Story Of An Hour

3 Pages 802 Words

In reading “The Story of an Hour” by Kate Chopin, I found that there was very much symbolism in the selection, and that a closer look must be taken in order to see the true meaning of the story.
The first sentence of the story “knowing that Mrs. Mallard was afflicted with heart trouble, great care was taken to break to her as gently as possible the news of her husbands death.” The first thing we are told about the main character is that she has a bad heart. It seems that people would see Mrs. Mallard as a weak and fragile woman. I personally got an image of an old lady, which I later figured she wasn’t that old. Her heart condition could show that she has had a hard life, and has an old soul.
When she first heard the bad news, “she wept at once, with sudden, wild abandonment..” Her reaction shows that she is a touchy person, a lot more then I would have thought. Yet while other wives could not accept the fact that their husbands were dead, she took to it immediately and began the whole “grieving” process all at once.
As she sits alone crying about her now late husband, she sat in the armchair facing the window and had a feeling that “haunted her body and seemed to reach into her soul.” This seems like she is feeling the hold her husnbad had on her that she couldn’t seem to escape even after he’s gone. The haunting her body can be thought of as physical abuse.
“The new spring life” could represent the new life she could have now that he;s gone. The peddler crying symbolizes her old life and how she felt during the years of her marriage. Though she did love her husband, him being gone gave her the freedom to do as she pleased, not as he commanded.
She begins to feel something come over her and “she was striving to beat it back with her will.” I later learned that it is the word “free” that came over her, and that she was “as powerless as her two white slender hands would hav...