Story Of An Hour Literary Analysis Essay

In Kate Chopin’s “The Story of an Hour,” a short lived emotional journey of a woman whose husband is presumed dead takes place as she learns that it’s not true. Mrs. Mallard is told by her sister Josephine that her husband’s name had appeared on a train, which had been in a serious accident, manifest. The news had to be broken lightly to her, as she was a woman with heart problems. A stunned Mrs. Mallard wept for her husband before withdrawing to the privacy of her room where she began to think of her life with Mr. Mallard, how she had sometimes loved him and often not and what her new life without him would be like. Although she attempts to suppress her emotions, she began to entertain the thought of being a free woman, “Free, Free, Free!” (706) she had said to herself as she realized that she would no longer be confined to her marriage to Mr. Mallard. She finds warmth in her newly found independence and dreams about all the years ahead of her as a free woman, she walks out of the room and begins making her way down the stairs with her sister only to find that Mr. Mallard was in fact

Mallard’s heart trouble. The story begins with the announcement that Mrs. Mallard has heart trouble and therefore couldn’t possibly handle the news of her husband’s passing, “Knowing that 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” (705). It’s easy to assume that someone would take the news of death as a bad thing in their life, but in Mrs. Mallard’s case her heart begins to pump blood through her veins and filling her with warmth as though she had no heart trouble when she begins to entertain the idea of being alone. She feels free, independent, and hopeful for a future where she no longer needs to be attached to her husband. She had lived with her husband feeling an obligation and responsibility to him that had tied her heart