Kate Chopin\'s the Story of an Hour and Earnest Hemingway\'s Cat in the Rain

Kate Chopin & Ernest Hemingway

Women Repression and Empowerment in Kate Chopin's "The Story of an Hour" and Ernest Hemingway's "Cat in the Rain"

Nineteenth century literature gave birth to a preponderance of works that centered on themes about women and their subjugation and struggle for power in the rigidly conservative society. Through literature, writers, men and women alike, pushed forth the program of inflicting change, as the 20th century began to emerge, through the social movement of women aspiring and achieving equal rights with men.

This was the social environment that Kate Chopin and Ernest Hemingway had been exposed to when they created their works "The Story of an Hour" and "Cat in the Rain," respectively. Both works had women as its protagonists, and implicit each story was the apparent repression and desire for freedom and power of the woman characters, the American wife and Louise Mallard. Though each woman had been put in different scenarios and social roles in life, both were characteristically repressed by their husbands. The American wife sought to attain power over her husband through the possession of a cat, the symbol of power. Louise, meanwhile, had experienced power and freedom with the death of her husband; the story of his 'false death' had only resulted to the woman's death.

This paper delves into the existence of repression and eventual emergence of power against women in Chopin and Hemingway's stories. Comparative analysis of the stories led to the generalization that the women characters in the story had sought to break free from their repression through symbolism. In the American wife's case, the cat symbolized her freedom and assertion of power as a woman, while Louise's death had been her reaction against the threat of further subjugation when her husband Brently had lived, falsifying the news that he was dead and Louise was finally free.

In "The story of an hour," Louise Mallard was characterized as a woman with hidden feelings of protest against her being a wife to her husband, Brently. Though not initially established in the story, it became apparent in the middle and latter parts of the short story that she harbored a feeling of resentment against her husband due to years of a bad marriage. When she heard the news that her husband was dead, Louise's reaction was indeed like any other wife would have reacted: shock and surprise. However, as the readers learned within the confines of the room Louise had locked herself in, Brently's death signified her freedom from her marriage, allowing her to become a woman once again, free to do everything she liked. Indeed, Chopin displays this freedom from male suppression as: "She was beginning to recognize this thing that was approaching to possess her ... When she abandoned herself a little whispered word escaped her slightly parted lips. She said it over and over under breath: "free, free, free!'" In this remarkable event in the story, we thus witnessed that Louise was more relieved than grieved when she heard about her husband's death.

Death took on a symbolic role in the story when Brently emerged alive in the Mallard home, and his death was apparently false news. Louise, realizing that her freedom was threatened, thought of no other recourse than death as her way of protesting the 'unfairness' of her husband being alive. Death became a symbol of protest and escape for Louise, and the news that her husband was alive can be interpreted as the persistent existence of a patriarchal society. Louise's death symbolized the death of women's freedom if Brently, the symbol of patriarchy, continues to live. In effect, the woman protagonist's power came with her death, for it was only in her loss that she had finally expressed her true feelings about her being a wife to Brently and a woman in a male-dominated society.