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Irony and The Story of an Hour
There is no indication of whether Kate Chopin was unhappy or not in her own marriage before her husband died, but she certainly wrote about female characters who were unhappy in their marriages. The Awakening is such a story, and The Story of an Hour about Mrs. Mallard is another such story. Today, Kate Chopin is celebrated as a feminist writer. However, because she wrote to support her family, it is quite likely that she simply tapped into a pervading sentiment at the end of the 19th century in American societythe problem of the unhappy, unfulfilling marriage. In Story of an Hour, Chopin depicts such a marriage as oppressive, and through the character of Mrs. Mallard she conveys the yearning for freedom that women stuck in such marriages often have. To achieve an effect on the reader, Chopin relies on irony to strike the kind of cynical note that reflects the acidity present in the text.
The story is about Mrs. Mallard, who is sick at heart, because she feels oppressed in her marriage. When news suddenly comes that her husband has died in a train accident, she feels alive and free as though for the first time. She is filled with joy: Free! Body and soul...…a young age and likely new the feeling that Mrs. Mallard conveys in the story. It is difficult to ascertain how true this is, though, since Kate Chopin herself was more or less a workaday writer in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It was only with the arrival of the second wave of feminism in the US that her work was rediscovered and promoted in schools. Thus, a solid biography of her life does not really cover a great many of the finer details about her actual thoughts. Undoubtedly, however, she wrote for an audience that appreciated her voice and perspective, as she wrote several dozens of stories,…
Kate Chopin lived and created in a time when society could not or was not willing to handle her. When she died, in 1903, it felt like the world was putting her on hold. She was a woman ahead of her times who rang the "awakening" for a cohort of women. Her tolling bells would only be heard more than half a century later when a man, a Norwegian professor
Mallard locks herself in her room and looks to nature for consolation, a situation that seems to dissolve the tension that she was subjected to, and Mrs. Sommers goes on a shopping and fun spree that ends up in the movie theatre. Finally at the end of the three stories there seems to be a successfully resolved situation for the tension that was, Calixta seems at peace with the
Kate Chopin's short stories "The Storm" and "The Story of an Hour" both offer messages of hope for women trapped in patriarchal relationships. The two short stories are framed with a feminist social commentary, while offering completely different perspectives on the ways women can achieve self-determination within the dominant culture. The two main characters of "The Storm" and "The Story of an Hour" are married; but their relationships are noticeably
Kate Chopin (1850-1904) was born Katherine O'Flaherty in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1850. She didn't begin her writing career until after 1882, the year in which her husband, Oscar Chopin died (Toth). She spent several years publishing short stories, based on the Creole and Cajun cultures of Louisiana, where she and Oscar had lived. Her first novel, At Fault, was published in 1890. It was her second novel The Awakening
And the irony here is that when the two males arrive, Bobinot "prepares for the worst..." (115); he tries hard to remove the mud from legs and feet of he and his son. Mom won't like the men folk bringing mud into her clean house. She is an "overscrupulous housewife" when it comes to housekeeping, but obviously not too scrupulous when it comes to her morality. Perhaps some guilt creeps
Kate Chopin "Free! Body and soul free!' she kept whispering." Mrs. Louise Mallard dealt with the death of her husband in an unusual and ambiguous way. At first she wept, "at once, with sudden, wild abandonment." The narrator of Kate Chopin's "The Story of an Hour" notes that Mrs. Mallard did not react with paralyzed shock as many others would have but rather, with a "storm of grief." Mallard's initial response