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Analysis of the story of an hour
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According to Harris Poll only 1 in 3 Americans are very happy. Kate Chopin’s “The Story of an Hour” main character Mrs.Mallard and Michele Serros’s “Senior Picture Day” main character the narrator both have similar, but yet very different characters. Mrs.Mallard and the narrator are similar characters because they are both not happy with a certain aspect of their life. Yet are very different because Mrs.Mallard is unhappy about her life with her husband and the narrator is unhappy with her nose. Mrs.Mallard and the narrator also handle their unhappiness in very different ways. In Kate Chopin’s short story “The Story of an Hour” the main character is Mrs.Mallard who finds out about her husband’s untimely death. Chopin says “She wept at once,
After Mrs.Mallard’s husband’s death she realizes that she was not happy all this time because she stopped feeling grief and then felt freedom. In the same way, the narrator is already unhappy with her nose, but when her friend Terri makes a comment about her Indian nose it really hits home for her. Another similarity between these stories is both of their main character’s lives changed significantly. Mrs.Mallard losing her husband would change her life significantly because now she would have to live her life without him. Although she didn’t mind the thought of this because she realized that she would actually enjoy a life that belong to only her. The narrator lost someone who she thought was her best friend, Terri after she made a negative comment about the narrator’s nose who was already very insecure about
Although both Mrs.Mallard and the narrator were both unhappy, they were unhappy about two completely different things. Mrs.Mallard realizes that the life she had been living with her husband all this time was actually a really unhappy life once he passed away. The narrator is unhappy with the size of her nose claiming that it looks like an Indian nose. Another difference is Mrs.Mallard and the narrator both handle their unhappiness in very different ways. Mrs.Mallard barely has to the handle the situation with her husband because he is deceased, but she decides to start making herself happy by living a life that belongs to her. The narrator takes more initiative and handles the situation by squeezing her nose every morning in hopes to make her nose thinner. Serros says “Just last week I lined up all my class pictures and could definitely see the progress” (30). It is clear that, the narrator believes squeezing her nose is working to give her that perfect nose and her picture will be the best in the
Mrs. Mallard in 'The story of an hour', is a woman that has had to live her life composed and in control as the wife of her husband, Brently Mallard. Chopin details Mrs. Mallard's reaction to the news of her husband's death with convolted emotions that were considered appropraite and yet horrifying to the reader. At the end of the story, her death came as no surprise.
works of literature have tremendous amounts of similarity especially in the characters. Each character is usually unique and symbolizes the quality of a person in the real world. But in both stories, each character was alike, they represented honor, loyalty, chivalry, strength and wisdom. Each character is faced with a difficult decision as well as a journey in which they have to determine how to save their own lives. Both these pieces of literatures are exquisite and extremely interesting in their own ways.
The couples share a certain amount of love for each other but the disconnection was stronger. The protagonist’s disconnection is evident because her husband treats her like a little girl instead of a wife when he takes her “ …in her arms and called [her] a blessed little goose” (p121). The Mallard’s disconnection is also evident because her husband’s “face that had never looked save with love upon her, fixed and gray and dead” (p 15). This is not the emotion a wife wants to feel from her husband.
In the short story, “The Story of an Hour,” author Kate Chopin presents the character of Mrs. Louis Mallard. She is an unhappy woman trapped in her discontented marriage. Unable to assert herself or extricate herself from the relationship, she endures it. The news of the presumed death of her husband comes as a great relief to her, and for a brief moment she experiences the joys of a liberated life from the repressed relationship with her husband. The relief, however, is short lived. The shock of seeing him alive is too much for her bear and she dies. The meaning of life and death take on opposite meaning for Mrs. Mallard in her marriage because she lacked the courage to stand up for herself.
Kate Chopin’s story, "The Story of an Hour," may seem to be about Mrs. Mallard’s unexpected and ironic reactions to the news of her husband’s untimely death due to a railroad disaster. At least that’s what I thought when I read the story. It seemed to me that she led a normal life with a normal marriage. She had a stable home life with a kind, loving husband who cared for her. She seemed to love him, sometimes. She had some kind of "heart trouble" (Chopin 25) that didn’t really affect her physically, until the very end. I thought Mrs. Mallard would have been saddened and filled with grief for an adequate period of time after her spouse died, but her grief passed quickly, and she embraced a new life that she seemed to be content with. Therefore I believe there is good evidence that Mrs. Mallard was an ungrateful woman who did not appreciate her husband or his love for her. That evidence is found in her selfish behavior after the death of her husband, Brently Mallard.
The symbols and imagery used by Kate Chopin's in “The Story of an Hour” give the reader a sense of Mrs. Mallard’s new life appearing before her through her view of an “open window” (para. 4). Louise Mallard experiences what most individuals long for throughout their lives; freedom and happiness. By spending an hour in a “comfortable, roomy armchair” (para.4) in front of an open window, she undergoes a transformation that makes her understand the importance of her freedom. The author's use of Spring time imagery also creates a sense of renewal that captures the author's idea that Mrs. Mallard was set free after the news of her husband's death.
In Kate Chopin’s “The Story of an Hour” allows one to explore many ironic instances throughout the story, the main one in which a woman unpredictably feels free after her husband’s assumed death. Chopin uses Mrs. Mallard’s bizarre story to illustrate the struggles of reaching personal freedom and trying to be true to yourself to reach self-assertion while being a part of something else, like a marriage. In “The Story of an Hour” the main character, Mrs. Mallard, celebrates the death of her husband, yet Chopin uses several ironic situations and certain symbols to criticize the behavior of Mrs. Mallard during the time of her “loving” husband’s assumed death.
In conclusion, it was no surprise when Mrs. Mallard is shocked when her husband is standing at their front door. He had missed his train; therefore, sparing his life. When she is making her symbolic descent down the stairs, she spots her husband and realizes that she can never reverse her progress. The “joy” that kills her is the joy that she refuses to surrender, but for one hour she gets glimpse of what true joy is (Jamil 219).
Mallard gets close to the window and sees the new outside life which a tall tree represents. The narrator shows, “The delicious breath of rain was in the air.” For Mrs. Mallard it can represent a lot of things, but this day she feels like it is a sign of her new beginning. Now she will have the opportunity to be herself and not to be what everyone wants her to be. “She [is] young, with a fair, calm face, whose lines bespoke repression and even a certain strength.” She has an entire life in front of her eyes, which now she is able to do what she wants with anyone on her back stopping her. The narrator shows the reader how Mrs. Mallard is not going to live for someone else but herself and even though “…she [loves] him—sometimes. Often she [doesn’t]” No matter how much Brently loves her, sometimes Mrs. Mallard does not feel like loving
...more, the audience never figured for Mrs. Mallard, a wife, to be content about her husband’s death. What would make someone satisfied about one’s death, especially a wife? Nevertheless, Mrs. Mallard was going to be unhappy because she may have loved her husband, but she was not in love with him.
Most women in Mrs Mallard’s situation were expected to be upset at the news of her husbands death, and they would worry more about her heart trouble, since the news could worsen her condition. However, her reaction is very different. At first she gets emotional and cries in front of her sister and her husbands friend, Richard. A little after, Mrs. Mallard finally sees an opportunity of freedom from her husbands death. She is crying in her bedroom, but then she starts to think of the freedom that she now has in her hands. “When she abandoned herse...
Both women in these stories help symbolize hope and a strive for something. Holding on to something that you feel very unpleasant about can make the relationship seem ill. In “The Story of an Hour” is believed that Miss Mallard holds onto her relationship with Bentley Mallard because she does not want to be alone. She will be with a man that she is not happy with just for the sole reason of not being alone. This may sound gruesome when I state this, but Miss Mallard finally got sick of it and she wanted to worst for her husband. The hope that she could get out of this exhausting relationship is what made her feel relieved in the end, and that is what she had hoped for. Within “A Cup of Tea” Rosemary strives for feeling beautiful in any way possible. There are many symbols in the story that help me come to this conclusion. The story bluntly says in the first line that Rosemary is not pretty. With the wealth of Rosemary she tries to cover up her blemishes with the prizes and treasure that money can buy. The possessions and treasures that she buys helps cover up what she actually looks like because of the money she has. Rosemary is striving to cover up that she is not the best looking woman by the way she purchases items that are classy. Both of these stories reflect that you need to strive for something and set a goal, so that in the end you are happy with
Despite the authors writing the stories decades apart, there are striking similarities between the protagonists. Defying the societal standard of the time, they rebelled against their marriages and strove for any feeling
The first reader has a guided perspective of the text that one would expect from a person who has never studied the short story; however the reader makes some valid points which enhance what is thought to be a guided knowledge of the text. The author describes Mrs. Mallard as a woman who seems to be the "victim" of an overbearing but occasionally loving husband. Being told of her husband's death, "She did not hear the story as many women have heard the same, with a paralyzed inability to accept its significance." (This shows that she is not totally locked into marriage as most women in her time). Although "she had loved him--sometimes," she automatically does not want to accept, blindly, the situation of being controlled by her husband. The reader identified Mrs. Mallard as not being a "one-dimensional, clone-like woman having a predictable, adequate emotional response for every life condition." In fact the reader believed that Mrs. Mallard had the exact opposite response to the death her husband because finally, she recognizes the freedom she has desired for a long time and it overcomes her sorrow. "Free! Body and soul free! She kept whispering." We can see that the reader got this idea form this particular phrase in the story because it illuminates the idea of her sorrow tuning to happiness.
As Chopin mentions, “She breathed a quick prayer that life might be long. It was only yesterday she had thought with shudder that life might be long”(497). Just the thought of having a long life in your marriage makes you shudder shows that Mrs. Mallard was not happy in her marriage. Mrs. Mallard was happy about living a long life once she accepted the fact of freedom once her husband died. As Cathryn Hunter mentions, “The serious and wide-ranging negative effects that relationship distress can have on individuals”(55). The relationship distress played a toll on Mrs. Mallard mainly because although she was sad that her husband death, she could not help but feel free.