Mrs. Mallard In Kate Chopin's The Awakening

The protective forces of society, the sister Josephine as the representative of her own family –protection as a daughter- and the friend Richards as the protective male attitude towards women come together to shelter and to protect Mrs. Mallard, who is the paradigm of the ideal of woman in society as a weak, delicate and gentle creature. Her reaction to the news of death gives the first sign of her individuality: “she did not hear the story as many women have heard the same, with a paralyzed inability to accept its significance” (Chopin, line 9). The way Mrs. Mallard reacts to the news is different and untraditional. She wails with wild abandonment and runs away to be alone in her room, shunning her sister and slumping into one of her armchairs

She recognizes self-assertion as the strongest impulse of her new being. She begins to look forward to the rest of her life when just the day before, she shuddered at the thought of it. When she leaves the room to join her sister to return downstairs where Richards still waits, she carries herself like a “goddess of Victory” (Chopin, line 63). She is not the same woman who entered the room an hour ago, and she welcomes the new life hoping that it will be long. But, a moment later, the opening of the door brings in Mr. Mallard and his entrance brings both the end of the story and the death of Louise, whose heart gives out. Her doctors explain that she “died of joy that kills” (Chopin, line 72). Mrs. Mallard’s heart fails in the end, of course, not because of her overwhelming happiness at seeing her husband alive, as the doctors suggest, but ironically, what murdered her was a monstrous joy, the birth of individual self and erasure of that joy when her husband and her old self

As a result of his cold attitude towards her, Désirée decides to leave and eventually commits suicide by walking into “the reeds and willows that grew thick along the banks of the deep, sluggish bayou” (Chopin, paragraph 29). Eventually, the reader discovers that it is Armand who is of mixed race heritage and as a result, he no longer has a sense of identity because everything he believed to be true is wrong. In both stories, the presence of a significant other has quite a dramatic effect on the protagonist. For Louise Mallard, the presence of her husband at the end of the story causes her die because she has lost a sense of hope in what is to come for her future and for Désirée, her husband’s willingness to let her leave causes her to want to commit suicide. Therefore, the circumstances which brought them to the end are completely different. Yet, herein also lies the point of greatest similarity: both are trapped in their relationships and have lost their sense of