How Marriage Was Back In The 1800's

4 Pages 947 Words

How Marriage was back in the 1800’s
Kate Chopin’s The Storm and The Story of An Hour, recognizes that relationships can be missing something very important. The two stories tell about two different married couples who lack something in their lives.
In the Story of an Hour, Mrs. Mallard is a lady afflicted with heart problems who feels completely sheltered inside (17). She is trapped physically by her husband and doesn’t know what to do. Mrs. Mallard feels unloved and very sad. But, there is nothing she can do but wait for better days to come.
One day, her sister comes to relay a message to her that her husband had been killed in a train wreck (12). At first she expresses grief when she hears the news, but soon (unknown to her friends) she finds joy in it. So, the “sad message”(12), though sad to Richard, is in fact a happy message. She realizes that she is free now and can do as she wishes with no one to stand her way with many years to come. She becomes uncaring and selfish for she feels no sorrow at all for her husbands death (12). No one knows that she really feels this way and it will be a secret she would hold forever. Although, she loves him sometimes it is the greatest feeling and release of her life. But, her free life did not last long for the pain is too overwhelming when she sees that her husband is not dead and is standing before her. The doctors say that she “died of heart disease.” (18)
In The Storm, Calixta is unable to fulfill society’s standards of virtue, despite her perceived purity by her lover Alcee. When Alcee professes, “If she was not and immaculate dove in those days, she was still inviolate.”(34), he is basically saying that just because a woman is chaste, does not mean she is not pure of heart. Calixta’s marriage stripped her of her chastity status. has two kinds of storms: a real one and a passionate storm. The real storm blows over just as the physical one do...