Story of an Hour

¶ … Institution of Marriage According to Chopin

The institution of marriage has historically carried powerful implications of patriarchy. Especially in turn of the century America, marriage was seen to largely serve the interests of male desire and the impulse for procreation. Within this scope, very little room was left to discuss the female desire. Indeed, the pressure for a woman to ultimately be taken as a wife by a reputable man was a strong force underlying a great many marriages. This is the same force that we find at the center of Kate Chopin's 1894 short story, "The Story of An Hour." In Chopin's highly allegorical piece, the female protagonist offers an inadvertent and unabashed critique of marital patriarchy simply by expressing involuntary joy at the death of her husband.

Discussion:

Chopin's "The Story of an Hour" suggests that the affection which can emerge in a marriage of social convenience may not be enough to erase the feeling of being trapped. According to Toth (1999), Chopin's story is about "the submission of a young woman to someone else's will. It can also be read as a criticism of marriage itself, as an institution that traps women." (Toth, p. 10)

This is a fascinating reading, particularly because the story's protagonist does not appear to be locked into an unhappy marriage. Indeed, Chopin tells that her husband had always been kind, had always treated her with love and had, as far as the subtext suggests, been a faithful provider. Therefore, it says much about the institution of marriage that Louise records her shocking response to news of her husband's death. The notion of patriarchy as a negative force is easy to observe in the context of an abusive or violent relationship. However, its impact may be a great deal more subtle in the context of a happy marriage.

Here, the factors impacting Louise's emotional state have less to do with her husband himself than with the overarching socio-cultural pressures which placed the young woman in a marriage to begin with. The exultant joy that wells up within her at the thought, not of his death, but of his absence, suggests that the character may have been married against her own internal wishes. If this is the way that we are to interpret the Chopin story, it provides some meaningful insight into the sociological pressure which required women to marry. Moreover, upon marrying, most women during the turn-of-the-century moment captured in the story will tend to become almost appendages to the will of their husbands.

The Chopin story does not necessarily imply that Louise has been subjugated to the desires and demands of an imposing or overbearing male figure. Indeed, there is no particular dimension of this marriage that we, as the reader, have been given to believe is negative or objectionable. Instead, it is the mere institution of marriage in and of itself that is subject to criticism. Given the moment of perceived freedom to consider this institution, the character seems almost to suggest that there is something inherently unnatural about the state of a human relationship in marriage. As Louise begins to recognize that she has been liberated from a state of imposition, Chopin describes the moment, telling that "there would be no one to live for during those coming years; 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. A kind intention or a cruel intention made the act seem no less a crime as she looked upon it in that brief moment of illumination." (Chopin, p. 1)

In this description, we can see that it is not the nature of her marriage but the nature of marriage itself that she had objected to. Further, we can presume that she did not recognize this objection in herself until the moment she was informed of her husband's passing. That the report was incorrect is rather irrelevant in the moment of realization given the rapid sequence that takes the women from grief to internal celebration. What is far more relevant is the emergent understanding the most women in this era complied with the pressure to become married and to live in compliment to another individual's desires and expectations even if this did not strike one as the most desirable or fitting course of life.

In this regard, Louise strikes the reader as a woman who feels that she has been given her own life back. With the death of her husband, she experienced a sense of the entitlement for self-determination. Even before marriage, the understanding that marriage was inherently necessary would have presented this character with an already defined future. Based on the societal pressure for women to ultimately become married and have children, and based on the understanding that a woman lacked the right to extricate herself from a marriage through divorce during that time, death would truly be the only key to extrication from a binding union such as this. As such, even before her betrothal to the man believed to be dead, Louise will have had a future entirely laid out before her, predictable and routine to its core.

In those moments following the proclamation of her husband's death, the character experiences a sense that she had perhaps never felt. It was a feeling of excitement at the unknown, the unpredictable and the things that she would yet see, feel and experience. According to Chopin, the death of her husband did not put an end to her future but stimulating a whole new imagination regarding what this future could be. Chopin tells that "her fancy was running riot along those days ahead of her. Spring days, and summer days, and all sorts of days that would be her own. 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."