The Story of an Hour

 

 

Kate Chopin’s “The Story of an Hour” accounts the last hour of the young Louise Mallard’s life. After crying at the news of her husband’s death in a railroad disaster, Louise abandons herself to her room alone. There, she sits next to an open window and is overcome with a profound realization of the independence and happiness she was lacking in her marriage. Inundated with the concept of being free of the patriarchal rule of her husband, she is driven into a state of madness as she chants, “free, free, free!...Body and soul free!” thinking of her future “of days that would be her own.” Just as she is in the deepest state of her euphoric madness, her husband walks through the front door seeming to not have been near the accident at all. The very sight of him ends her euphoria abruptly; the “coursing blood” that warmed her thoughts and sensations just minutes before seized up as the prospect of a free future came crumbling down. “When the doctors came they said she had died of heart disease--of the joy that kills.” The doctors assumed that, like a good wife, she was overjoyed at seeing her husband so much that she died, but we as readers know the truth. Louise indeed died of heart disease, but she died from the shock of having her heart set on something, on almost having something so sensational, and then getting it ripped from her just as she was about to breath it in.  Louise’s death, and the powerful realizations she had before then, is a powerful critique on the 19th Century role of marriage. Louise could only have the freedom she sought in life through death.

In this work, like many others by Chopin, she analyses and empowers the 19th century woman with feministic undertones.