The Story of an Hour is written by Kate Chopin (1894). And Here follows the main Text ~
When I first began reading "The Story of an Hour," Mrs. Mallard seemed to me an old woman and as we are told in the very first line, “afflicted with a heart trouble.” I was surprised in the eighth paragraph when Chopin tells us that "She was young," but even more interesting to me that she is described as having “a fair, calm face, whose lines bespoke repression” which depicts her as being old for her age. The description of this repression is backed up when Chopin gives us the reason for Mrs. Mallard’s “monstrous joy” which reads thus “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.”
After reading through this story the first time, I had many questions and many conclusions. For instance, it seems as if Chopin is showing us a social situation of the times with the woman as prisoner of her husband. It is common knowledge that marriages are not always about mutual love between two people and during the time that Chopin was writing, this was more often the case. Marriage was as much about monetary comfort, social status and acceptance as it was about possible love. There are no children mentioned in this story which makes me wonder if there was a sexual relationship between the Mallards. It seems from the description that Mrs. Mallard has been trapped in this marriage for a long time even though we know she is young. How young is she? Even though I say she is trapped, do not misunderstand me: I do not think this marriage is arranged, instead that she has been coerced by her society to marry despite what she may want to do in her heart and soul. I believe she does love her husband, but it is possible to love a man and not be married to him. This was not her case; if she were able (meaning a man would agree with her decision) and she did engage in a loving relationship with a man who was not her husband, she would have certainly been looked down upon. Is her heart condition purely physical or is it also psychological and emotional? We know the stereotypes, as Chopin did, that women are hysterical, timid, weak, irrational. Could it be that her heart condition is created by those tip-toeing around her in conjunction with her own emotional weaknesses?
I find it interesting that her first name is only told to us after she hears of her husband’s death and when she feels the most free. Before this point she is referred to as Mrs. Mallard or “she,” and after this point when her husband returns home, she is referred to as “wife.” Chopin is pointing to something very interesting here which leads me back to the title of woman as “wife.” When Louise marries Bently she becomes Mrs. Mallard; she loses her identity and assumes a new and strange one. While it seems very normal and average for a wife to assume her husband’s name in marriage and in that time, to put it harshly, become the property of him, it cannot be ignored that a certain part of the self is lost. This woman is very in tune with this loss and even though her love for her husband keeps her from it, the freedom she feels when she thinks he is dead becomes unavoidable and enjoyable.
Chopin wrote the story and has given us a narrator who, if it is not Chopin personally, I believe to still be female. The descriptions and insight we are given into the character of Louise come from someone who understands her situation and is forgiving. We see Louise as she finds happiness out of her husband’s death and yet, by the narration, we see her struggle with guilt and overcome it. From the female perspective, it could be argued that her death was really an ultimate freedom from her unhappy marriage. If we assume that the narrator is male, could it be that her death was a punishment for her happiness at the death of her husband? It is not as farfetched as it seems and raises many more questions as to the goal this story sets out to achieve.
Text
Knowing that Mrs. Mallard was afflicted with a heart trouble, great care was taken to break to her as gently as possible the news of her husband's death.
It was her sister Josephine who told her, in broken sentences; veiled hints that revealed in half concealing. Her husband's friend Richards was there, too, near her. It was he who had been in the newspaper office when intelligence of the railroad disaster was received, with Brently Mallard's name leading the list of "killed." He had only taken the time to assure himself of its truth by a second telegram, and had hastened to forestall any less careful, less tender friend in bearing the sad message.
She did not hear the story as many women have heard the same, with a paralyzed inability to accept its significance. She wept at once, with sudden, wild abandonment, in her sister's arms. When the storm of grief had spent itself she went away to her room alone. She would have no one follow her.
There stood, facing the open window, a comfortable, roomy armchair. Into this she sank, pressed down by a physical exhaustion that haunted her body and seemed to reach into her soul.
She could see in the open square before her house the tops of trees that were all aquiver with the new spring life. The delicious breath of rain was in the air. In the street below a peddler was crying his wares. The notes of a distant song which some one was singing reached her faintly, and countless sparrows were twittering in the eaves.
There were patches of blue sky showing here and there through the clouds that had met and piled one above the other in the west facing her window.
She sat with her head thrown back upon the cushion of the chair, quite motionless, except when a sob came up into her throat and shook her, as a child who has cried itself to sleep continues to sob in its dreams.
She was young, with a fair, calm face, whose lines bespoke repression and even a certain strength. But now there was a dull stare in her eyes, whose gaze was fixed away off yonder on one of those patches of blue sky. It was not a glance of reflection, but rather indicated a suspension of intelligent thought.
There was something coming to her and she was waiting for it, fearfully. What was it? She did not know; it was too subtle and elusive to name. But she felt it, creeping out of the sky, reaching toward her through the sounds, the scents, the color that filled the air.
Now her bosom rose and fell tumultuously. She was beginning to recognize this thing that was approaching to possess her, and she was striving to beat it back with her will--as powerless as her two white slender hands would have been. When she abandoned herself a little whispered word escaped her slightly parted lips. She said it over and over under hte breath: "free, free, free!" The vacant stare and the look of terror that had followed it went from her eyes. They stayed keen and bright. Her pulses beat fast, and the coursing blood warmed and relaxed every inch of her body.
She did not stop to ask if it were or were not a monstrous joy that held her. A clear and exalted perception enabled her to dismiss the suggestion as trivial. She knew that she would weep again when she saw the kind, tender hands folded in death; the face that had never looked save with love upon her, fixed and gray and dead. But she saw beyond that bitter moment a long procession of years to come that would belong to her absolutely. And she opened and spread her arms out to them in welcome.
There would be no one to live for during those coming years; she would live for herself. 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. A kind intention or a cruel intention made the act seem no less a crime as she looked upon it in that brief moment of illumination.
And yet she had loved him--sometimes. Often she had not. What did it matter! What could love, the unsolved mystery, count for in the face of this possession of self-assertion which she suddenly recognized as the strongest impulse of her being!
"Free! Body and soul free!" she kept whispering.
Josephine was kneeling before the closed door with her lips to the keyhold, imploring for admission. "Louise, open the door! I beg; open the door--you will make yourself ill. What are you doing, Louise? For heaven's sake open the door."
"Go away. I am not making myself ill." No; she was drinking in a very elixir of life through that open window.
Her fancy was running riot along those days ahead of her. Spring days, and summer days, and all sorts of days that would be her own. She breathed a quick prayer that life might be long. It was only yesterday she had thought with a shudder that life might be long.
She arose at length and opened the door to her sister's importunities. There was a feverish triumph in her eyes, and she carried herself unwittingly like a goddess of Victory. She clasped her sister's waist, and together they descended the stairs. Richards stood waiting for them at the bottom.
Some one was opening the front door with a latchkey. It was Brently Mallard who entered, a little travel-stained, composedly carrying his grip-sack and umbrella. He had been far from the scene of the accident, and did not even know there had been one. He stood amazed at Josephine's piercing cry; at Richards' quick motion to screen him from the view of his wife.
When the doctors came they said she had died of heart disease--of the joy that kills.
Exploration of "The Story of An Hour"
Every story needs to be read in context of the writers other works to some degree. Chopin wrote other fiction about marriage which is especially relevant, including The Awakening and several stories. In particular, you should note the short piece called "Reflections"You might like to explore those ties in a paper.
The literary context of Chopin's work is debatable. She can be considered as a Southern women writer, a proto-feminist (a label she strongly denied), a local-colorist, a romantic, a realist, or a naturalist. In fact, her work may be characterized by ties to several literary "movements," ties which you might like to explore.
There have been two video productions of this story which are available through the library. "The Joy that Kills" is a 56-minute production produced by Tina Rathbone with many interpretive additions and feminist overtones. In this production Louise is presented as an invalid, envious of her husband's freedom. The video is described as follows: "The setting is the world of the upper-class Creole society which dominated New Orleans in the 1870s, a world with a strict code of behavior, one of whose strongest tenets required a wife to subordinate her will and her very being to her husband." "Five Stories of an Hour" presents five dramatizations for a total of 26 minutes, each keeping the intense brevity of the story but with decidedly different approaches to the "gaps" of the story. You might compare any or all of these interpretations with each other and with your own reading of the story and the characters.
A Student's Note
After reading through this story the first time, I had many questions and many conclusions. For instance, it seems as if Chopin is showing us a social situation of the times with the woman as prisoner of her husband. It is common knowledge that marriages are not always about mutual love between two people and during the time that Chopin was writing, this was more often the case. Marriage was as much about monetary comfort, social status and acceptance as it was about possible love. There are no children mentioned in this story which makes me wonder if there was a sexual relationship between the Mallards. It seems from the description that Mrs. Mallard has been trapped in this marriage for a long time even though we know she is young. How young is she? Even though I say she is trapped, do not misunderstand me: I do not think this marriage is arranged, instead that she has been coerced by her society to marry despite what she may want to do in her heart and soul. I believe she does love her husband, but it is possible to love a man and not be married to him. This was not her case; if she were able (meaning a man would agree with her decision) and she did engage in a loving relationship with a man who was not her husband, she would have certainly been looked down upon. Is her heart condition purely physical or is it also psychological and emotional? We know the stereotypes, as Chopin did, that women are hysterical, timid, weak, irrational. Could it be that her heart condition is created by those tip-toeing around her in conjunction with her own emotional weaknesses?
I find it interesting that her first name is only told to us after she hears of her husband’s death and when she feels the most free. Before this point she is referred to as Mrs. Mallard or “she,” and after this point when her husband returns home, she is referred to as “wife.” Chopin is pointing to something very interesting here which leads me back to the title of woman as “wife.” When Louise marries Bently she becomes Mrs. Mallard; she loses her identity and assumes a new and strange one. While it seems very normal and average for a wife to assume her husband’s name in marriage and in that time, to put it harshly, become the property of him, it cannot be ignored that a certain part of the self is lost. This woman is very in tune with this loss and even though her love for her husband keeps her from it, the freedom she feels when she thinks he is dead becomes unavoidable and enjoyable.
Chopin wrote the story and has given us a narrator who, if it is not Chopin personally, I believe to still be female. The descriptions and insight we are given into the character of Louise come from someone who understands her situation and is forgiving. We see Louise as she finds happiness out of her husband’s death and yet, by the narration, we see her struggle with guilt and overcome it. From the female perspective, it could be argued that her death was really an ultimate freedom from her unhappy marriage. If we assume that the narrator is male, could it be that her death was a punishment for her happiness at the death of her husband? It is not as farfetched as it seems and raises many more questions as to the goal this story sets out to achieve.
Comments
Post a Comment