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Thematic issues in Chopin's "The Story of an Hour,": plot, setting, voice, characterization, symbols, foreshadowing, and/or irony.

Chopin's "The Story of an Hour," is about a woman's heady realization that she is free with the death of her husband. Not that her husband was unkind to her but that she had surrendered her whole life to him and now that he was allegedly dead, she realized that she could live her life for herself. Her husband returns and the woman die, bystanders thoughts from "the joy that kills." The story seems to imply otherwise: the woman's dreams of freedom had suddenly vanished.

The story is replete with thematic issues heralding its subject. There is the setting: The onset of spring. Spring is a break from winter with a promise of new life and hope. Mrs. Mallard has just had her tempestuous cry, she has just experienced the bleakness and darkness of winter; hope -- spring -- is stirring outside her window.

She could see in the open square before her house the tops of trees that were all aquiver with the new spring life. The delicious breath of rain was in the air. In the street below a peddler was crying his wares. The notes of a distant song which some one was singing reached her faintly, and countless sparrows were twittering in the eaves.

Characterization also points to thematic content. The woman is called "Mrs. Mallard" at the story's beginning. She is still the possession of another. In making the transition to realization of freedom, she becomes known as the anonymous 'she'. And, finally, when embracing her freedom and becoming herself - "Free! Body and soul free!" she kept whispering - the character is called by her first name "Louise.'

We have the irony here too. Her sister begs her at this point to open the door; she is concerned of Louise becoming ill. Translate this as opening the door to liberty and as Louise asserts she is not ill. No, her door to liberty has cracked wide open, and the irony is amplified by the story pointing out the "elixir of life" that was coming through the "open window." The door to her home (which symbolized domesticity and forced ties to husband may be closed), but the window (to outside) was open. There are layers of meaning here

The culminating irony is her husband's return and her own death. Observers pronounce her to have died "of heart disease -- of the joy that kills." The story implies that she had died of the reverse. She had momentarily experience a life-enthralling joy that energizes. That joy had now been taken from her.

Not that her husband had abused her. The story deliberately points out that he had been kind to her, that she had even loved him infrequently. It was, as description of face hints -- "She was young, with a fair, calm face, whose lines bespoke repression and even a certain strength" -- the need to, over and again, repress herself for her husband's ends. Social convention and norms had pressed her into bondage. Her husband's supposed death had liberated her.