Chopin 13). Mrs. Mallard is fixated on the blue skies and freedom ahead and desires that are rooted in discontentment. She is not …show more content…

Mallard is alive and breathing, yet very much dead. Mrs. Mallard carrying “herself unwittingly like a goddess of Victory” after hearing of what should have been the biggest upset of her life is sickening (Chopin 13). To have a “feverish triumph in her eyes” when looking forward to a future without her husband, confirms that she feels as if she has won through the loss of her husband (Chopin 14). Her heart did not beat with love and respect for her husband, as it should have. Rather her “pulse beat fast, and the coursing blood warmed and relaxed every inch of her body” at the chance to live without him (Chopin 14). She does not know that being “free, free, free” without him is not living at all (Chopin 14). Laughing, submitting to, and loving her husband deeply, that is living. The moment Mrs. Mallard chose to see marriage as a binding contract rather than a gift from God is the moment Mrs. Mallard should have been handed a death certificate. Seeing a death as freedom, thinking “there would be no one to live for during those coming years; she would live for herself,” gives a peek into her calloused heart (Chopin 14). A human living a selfish life, always wishing for something better, loses the life they are so bent on finding. Living is more than merely breathing. Living is seeking God to make the most of each day He gives you and to make the most out of the marriage He gave you. Mrs. Mallard looking at the coming years without her husband, and relishing in the fact

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