The Story Of An Hour By Louise Mallard Character Analysis

Amanda Suire
Mrs. Ermis
English 1302.N06
04 October 2015
The Cause and Cure for Heart Trouble: A Character Analysis of Louise Mallard
In “The Story of an Hour”, Kate Chopin introduces Louise Mallard, the protagonist, as being “afflicted with a heart trouble” (1). Louise’s heart trouble can be seen as having both physical and emotional components. Physically Louise is introduced as frail and emotionally she is introduced as repressed. When faced with the news of her husband’s death, Louise’s reactions are different from that of most women and her heart ailments are cured with her new found joy of a future of freedom.
Louise’s physically frailty, due to her heart trouble, is introduced early in “The Story of an Hour”. Out of fear of her reaction due to her heart trouble, Chopin describes Josephine (Louise’s sister) using “broken sentences; veiled hints that revealed in half concealing” (2) to tell Louise of her husband, Brently’s, death. Additionally, Chopin emphasizes Louise’s frailty describing “powerless as her two white slender hands” (10).

The emotional component to Louise’s heart trouble is seen when Chopin describes Louise as “young, with a fair, calm face, whose lines bespoke repression and even a certain strength” (8).

It can be speculated that Louise is repressing her feelings for her late husband when Chopin explains “And yet she had loved him—sometimes. Often she had not” (15). This makes the reader think that she would not allow herself to think what she truly felt until he passed. The reader could also speculate that her husband often did not think of her feelings when Chopin implies “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” (14). All of these emotions could be what Louise’s “heart trouble” rooted

from.
Hints of Louise’s different attitudes are illustrated early in the story. In the scene where she learns of her husband’s death, she goes from being dependent on people as Chopin states when “She wept at once, with sudden, wild abandonment, in her sister’s arms” (3) to independent when Chopin writes “she went away to her room alone. She would have no one follow her” (3).
Later on in the short story it could be theorized that Louise’s heart trouble starts to heal when Chopin remarks “Her pulses beat fast, and the coursing blood warmed and relaxed every inch of her body” (11). Chopin then emphasizes, “There was a feverish triumph in her eyes, and she carried herself unwittingly like a goddess of Victory” (20). These sentences leave no doubt that Louise Mallard is not the same woman she was just an hour before, she is now “free”. All of her new feelings she finally let herself embrace changed her for the better in her mind. Chopin indicates, “Her fancy was running riot along those days ahead of her” (19). This points out her happiness to what her future could hold whereas only an hour ago she shuddered at the thought of a long life.
The story ends with much irony when Mrs. Mallard finally realizes she has her freedom and a long life ahead of her for it to end abruptly when the shock of seeing her husband alive rips all of her newfound elated feelings from her and kills her.