Crying

The first mention of crying, she is lamenting her husband’s death suddenly and immediately after hearing about it from her “friend” Richards (see note on “in bearing the sad message” in the annotated version and analysis of Richard in the open window versus closed door in the next section for explanation). The second time we hear of her crying, she is compared to a “child who has cried itself to sleep continues to sob in its dreams.” At this mention of crying she was confused of change and the more she thought, the more the crying became a distant action. The more she thought about it, the more she realized that, with the absence of her husband, she would be free. At first, she resisted this idea because women of that time were conditioned to be the perfect, submissive wife who lived for the happiness of her husband and who would be nothing without him. Then the realization came “creeping out of the sky” and the natural world around her: without her husband to bend her will to his she would live “a long procession of years to come that would belong to her absolutely.” She looks out the window and is refreshed by the “delicious breath of rain,” “patches of blue sky...through the clouds,” and the sound of birds. A third reference to crying is also outside of her open window: a peddler “crying” his wares. This crying, though, is not a lament; it is a realization. Louise sees this peddler crying his goods and realizes that she has something to offer as well. She has herself to offer to the world and the world, which had been withheld from her during her marriage, was within her reach to embrace. After this comprehension sinks in and she stops fighting the freedom.



The fourth time a sort of crying is brought up, it is narrated that Louise would “weep again” when she saw her husband in the coffin; however, she would specifically not cry. There would be no more reason for tears from crying. Weeping is a quieter, more passive form of crying. According to Webster’s New World College Dictionary, “--cry implies the expression of grief, sorrow, pain or distress by making mournful, convulsive sounds and shedding tears; weep more specifically stresses the shedding of tears” (Agnes). Louise would shed tears over her husband’s coffin, but tears without pain behind them. Chopin makes it seem that Louise would have already accepted that life would be different with her husband gone, and she was ready to move on with her life. However, she is not able do more than dream of those last tears. It is in fact Josephine, not Louise, who gives the last indication of crying. When Mr. Mallard walks through the front door as Louise and Josephine are coming down the stairs, Josephine let out a “piercing cry” at the sight of the assumed-dead man. Louise isn’t said to have let out a single sound before she dies of “heart disease.”

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Josephine may have had the last cry because she thought she had seen a ghost, while Louise seems to have just realized her too-good-to-be-true future and just gave up on the spot. Was this independence that Louise had felt just a figment of her imagination too? Even if her husband did indeed die, would she still be subject to the patriarchal society that she lived in? Death was the ultimate freedom from her struggle with her unhappy marriage. However, she was still never able to escape the patriarchal oppression that faced women of this time. Is this dream of self-concept and independence such a faraway dream for women of the 19th century? Of women now?