Story Of An Hour Sacrifice

Essentially, society controls our lives. We worry about how other people will react to our actions and how they will perceive us if we stray from the norm. For example, women are told to dress appropriately, act modestly, to be altruistic mothers and docile wives. No one is forced to live by these rules; however, bending the rules and living an alternative lifestyle is not without consequence. Women who stray from expectations are ridiculed and lose faith in themselves. In her stories “A Pair of Silk Stockings” and “The Story of an Hour,” Kate Chopin writes about the expected familial devotion of women and the spiritual death experienced as a result of challenging society.
In “A Pair of Silk Stockings,” Chopin describes society’s ideal selfless

Sommers experiences death of the spirit. Chopin introduces the consequences, saying: “She was not thinking at all. She seemed for the time to be taking a rest from that laborious and fatiguing function and to have abandoned herself to some mechanical impulse that directed her actions and freed her of responsibility”. After disregarding her plan to spend the money on her children and be the perfect mother, Mrs. Sommers loses control of herself. She is brought back to reality after the play, thinking: “It was like a dream ended”. She can no longer pretend to be someone she is not, living against the social norms. She must return to reality and, consequently, the fun she had must come to an end and she must face her children. Chopin ends the story saying: “[Mrs. Sommers had] a powerful longing that the cable car would never stop anywhere, but go on and on with her forever”. She has lost all faith in herself after what she has done. She cannot bear to face her children and explain to them that she made selfish decisions uncharacteristic of a good mother; she wishes the trolley would carry on, so she wouldn’t have to face them. This shame signifies Sommers’ loss of