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Kate chopins themes and literary elements
The theme of kate chopin's essay
Kate chopins themes and literary elements
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Disappointment in The Story of an Hour
"The Story of an Hour" is a short story in which Kate Chopin, the author, presents
an often unheard of view of marriage. Published in the late eighteen hundreds, the
oppressive nature of marriage in "The Story of an Hour" may well be a reflection of,
though not exclusive to, that era. Mrs. Louise Mallard, Chopin's main character,
experiences the exhilaration of freedom rather than the desolation of loneliness after she
learns of her husband's death. Later, when Mrs. Mallard learns that her husband, Brently,
still lives, she know that all hope of freedom is gone. The crushing disappointment kills
Mrs. Mallard.
Though Chopin relates Mrs. Mallard's story, she does not do so in first person.
Chopin reveals the story through a narrator's voice. The narrator is not simply an
observer, however. The narrator knows, for example, that Mrs. Mallard, for the most
part, did not love her husband (paragraph 15). It is obvious that the narrator knows
more than can be physically observed. Chopin, however, never tells the reader what Mrs.
Mallard is feeling. Instead, the reader must look into Mrs. Mallard's actions and words in
order to understand what Mrs. Mallard feels.
Mrs. Mallard is held back in her marriage. The lines of her face "bespoke repression"
(paragraph 8). When Mrs. Mallard learns of her husband's death, she knows that there
will "be no powerful will bending her" (paragraph 14). There will be no husband who
believes he has the "right to impose a private will upon a fellow creature" (paragraph 14).
Mrs. Mallard acknowledges that her husband loved her....
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life. When Brently walks in the door, though, Mrs. Mallard knows that she will have to
spend the rest of her life as no more than his wife, just as she had been. She knows that
she will never be free. This is too much for Mrs. Mallard to handle. Life had been grim
before, with her looking forward to the years ahead "with a shudder" (paragraph 19).
Now that Mrs. Mallard has tasted what life might have been like without her husband, the
idea of resuming her former life is unbearably grim. When Mrs. Mallard sees that her
husband still lives, she dies, killed by the disappointment of losing everything she so
recently thought she had gained.
Work Cited
Chopin, Kate. "The Story of an Hour." The Heath Anthology of American Literature. Ed. Paul Lauter, et al. 2nd ed. Vol. 2. Lexington: Heath, 1994. 644-46.
In the short story “A Story of An Hour” by Kate Chopin, the whole range
Ralph shows that he has a better understanding of the boys than Jack. He knows that the boys need some sort of order on the island in order for them to survive. He starts a simple form of government and sets a few rules for them. Even though they don’t last very long, the fact that he tried to help the group is what makes him a better leader. Ralph’s wisdom and ability to look toward the future also has an advantage over Jack. He has a sense to keep his focus on getting off the island. When the fire goes out, Ralph gets upset because the chance to be rescued was gone as well. Ralph enforces his role of leadership as he gives the boys a sense of stability of an authority figure. He keeps the boys in pretty good order at the meeting by making a rule that they can only speak if they have the conch. Ralph knows that the littleuns are afraid and they need shelter to feel more secure. They work together for a while, but as the time goes on the smaller boys want to go play. They slowly lose all their help until Simon and Ralph are the only ones left to work on them. Ralph knows that this is a necessity and keeps bringing it up at the meetings. Jack, on the other hand, is doing nothing but causing chaos.
In the novel Jane Eyre, it narrates the story of a young, orphaned girl. The story begins shortly after Jane walk around Gateshead Hall and evolves within the different situations she face growing up. During Jane’s life the people she encounter has impact her growth and the character she has become.
In the story, The Story of an Hour, Mrs. Mallard and all her actions and surroundings are used as symbolism .At the beginning of the story; Mrs. Mallard had heart conditions, so what they did to explain the tragic death of her husband to her. Was that they kept her as comfortable as they could and released the news to her little by little, and also gave her hints in order for her not to know by the harsh way, notified by the newspaper office in which the husband of her sister worked at currently.
Chopin, Kate. “The Story of an Hour.” Backpack Literature: An Introduction to Fiction, Poetry, Drama, and Writing. Eds. X. J. Kennedy and Dana Gioia. 3rd ed. New York: Pearson, 2010. 261-263. Print.
Ralph shows what the boys need by the way he handles the then. Jack considers the boys lower to him, meanwhile, Ralph treats...
Jane’s Eyre faces many problems in her short life: her father and mother died when she was young, they left her to a family who views and treats Jane as a burden, and she is a girl desiring individualism in a patriarchic society that eulogizes conformity. But in Mrs. Reed’s last action involving Jane, Mrs. Reed, unintentionally gives Jane the gift of an education—which has given Jane the confidence in her ability to perorate and adapt to many situations. Thus, Jane is now prepared to achieve whatever she wants to achieve—whether it conforms to Victorian conventions or not.
She would not have grieved over someone she did not love. Even in the heat of her passion, she thinks about her lost love. She knew that she would weep again when she saw the kind, tender hands folded in death; the face that had never looked safe with love upon her, fixed and gray and dead. Her love may not have been the greatest love of all time, but it was still love. Marriage was not kind to Mrs. Mallard, her life was dull and not worth living, her face showed the years of repression.
her house. Mrs. Mallard was suddenly disappointed in her heart and she though in her
Chopin, Kate. "The Story of an Hour." The Compact Bedford Introduction to Literature. 4th ed. Ed. Michael Meyer. Boston: St. Martins, 1997. 12-15.
Frank Norris comments that realism is the “smaller details of every-day life, things that are likely to happen between lunch and supper, small passions, restricted emotions.” (1741). “A Story of an Hour” tells the tale of an unhappy married woman, which is not an unrealistic or extreme occurrence. Chopin conveys in her short story the feeling of marriage as an undesired bondage to some married women in the nineteenth century. Mrs. Mallard is an ill woman who is “afflicted with heart trouble” and had to be told very carefully by her sister and husband’s friend that her husband had died (1609).
She realizes that this is the benefit of her husband’s death. She has no one to live for in the coming years but herself. Moments after this revelation, her thought to be deceased husband walks through the front door. He had not died after all. The shock of his appearance kills Mrs. Mallard.
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...
The conflict continues in the next passage, “She did not hear the story as many women have heard the same, with a paralyzed inability to accept its significance. She wept at once, with sudden, wild abandonment, in her sister's arms. When the storm of grief had spent itself she went away...
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.