The Story of an Hour

3 Pages 686 Words

The Story of an Hour

“The Story of an Hour” is about a woman who finds the liberation to live for
herself through her husband’s death. Kate Chopin’s main character, Louise Mallard, is an
ordinary housewife who has a heart condition. When her husband dies in a train wreck,
her sister Josephine and her husband’s friend Richards rush to her to break the news as
gently as possible. When the news is broken to Louise, she immediately burst into tears
and clutches her sister. After Louise calms down, she goes to her room to be by herself.
She is still very upset, sobbing every now and then, but as she looks through the window,
she is disturbed by her feelings, “this thing that was approaching to possess her”(Trotter
150). She is beginning to feel the freedom of being able “to live for herself”(Trotter 153)
instead of her husband. She tries to reject this feeling at first, but then starts to give into it
until it is a “monstrous joy”(Trotter 156) that consumes her. When she finally leaves the
room in triumph, she finds out that her husband is alive. She dies from the shock of
finding out her husband is alive. The doctor ironically said, “she died from the grief that
kills.”(Chopin 446)
Kate Chopin is known for writing controversial works in a time when they were
not accepted. In that sense this story is very comparable to her other works. Her
characters are always commits sins that often made her contemperaries cringe, whether
reading private mail (Elizabeth Stock’s One Story”), deceiving well-meaning nuns
(“Lilacs), smoking illicit hallucinogenic ciggarettes (“An Egyptian Ciggarette”),
condoning murder (The Godmother”) or rejoicing at a husband’s death (“Story of an
Hour”). Kate Chopin foreshadows Louise’s strange feelings about her husband’s death
right from the start. Chopin writes, “she did not hear the story as many women have
heard the same, with a paralyzed inab...