In the late 1800s and early 1900s, gender roles were very specific. It was a male dominant society and women were considered subordinate; therefore, it was difficult for women to break free from their existing roles. Also in this time frame, classism, or discrimination based on class, existed. Louise Mallard, the protagonist in Kate Chopin’s “The Story of an Hour,” and Emily Grierson, the protagonist in William Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily,” are both characters living in the post-Civil War era, struggling to free themselves from the constraints society has placed upon them. Louise Mallard and Emily Grierson both lack the freedom to control their own lives because of societal reasons. In “The Story of an Hour” and “A Rose for Emily,” Kate Chopin and William Faulkner show us that their characters, Louise Mallard and Emily Grierson, both have an experience of loss that makes them understand their oppression.
Kate Chopin creates Louise Mallard as a character in the nineteenth century who experiences conflicting emotions regarding to her marriage. In her writing, Chopin does not mention anything bad about Louise’s husband, Brently Mallard. In fact, the text suggests that Brently is a good husband to Louise and their relationship is not a problem. This is why when Mrs. Mallard receives the news that her husband is on the list of people who were killed in a train crash, she grieves. She isolates herself in her room, stares out an open window, and then involuntarily begins to feel emotions other than sadness and devastation. Feelings of joy and freedom consume her and she becomes internally conflicted. Chopin does much in the text to show that Louise is not a horrible and egotistic person for feeling happiness at the death of her husban...
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... Emily, to learn and understand the actuality of their oppression.
Works Cited
Chopin, Kate. “The Story of an Hour.” The Compact Bedford Introduction to Literature.
Ed. Michael Meyer. 9th Ed. Boston: Bedford, 2012. 15-16. Print.
Faulkner, William. “A Rose for Emily.” The Compact Bedford Introduction to Literature.
Ed. Michael Meyer. 9th Ed. Boston: Bedford, 2012. 84-90. Print.
Jamil, S. Selina. "Emotions in The Story of an Hour." The Explicator 67.3 (2009): 215+.
Literature Resource Center. Web. 12 Apr. 2014.
West, Ray B., Jr. "Atmosphere and Theme in Faulkner's 'A Rose for Emily'." William
Faulkner: Four Decades of Criticism. Ed. Linda Welshimer Wagner. Michigan State University Press, 1973. 192-198. Rpt. in Short Story Criticism. Ed. Laurie Lanzen Harris and Sheila Fitzgerald. Vol. 1. Detroit: Gale Research, 1988. Literature Resource Center. Web. 17 Apr. 2014.
6. West, Ray B., Jr. "Atmosphere and Theme in Faulkner's 'A Rose for Emily'." William Faulkner: Four Decades of Criticism. Ed. Linda Welshimer Wagner. Michigan State University Press, 1973. 192-198. Rpt. in Short Story Criticism. Ed. Laurie Lanzen Harris and Sheila Fitzgerald. Vol. 1. Detroit: Gale Research, 1988. Literature Resource Center. Web. 5 July 2011.
Chopin, Kate. ?The Story of an Hour.? Making Literature Matter: An Anthology for Readers and Writers. 2nd ed. Ed. John Schlib and John Clifford. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin?s, 2003. 862-63.
Faulkner, William. "A Rose for Emily." The Norton Introduction to Literature. By Carl E. Bain, Jerome Beaty, and J. Paul Hunter. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. 1991: 69-76.
Can you hear the voices? In a story there is always more that just one voice to be heard. Can you hear them? It is only necessary to look closely and read the text, then you can hear them. In Kate Chopin’s story, “Story of an Hour,” there are four distinct voices that can be heard. You are able to hear the narrator, author, character, and yourself as you read.
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.
Chopin, Kate. "The Story of an Hour." Heritage of American Literature. Ed. James E. Miller. Vol. 2. Austin: Harcourt Brace Jovanich, 1991. 487. Print.
Chopin, Kate. “The Story of an Hour.” Literature: Reading Fiction, Poetry, and Drama. Ed. DiYanni Robert. 6th ed. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1986. 38-41. Print.
“The Story of an hour” a complex piece of literature by Kate Chopin, has various interpretations to it. This story has, one definite interpretation, which is the following: life has to go on no matter what is happened in the past. In this story, Chopin implies Ms. Mallard’s husband has been very cruel to her in her lifetime. However, she never lets her husband get in the way, finally he dies, and, she thinks she is free although she really is not.
Faulkner, William. "A Rose for Emily." Literature: Reading, Reacting, Writing. Ed. Laurie G. Kirszner and Stephen R. Mandell. Compact 4th ed. Fort Worth: Harcourt College Publishers, 2000. 81 - 88.
In Kate Chopin’s “The Story of an Hour”, it talks about marriage and a woman’s life in the 1800’s. This story illustrates the stifling nature of a woman’s role during this time through Mrs. Mallard’s reaction to her husband’s death. When Mrs. Mallard obtains news that her husband is dead, she is hurt after a brief moment and then she is delighted with the thought of freedom. This story shows how life was in the mid 1800’s and how women were treated around that time.
In “ A Rose for Emily”, William Faulkner tells the complex tale of a woman who is battered by time and unable to move through life after the loss of each significant male figure in her life. Unlike Disney Stories, there is no prince charming to rescue fallen princess, and her assumed misery becomes the subject of everyone in the town of Jefferson, Mississippi. As the townspeople gossip about her and develop various scenarios to account for her behaviors and the unknown details of her life, Emily Grierson serves as a scapegoat for the lower classes to validate their lives. In telling this story, Faulkner decides to take an unusual approach; he utilizes a narrator to convey the details of a first-person tale, by examining chronology, the role of the narrator and the interpretations of “A Rose for Emily”, it can be seen that this story is impossible to tell without a narrator.
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.
Faulkner, William. "A Rose For Emily." The Bedford Introduction to Literature: Reading, Thinking, Writing. Ed. Michael Meyer. 9th ed. Boston: Bedford/St. Martins, 2008. 91-99. Print.
" The Story of an Hour " by Kate Chopin is about a young woman with a serious heart condition that finds out her husband is killed. She reacts very different to the news then a wife would react to their husband's death. She loves her husband but is not happy with her life. After the tragic news, she envisions her life as being fuller. She sees the severity of her heart condition, but prays that she will now live longer. This story is more about her realization of her existence and her beginning to cope with her dieing rather than being completely about her husband dieing.
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.