Heart Disease

Chopin is very blunt in the nature of her character and the problem that she will face in the very first sentence. In it we can assume that Mrs. Mallard is susceptible to heart attacks or has had pain in her chest area in the past. However, after Louise is described as young with a “fair, calm face whose lines bespoke repression,” the reader is lead to wonder why a girl so young would suffer from heart disease so apparent that even the limited medical knowledge of the 19th Century was able to diagnose it.
Louise suffers from biological heart disease, but she also suffers from the disease of a marriage without love. Even without the more explicit explanation in the paragraphs that follow, readers get a hint at her emotional past in her heart disease. Studies referenced in Orth-Gomaer, Chesney, and Wenger’s book, Women, Stress, and Heart Disease, list stress as a major risk factor for cardiovascular disease. Knowing this, a reader can assume that Mrs. Mallard is emotionally stressed in her marriage. This idea is then affirmed in the line, “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.” Readers can again assume that she isn’t talking in third person, but rather speaking from experience in her own marriage. Even though it is stated that she had loved him “--sometimes” and that he had “never looked save with love upon her,” she still felt shackled to her marriage. As she gained the courage to recognize the independent future she could have, she began to whisper “Free! Body and soul free!” as “her pulses beat fast, and the coursing blood warmed and relaxed every inch of her body.”