Women Deserve Independence and Choice Too “The Story of an Hour” was author Kate Chopin’s way of showing the world how women felt with no independence or ability to make decisions on their own that dealt with issues such as marital status by showing Mrs. Louise Mallard’s emotions after learning about the loss of her husband. The late 1800’s didn't provide much freedom in any aspect of their life when it came to owning a house, living on their own, or earning money of their own. Chopin took the idea of how women felt and created the story of a young Mrs. Mallard and her journey in what Mr. Mallard’s death was going to bring her. As soon as Louise Mallard heard of the loss of her husband, she felt a great deal of shock in knowing he was gone. Mrs. Mallard sat “quite motionless” in her chair, the …show more content…
Louise felt such a sadness by the loss because she knew she was loosing a very kind, gentle, and loving man who never did any harm to her; she just felt a lack of her own personality and freedom while with him. Chopin’s biggest point in showing the tenderness of Mr. Mallard proved men weren't bad people, but under the circumstances women were in they couldn't be happy within the marriages they had been placed in. To emphasize that idea, Chopin explains Mrs. Mallard finding a type of relief in knowing she will be free and would have “years to come that belong to her” and nobody else could tell her how to live her life (Chopin 2). Louise knew for the first time in her life she could be an independent women who no longer has to listen to what a man has to say with where she has to live or what she has to do with the money earned. The idea of a woman being able to make choices like these was unheard of when a woman was in a marriage, and that is what Chopin tried to shed a light on for the world to see. Chopin wanted it to be known that women have the ability to make their own choices for the betterment of themselves and don't need
She whispers, “Free! Body and soul free!” (Chopin). Though her situation is sad, she does not have a remorseful response. She locks herself in her room and reflects upon her new reality. She instead comes to find a form of liberation for herself from her husband’s death. As she looks out the window, Chopin writes, “…she was drinking in a very elixir of life through that open window,” (Chopin). Chopin is stating Louie’s newly found greatness for her life. She is now able to live for herself and not behind her husband as society has told her. She can be different and gain more from her life now because she does not have to follow or live for a man, as many woman did in society. She feels exonerated from her bondage, which is marriage, and she now feels she can have a life for herself. In the end, her husband is actually found to be alive as he walks into the room. Chopin writes, “When the doctors came they said she had died of heart disease--of the joy that kills,” (Chopin). From seeing her husband, Louise dies. It was joy that had killed her. Readers can easily believe that she died because of the shock that her husband was still alive, but in reality she died from the loss of her new found greatness. The joy that killed her was her own
Women should be powerful, beautiful and intelligence. Nevertheless, women in the eighteenth century were portrayed as servants did not have any say in anything just like the story of an hour by Kate Chopin, where even in a good marriage you could not do the things you wanted to do. What if their husbands died what would come of them? How would they feel? And the irony of gaining freedom but losing everything?
Kate Chopin's The Story of an Hour. Kate Chopin was a Victorian writer whose writing manifests her life experiences. She was not happy with the principles of the time, because women had fewer rights, and they were not considered equal to men. Afraid of segregation from society, people lived in a hypocritical world full of lies; moreover, Kate Chopin was not afraid of segregation, and used her writing as a weapon against oppression of the soul.
Louise Mallard husband just past away from a tragic accident. Her sister, Josephine, and friend Richard was there to mention the sad news. They had to break this story to her as soft as possible. "...Mrs. Mallard was afflicted with a heart trouble, great care was taken to break to her as gently as possible the news of her husband's death." (Chopin 01) She wept the death of her husband and fell to her surprise the greatness of her freedom.
In Kate Chopin's "Story of an Hour" the author portrays patriarchal oppression in the institution of marriage by telling the story of one fateful hour in the life of a married woman. Analyzing the work through feminist criticism, one can see the implications of masculine discourse.
Story of an Hour – A Big Story in a Small Space. Kate Chopin's "Story of an Hour" tells the story of a woman trapped in a repressive marriage, who desperately wants to escape. She is given that chance, quite by accident, and the story tells of the hour in which this freedom is given to her. The story is very short (only two pages), so is interesting to look at as a minimalist piece of literature, and the surprise ending offers an opportunity to look at Chopin's use of foreshadowing.
Setting exists in every form of fiction, representing elements of time, place, and social context throughout the work. These elements can create particular moods, character qualities, or features of theme. Throughout Kate Chopin's short story "The Story of an Hour," differing amounts and types of the setting are revealed as the plot develops. This story deals with a young woman's emotional state as she discovers her own independence in her husband's death, then her "tragic" discovery that he is actually alive. The constituents of setting reveal certain characteristics about the main character, Louise Mallard, and are functionally important to the story structure. The entire action takes place in the springtime of a year in the 1890s, in the timeframe of about an hour, in a house belonging to the Mallards. All of these aspects of setting become extremely relevant and significant as the meaning of the story unfolds.
In "The Story of an Hour" Kate Chopin tells the story of a woman, Mrs. Mallard whose husband is thought to be dead. Throughout the story Chopin describes the emotions Mrs. Mallard felt about the news of her husband's death. However, the strong emotions she felt were not despair or sadness, they were something else. In a way she was relieved more than she was upset, and almost rejoiced in the thought of her husband no longer living. In using different literary elements throughout the story, Chopin conveys this to us on more than one occasion.
The Symbolism of Louise’s death at the end of this short story shows how tragically someone’s life can be when deprived of self-expression. Some critics like Madonne Miner states that “upon seeing her husband. Louse suffers a heart attack and dies”(Cunningham) others like Emily Toth “argues that Louise must die at the end of “The Story of an Hour” because the idea that she could live on as a widow glad of her husband’s death would have been ‘much too radical, far too threatening’ for editors and readers in the 1890s” (Cunningham). Chopin is such a gifted writer that she ends the story with a ironic sentence, “when the doctors came they said she had died of heart disease – of joy that kills” (1203) that can be interpreted as she died from overwhelming joy upon seeing her husband alive or that she died of disappointment upon realizing that her fantasized freedom would no longer be possible. With one sentence Chopin is able to fulfill both the expectation of the patriarch society, that Louise deserved dying for rejoicing in her husband death and also satisfy the feminist audience with the possibility that she rather dies than continue to live a repressed
While Chopin's employment of irony presents a socially unaccepted concept in a more acceptable format, it is the author's use of perspective that increases the impact of her message. Chopin's point might be lost, perhaps entirely, if the reader were not informed from Louise's viewpoint. While the other characters are oblivious to her actual joy in death, although it is described as such "When the doctors came they said she had died of heart disease - of joy that kills," their definition of this joy equates to her love for her husband. In contrast, because Chopin writes from the perspective of Louise, we understand that the intermittent love she feels for her husband, love itself dismissed as the "unsolved mystery," pales in comparison to the joy she feels upon the discovery that she can now live with the "possession of self-assertion which she suddenly recognized as the strongest impulse of her being."
Freedom is one of the most powerful words in the world because of the feeling it gives people. This idea is evident in Kate Chopin’s, “The Story of an Hour.” In the story, readers witness the effect freedom can have when the main character, Louise, finds out her husband had passed away. The story begins when Louise’s sister informs her that her husband had been in a terrible accident and he was dead. Once she gets over the immediate shock, she finds herself overwhelmed with joy because she was free to live her life for herself and not her husband. At the end of the story, her husband walks through the front door, and Louise has a heart attack and dies. In the story "The Story of an Hour," Kate Chopin reveals the power of freedom through the use of diction, point of view, and setting.
The descriptions in the story foreshadow the tragedy that ends the story. The author believed unexpected things happen often. In the case of this story, Louise Mallard believed her husband to be dead, having been told this by her sister, Josephine. However, when it is revealed that her husband had been alive the whole time, she is unhappy to see him and suffers a fatal heart attack. While she did have heart trouble, Richards and Josephine thought that the news of her husband’s death, not her seeing him again would be detrimental to her health, possibly even fatal. Chopin succeeded in getting this message across.
Chopin uses settings to convey particular moods, character qualities and features of theme. Firstly, the author uses time setting to reveal Louise' inner desire and her restrictions. The entire action happens in the "spring" (Chopin 69) of a year in the 1890's. Spring means hope. But woman are restricted by the society in 1890's. The two time settings create a conflict between Louise's expectation and reality. Secondly, the author uses a lot of place setting. The story happens in the house that belongs to Louise Mallard. Most of the time, the author focus on the upstairs of the house- Louise's bed room and the room is closed. We can see Louise is trapped in her house. Her bed room is the only place that belongs to her. So when she heard about the"death" of her husband, she goes to her upstairs bed room, and close the door. "free, free, free" (69), that her true feeling." "She would have no one follow her." (69) that is her desire.
Kate Chopin, author of “The Story of an Hour” written in 1894 was the first author who emphasized strongly on femininity in her work. In the short story, Chopin writes about freedom and confinement Chopin is an atypical author who confronts feminist matter years before it was assumed. The time period that she wrote in women were advertised as a man’s property. The main idea in the short story is to illustrate that marriage confines women. In “The Story of an Hour” the author creates an intricate argument about freedom and confinement Mrs. Louise Mallard longing for freedom, but has been confined for so long freedom seems terrible. Mrs. Mallard wife of Brently Mallard instantly feels free when her husband dies. The reason she feels this way
The Story of an Hour is based on a wife that received some bad news about her husband that were killed in a railroad disaster and found out later that the same day he was still alive. The Story of an Hour is written by Kate Chopin, she is an American author that was born in St. Louis, Missouri in 1850 later died in 1904. She was the only child out of five live past the age of twenty five.