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Oppression in a story of an hour
The story of an hour freedom theme
Character analysis of story of an hour
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For many, marriage is the most important steps in life because it doesn’t just represent two people taking a vow to be with each other. But marriage also exemplifies purity and singularity because it gives people the strength to overcome any temptations by engaging in a love that can be given and received physically, emotionally, and spiritually. However, in The Story of an Hour, Chopin also displays how all marriages can be oppressive, even the “kindest and loving” ones, which implies that people just want to be free physically, emotionally, and spiritually. She does this by having Louise Mallard react to her husband’s death with joy and also not having any sort of bitterness or contempt over his passing either.
Marriage is not easy because
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When a couple say the words “till death do us part” it is an unbreakable bond that only death can break. Ironically, this is the case in the Story of an Hour. When Louise believed that her husband had passed away she cried hysterically however, not with sadness but, with joy. “She said it over and over under her breath: "free, free, free!" Her pulses beat fast, and the coursing blood warmed and relaxed every inch of her body.” (Gioia, 157). It’s obvious that at this moment she felt relieved or like a weight had been lifted off her shoulder. This is due to the fact that since she is ill, she has to be taken care of, and because of that she is mostly confined to her room. However, in this case, she has never felt more alive. In fact, her heart began beating faster and pumping more warm blood throughout her body allowing her to relax. At this moment she is literally being physically freed from her marriage. She now can live for herself with no one to hold her back from her passions or wishes. Even before Louise began …show more content…
It is clear that she is trying to speak for those women that are going through marriages where the spouse is caged in the house or unable to have the freedom to do what she wants. Not only that, it can also be seen that Chopin could be speaking for the men that have to make sacrifices for their family or change for their marriage inhibiting them from doing what they want. That’s why the Story of an Hour is so interesting because Chopin doesn’t clarify how Louise was oppressed showing that marriage is generally oppressive. Chopin goes even farther by adding “There would be no powerful will bending hers in that blind persistence with which men and women believe they have a right to impose a private will upon a fellow-creature” (Gioia, 158). She is saying what kind of sane person would bestow this life of oppression on another person; heavily beating down the thoughts of freedom and independence from marriage. However, she never says anything about
By contrast, Louise Mallard, the protagonist in Chopin's "Story of an Hour", is a moral woman and loving wife, at least by Western standards. Her life is defined by the accepted social ideal of a husband's will as final. She is so inured to this concept that only upon hearing the news of his death does her true feeling of something "too subtle and elusive to name" (199) come forth. What she acknowledges to herself is that her marriage is not happy for her and she often resents her subservient role and "a kind intention or a cruel intention made the act seem no less a crime".
Marriage is an important theme in the stories Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston and The Story of an Hour by Kate Chopin. When someone hears the word “marriage”, he thinks of love and protection, but Hurston and Chopin see that differently. According to them, women are trapped in their marriage and they don’t know how to get out of it, so they use language devices to prove their points. Chopin uses personification to show Mrs. Mallard's attitudes towards her husband's death. Louise is mournful in her room alone and she is giving a description of the nature as a scene of her enjoying “the new spring life” and “the delicious breath of rain was in the air” (Chopin1).
This is a story of a series of events that happen within an hour to a woman named Louise Mallard. Louise is a housewife who learns her husband has died in a train accident. Feeling joy about being free she starts seeing life in a different way. That is until at the end of the story she sees her husband well and alive. She cries at the sight of him and dies. The story ends with a doctor saying “she had died of a heart disease—of the joy that kills” (Chopin). Even though the story doesn’t describe Louise doing chores at the house like in The Storm we know that she was a good wife because of the way she reacts when she learns that her husband is dead. Louise gets described as “young, with a fair, calm face, whose lines bespoke repression and even a certain strength” (Chopin). From this line we get a bit of insight into her marriage and herself. We get the idea that she wasn’t happy being married to her husband but still remained with him and did her duties as she was supposed to. In reality her being a good wife was all an act to fit in society’s expectations of a woman being domestic and submissive. As she spend more time in her room alone thinking about her dead husband she realizes life would finally be different for her. She knows that “there would be no one to live for during those coming years; she would live for herself” (Chopin) For a long time in
In The Story of an Hour, the main character, Mrs. Louise Mallard, is a young woman with a heart condition who learns of her husband’s untimely death in a railroad disaster. Instinctively weeping as any woman is expected to do upon learning of her husband’s death, she retires to her room to be left alone so she may collect her thoughts. However, the thoughts she collects are somewhat unexpected. Louise is conflicted with the feelings and emotions that are “approaching to possess her...” (Chopin 338). Unexpectedly, joy and happiness consume her with the epiphany she is “free, free, free!” (Chopin 338). Louise becomes more alive with the realization she will no longer be oppressed by the marriage as many women of her day were, and hopes for a long life when only the day prior, “…she had thought with a shudder that life may ...
In "the story of an hour" Chopin discuss how getting married can lead you to live a life of anguish. In the beginning of the short story Mrs. Mallard revives terrible news that her husband has been recently killed, she "Wept at once, with sudden, wild abandonment." This intense reaction is how society would expect her to act if your husband dies. Mrs. Mallard then goes into her bedroom to grieve alone: "She could see in the open square before her house the tops of the trees that were all aquiver with the new spring life." Seeing the open square makes her crave freedom, something she doesn't remembering having. The new spring life will eventually represent her new-found freedom and happiness. As she stares outside the window she thinks, but "It was not a glance of reflection, but rather indicated a suspension of intelligent thought." She is critically thinking of what will come and what has just happened, she has not ever has to think for herself, her husband always did that for her. This is the first time her feelings start to stir, she tries to process the information more to figure out what they mean.
To appreciate the full impact of what Chopin was conveying to her readers in “The Storm” and “The Story of an Hour”, one must first understand that women of the time had virtually no civil rights, and upon getting married, actually lost the few rights they did enjoy. A single woman could own land, pay property taxes, and enter into legal agreements. Those rights were rescinded the moment she said, “I do”. To be a wife, was to be owned, body and soul, by a man.
The narrator is confined to a room with strange wall-paper. This odd wall-paper seems to symbolize the complexity and confusion in her life. In “The Story of an Hour” by Kate Chopin, the protagonist, Mrs. Mallard must also deal with conflict as she must deal with the death of her spouse. At first there is grief, but then there is the recognition that she will be free. The institute of marriage ties the two women of these two short stories together. Like typical young women of the late 19th century, they were married, and during the course of their lives, they were expected to stay married. Unlike today where divorce is commonplace, marriage was a very holy bond and divorce was taboo. This tight bond of marriage caused tension in these two characters. Their personal freedom was severely restricted. For Mrs. Mallard, marriage was a curse to be reckoned with. She knew inside that her marriage was wrong, but she could not express her feelings openly. Her husband was not a bad man, but he was in the way. After hearing about her husband’s death, Mrs. Mallard comments, “now there would be no powerful will bending her in that blind persistence with which men … believe they have a right to impose a private will upon a fellow creature” (Chopin 72), Her husband definitely was a thorn in her
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.
Marriage can be seen as a subtle form of oppression, like many things which are dictated by social expectations. In Kate Chopin’s The Story of An Hour, Louise Mallard finds herself in distress due to the event of her husband’s death that makes her question who she is as a person. The author cleverly uses this event to create the right atmosphere for Mrs. Mallard to fight against her own mind. As the short story progresses, we see that Mrs. Mallard moves forward with her new life and finds peace in her decision to live for herself. This shows that marriage too is another chain that holds oneself back. Not wanting to admit this to herself, Louise
In the beginning of "The Story of an Hour," Mrs. Mallard is just a typical wife. It is not until she hears of her husband's death that she then simply becomes Louise, now an individual, no longer overshadowed by her husband. Following her husband's death, Louise feels she will no longer suffer a "powerful will bending her" (14), thus indicating she had lacked a voice in the marriage. Chopin clearly indicates this lack of freedom and individuality in Louise's marriage stating, "[. . .] that blind persistence with which men and women believe they have a right to impose a private will upon a fellow creature." (14). This statement reflects how men and women oppress each other, denying one another freedom and a sense of identity. This is in line with the common view that women lost their individuality because their, "legal existence had been extinguished by the status of marriage." (Robson). Next, we learn that Louise actually begins to accept, even enjoy the notion of a life by herself, as Chopin writes the years "that would belong to her absolutely [. . .] she would live for herself." (14). Louise woul...
Marriage was an oppressor to Chopin, she had been a victim of this institution. Being a victim of marriage, Chopin's "Story of an Hour," is an expression of her belief that, marriage is an institution that oppresses, represses, and is a source of discontent among human beings. Mrs. Mallard loved her husband. She wept at once. This was her first response to the news of his death.
“The Story of the Hour” by Kate Chopin portrays an opposing perspective of marriage by presenting the reader with a woman who is somewhat untroubled by her husbands death. The main character, Mrs. Louise Mallard encounters the sense of freedom rather than sorrow after she got knowledge of her husbands death. After she learns that her husband, Brently, is still alive, it caused her to have a heart attack and die. Even though “The Story of the Hour” was published in the eighteen hundreds, the views of marriage in the story could coincide with this era as well.
“There is no perfect relationship. The idea that there is gets us into so much trouble.”-Maggie Reyes. Kate Chopin reacts to this certain idea that relationships in a marriage during the late 1800’s were a prison for women. Through the main protagonist of her story, Mrs. Mallard, the audience clearly exemplifies with what feelings she had during the process of her husbands assumed death. Chopin demonstrates in “The Story of an Hour” the oppression that women faced in marriage through the understandings of: forbidden joy of independence, the inherent burdens of marriage between men and women and how these two points help the audience to further understand the norms of this time.
During the time period of “The Story of an Hour,” the main role of a woman is to marry and have children. The husband is expected to take care of their wife, but in return, they receive all the earnings of their spouse. The concept of marriage is that women have to stay dependent on a man, just like they did as a child. Therefore, women are not allowed a freedom of their own. As a matter of fact, life as a slave is often compared to the life as a women. In “The Story of an Hour,” Chopin expresses the idea of feminine independence through the death of Brently, Louise’s husband.
Although marriage is considered a lifelong bond in “The Story of an Hour, Kate Chopin uses the open window to symbolize Louise’s new life to come. Throughout her life she secretly lived a mournful life. Louise had been fooled by her marriage life. In fact, only minutes after Josephine tells her about Brentley’s tragic death she reconsiders her previous feelings. Louise reconsidered her speculation of their marriage life and had second thoughts on how she felt about Brently, “And yet she loved him--sometimes. Often she had not. What did it matter! What could love, unsolved mystery, count for in the face of possession of self-assertion, which she suddenly recognized as the strongest impulse of being her” (Chopin 2). Regardless of the fact that