Story Of An Hour Literary Analysis

The nineteenth century was a period in which marriage was viewed differently from the way it’s viewed today. Women didn’t have the same rights they have now, in fact they didn’t have any rights. Staying home and tending to the house, while the husbands went out and worked was a woman’s job. This period was filled with men whom held a sort of dominance over women which in turn prevented women from satisfying their own desires and ending up unhappy. In Kate Chopin’s “Story of an Hour” she uses irony and symbolism to show how an unwanted marriage can deprive a woman of her happiness and independence during the nineteenth century. Chopin’s “Story of an Hour” put me in mind of an author named Charlotte Perkins Gilman and her short story “The Yellow

Chopin uses the heart trouble as a symbol to represent Louise lack of happiness and freedom very similar to a broken heart. Josephine mentioning her sister’s heart troubles can also be the author’s way of showing how society viewed women as fragile, and unable to withstand as much as men being that women were seen as inferior to men. Chopin also uses the window to symbolize the amount of hope and possibility awaited Louise now that she was free. (Expand) In “The Yellow Wallpaper” Charlotte Perkins Gilman used symbolism to get her message about woman suffrage across without saying it outright, just like Chopin. Gilman uses many symbols throughout the story to emphasis the struggles women faced. The house was the first symbol Gilman used, she first describes it as “haunted” (Gilman 151). When people think of something being haunted it usually by a trapped spirit, but Haunted means troubled. Gilman was describing how women felt during the 19th century as a result of physical and mental entrapment. Women often felt trapped whether in a place or a situation like a marriage. Haunted could have also been the narrator’s way of telling the readers something is wrong with her, she is troubled. This could be possible because throughout the story we see her in a troubled state. Another symbol was the description of the wallpaper’s