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In this essay, we are going to make a critical analysis of a short story by a famous American writer Kate Chopin (1850 – 1904) “The Story of an Hour”. K. Chopin is sometimes called a forgotten voice of American Literature, only in the middle of the 20th century her works regained their popularity and took their deserved place among the masterpieces of world literature. Kate Chopin can even be called “a prophet” of the feminist literature of the end of the 19th century.
And this fact can be easily explained if we take a look at her life. Her father died when she was five years old and she was brought up by her mother and great-grandmother. She had to prove the right of a woman to decide something in the society contemporary to her and, besides, was influenced by her parents. So, as we can see it is understandable that her works express concern about the role a woman should play in society.
In the story under consideration, “The Story of an Hour”, purely feminist ideas are expressed together with a skillful description of the emotional state of the main character of the story which is rather an interesting psychological type of a human being. What we are going to discuss in the essay is the epiphanies the main character of the story, Mrs. Mallard, had and the conflict of her behavior with the social and historical context of those times.
We will try to find out the reasons for such actions and feelings of Mrs. Mallard, discuss the means used by the author to describe the above-mentioned emotions of the main character, and the aim of the story on the whole: its audience and the effect it had in the social opinion.
To start with, let us restore a picture of the society of that time – a society controlled by and existing for men, few, if any, women’s rights, and the atmosphere of the permanent tension, though not exposed, nevertheless, felt and real. It was impossible to imagine a woman’s behavior that would violate the set standards and avow disagreement with the existing norms. And in the story under consideration we can observe an inner conflict of a personality – she is ashamed to express her emotions, not because of possible social disapproval, but because she still can not decide even for herself what she feels. We are the witnesses of the duality of the attitude conditioned by two “musts”: on the one hand – an inner state of a personality, and on the other hand – societal foundations and principles.
Now let us examine the characteristics of the main heroine in a more detailed way. Mrs. Mallard was a young lady with a fair face that bespoke repression and a certain strength (Chopin 259). She could not be called a weak-willed person anyway. Surely, she had some physical weaknesses, like heart trouble she was afflicted with, but this has nothing to do with the strong spirit of freedom and aspiration for self-assertion which lived inside of this tender young lady. If we address the message implicated in the text of the story, we can guess that her husband, Brently Mallard, did not appreciate these features of her character and, probably tried to suppress them.
She confessed to herself that there had been moments when she loved her husband but more often she did not (260). Mrs. Mallard could patiently stand almost everything but the only thing that arouse her anger was that she did not possess her life, her time, she did not possess herself – everything was bent to her husband’s will.
When we start reading this story we do not know these details and that is why Mrs. Mallard’s reaction to her sister’s message about the accident on the railroad where her husband was among the killed seems, at first, natural: “She wept at once, with sudden, wild abandonment, in her sister’s arms.” (259), but then it becomes unpredictable and she even starts feeling a kind of joy! Of course, she was sure to “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” (260), but it was nothing in comparison to the freedom she could get from what had happened. “Free! Body and soul free!” she kept whispering. (260)
As can be easily understood, she spoke of herself, of her new life which must begin after her husband’s death. She was at first afraid of these thoughts, afraid to accept them, tried to “beat them back with her will”. But a bit later she gave up, she abandoned the hope to resist these thoughts and feelings and a word in whisper sounded from her lips again: “Free!”(260).
Having thought of all the advantages of her new status, the status of a widow, “she opened and spread her arms out to them [above mentioned thoughts] in welcome.” (260). Here we can notice that she was ashamed to feel this way but she could not fight the feeling because it was inside of her, it was her original self expressing sincere emotion, though cruel but not subjected to social attitudes. In this episode of the story, the author depicted the state of mind when a conflict with the accepted standards is a result of a person’s being absolutely sincere and honest to herself.
The author skillfully pictures Mrs. Mallard’s behavior at the time when she was alone in her room after coming to know about her husband’s death. Her husband’s friend Richard and her sister were afraid that she was drowning in sorrow and could make herself ill while she was looking at the blue sky with grey patches of clouds and considering all the positive sides of the freedom she could finally get. No one would control her actions, she would be the only mistress of her life, “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.”(260).
Her husband’s death became a starting point for her new life, at least she took it so: “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.” When Mrs. Mallard’s sister persuaded her to leave the room and go downstairs she appeared in the corridor with a look which could not be called the one of a mourning widow. She was full of energy, her eyes sparkled with enthusiasm “and she carried herself unwittingly like a goddess of Victory.”(261).
But when she descended the stairs the dreams of freedom broke into small pieces. What she saw made her cry piercingly. Her husband stepped into the house has opened the front door with a latchkey. He did not even know about the accident and was far from the place where it had happened. Mrs. Mallard’s shock was too strong. “When the doctors came they said she had died of heart disease–of the joy that kills.”
An hour in Mrs. Mallard’s life depicted in the story under consideration turned out to be fateful, but, at the same time, the happiest one. During this hour she felt free, felt how her dreams came true and this was real happiness. And when this feeling came to its end so did her life.
Speaking of Brently Mallard, we can not learn a lot about him and his relations with his wife from the text of the story. It is the implication that helps us develop the whole setting of the work. Only using understanding the implicit meaning we can visualize the background of the story. We know much about Mr. Mallard after reading the story through the author mentions his name only several times. The emotions of Mrs. Mallard are what give us information to think over and make our conclusions about her husband. This should be referred to the author’s literary skills – Kate Chopin said much without saying a word. The fact confirms Chopin’s works’ place among the best masterpieces of world literature.
And in conclusion, I would like to sum up all the above said. “The Story of an Hour” is one of the best works by the famous American writer Kate Chopin. In this story, we could observe different sides of human nature, the conflict within a personality, and contradictions of one’s own identity with the norms of society. We were witnesses of the kaleidoscope of feelings of the main character, we could see how happy she was and how, in a minute, everything was destroyed and her life did not have sense anymore.
Kate Chopin is a master of a psychological novel and, by different means, for example describing how Mrs. Mallard enjoyed looking at the sky after she had learned about her husband’s death, she displays a full picture of human life in the plenitude of its bright and dark colors. Kate Chopin managed perfectly to describe them in her work which provokes every reader to think of what is right and what is wrong and to change in a certain manner his or her values and the universal values of mankind.
Another point of crucial importance in this story is the feminist view of the author, paying attention to the problem of a woman’s role in society and an attempt to change the situation by the power of literary art.
So, the idea of the story under consideration is making changes, in a personality as well as in the state of things in the whole world and the audience of such a work can not be outlined distinctly. It is aimed at readers of all ages, genders, and social positions. It was written more than a hundred years ago but still has not lost its topicality and importance because it is the material side of life that changes but not people.
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