Kate Chopin's "The Story of an Hour": A Rhetorical Analysis

Introduction: Miniaturism and Meaning in Chopin's Story

Kate Chopin's 1894 short story "The Story of an Hour" depicts a major event in a minimalist fashion — most of the action takes place in the mind of the protagonist, Louise Mallard. The story fits well with modern assessments of Chopin's achievement in longer fiction: her well-known novel The Awakening, published five years after "The Story of an Hour," revisits many of the same themes, dramatizing them in broad, colorful strokes while endeavoring to depict the vanishing world of Creole New Orleans. As Martha Cutter observes, Chopin's fiction features "stronger, less conventional female characters" (Cutter 34). In his survey of the nineteenth-century American novel, Gregg Crane notes that in The Awakening, "Chopin convincingly dramatizes how an unnameable and relatively faint discontent grows into a very real emotional disturbance and eventually leads not only to actions and decisions contrary to established arrangements and social customs, but also to catastrophe and death" (Crane 166–7).

To a certain degree, this is also an accurate summary of "The Story of an Hour" — a much shorter narrative in which the same vague discontent grows into a sincere emotional disturbance, encapsulating a scenario that is potentially subversive of the established patriarchal social order, but which finally leads to the ineluctable fact of death. The difference is that "The Story of an Hour" is not a novel: the same actions that Chopin treats at leisure in long fiction are here compressed into roughly a thousand words. This act of stylistic and cognitive compression means that the best approach to the story is rhetorical, with close attention to Chopin's language and literary style, in order to see how this short tale manages to pack such large meanings into the most minimal storytelling framework possible.

The Opening Sentence: Foreshadowing and Ambiguity

The opening sentence carefully sets up the ending. Since Chopin is working within such limited space — the story resembles the crafting of a prose poem more than a conventional fictional narrative — we are told that Mrs. Mallard "was afflicted with heart trouble," so "great care was taken to break to her as gently as possible the news of her husband's death." Chopin performs a number of functions with this opening beyond mere plot setup. There is significant ambiguity in the euphemism "heart trouble," which may indicate that Louise Mallard's affliction is related not merely to her circulatory system but to her emotional life. The use of the word "break" in close proximity — followed immediately by a reference to "broken sentences" — summons the echo of the phrase "heartbreak." To a certain extent, "The Story of an Hour" is a tale of love and loss, though it performs complicated reversals on the reader's expectations. These hints of heartbreak at the outset suggest the deeper emotional currents of the story, which Chopin carefully frames within the buttoned-down, emotionally repressed milieu of the late-nineteenth-century American haute-bourgeoisie.

Chopin tells us a little later that Mrs. Mallard had "a fair, calm face, whose lines bespoke repression and even a certain strength" — in other words, she is not alienated from the standard bourgeois virtues. Yet Louise Mallard will react emotionally and, as Chopin notes, atypically to the newspaper account listing her husband Brently Mallard among those killed in a "railroad disaster." Chopin informs us that Louise "did not hear the story as many women have heard the same, with a paralyzed inability to accept its significance" — the significance, of course, being widowhood and solitude. Ironically, once Louise gives way to grief, weeping "with sudden, wild abandonment" — a phrase more appropriate to sexual passion than bereavement — she retreats to her room alone and "would have no one follow her." It is clear that Louise does not fear the solitude of widowhood; she understands and courts it with preternatural immediacy. The remainder of the story takes place within the confines of Louise's room and her subjectivity.

Louise's Epiphany: Language, Suspense, and Transgression

Chopin chooses her words carefully — in a story of only a thousand words, every choice must be deliberate — and as Louise begins to search her thoughts, Chopin uses the language of literary suspense to prevent Louise's realization from attaining clarity too early in the story's arc. Chopin writes:

There was something coming to her and she was waiting for it, fearfully. What was it? She did not know; it was too subtle and elusive to name. But she felt it, creeping out of the sky, reaching toward her through the sounds, the scents, the color that filled the air.

This suggests that Louise Mallard's epiphany, upon learning of her husband's death, is not only "too subtle and elusive to name" but probably also something that should not be spoken — something transgressive. Bert Bender connects Louise's agonies to a larger strain in Chopin's fiction, reflecting Chopin's "growing sense that love might be nothing more than sexual desire, and that it is inconstant" (Bender 200). There is certainly a consciously sexual element to Chopin's portrayal of her protagonist at this moment: we are told that "her bosom rose and fell tumultuously" as "she was beginning to recognize this thing that was approaching to possess her, and she was striving to beat it back with her will — as powerless as her two slender hands would have been." This invokes, shockingly, the metaphoric imagery of rape to describe Louise's epiphany, and again a moralistic nineteenth-century sexual term — "abandoned" — is used to characterize the experience.

The epiphany consists, of course, of Louise's realization that she is "free, free, free." This is the major shock of the story: her grief gives way to a vertiginous sense of liberation, one that also implicitly compares the position of the middle-class housewife to that of a chattel slave — an echo of the Creole culture Chopin documents elsewhere in her fiction. Chopin describes the moment as an almost sexual response: Louise's eyes suddenly grow "keen and bright," her "pulses beat fast, and the coursing blood warmed and relaxed every inch of her body." It is not the expected reaction of a grieving widow, but these references to her "pulses" and "blood" are deliberately intended to recall the health problem mentioned in the story's first sentence.

Works Cited

Bender, Bert. "Kate Chopin's Quarrel with Darwin Before The Awakening." Journal of American Studies 26.2 (Aug 1992): 185–204. Print.

Berkove, Lawrence I. "Fatal Self-Assertion in Kate Chopin's 'The Story of an Hour'." American Literary Realism 32.2 (Winter 2000): 152–8. Print.

Crane, Gregg. The Cambridge Companion to the Nineteenth Century American Novel. New York and London: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Print.

Cutter, Martha J. "Losing the Battle but Winning the War: Resistance to Patriarchal Discourse in Kate Chopin's Short Fiction." Legacy 11.1 (1994): 17–36. Print.