Storytelling in “the Story of an Hour” and “girl”

Storytelling in “The Story of an Hour” and “Girl”

Reading Kate Chopin’s “The Story of an Hour” and Jamaica Kincaid’s “Girl” for the first time, there seems to be a similarity in the story. Even though both stories are focused on women and their roll, the two stories are very different. “The Story of an Hour” is about a woman who has a heart trouble and also fined out that her husband had died in a railroad disaster that occurred that day. Even though she loved her husband she had found freedom in the death of her husband because she had never being able to live for herself but now that her husband is dead she can begin to live for herself, but this all lead to a tragic ending when her husband came into the house and had not be were the disaster was and this lead to her death. While “Girl” is a dialog between a mother and her daughter about how a girl should look and act, and what a girl should know and be able to do so that she does not turn out to be a slut that she is bent on being.

In the beginning of the story “The Story of an Hour” the narrator introduce the characters by telling us their name and how they are related to the main character, Mrs. Mallard. Mrs. Mallard was a character that people pity and handle with delicacy, because of her heart problem she had to hear the story of her husband’s death in pieces and how it has been told to the other women (449; all page references are to the class text The Norton Introduction to Literature, Shorter 9th ed).

The narrator shows us how much she loved her husband by telling us that she broke down in tierce and begins to cry. The narrator also mentioned that she went upstairs alone to be by self, which is what any anyone who has lost someone the loved would have done. When she got in the room she wept some more that it got to the point that she could not weep anymore and she begin to weep like a child (450).

The narrator begins to talk about the future and a head by first using things that Mrs. Mallard could see through the open window from were she was sitting, the top of trees with new life because of the spring and the breathe of rain which indicates that it is going to rain (450). The narrator also talked about how she looks and how she had gotten a dull stare in her eyes that was now fixed on a sky that was far away from her in the sky, how she feels that there is something coming to her and how had been scared at first because nothing like the thing coming her now have ever happened to her before or imagined because she had never thought she could be free (450). Freedom was new to her because she had never been free. Other people have had to live for her, but now she can finally live for herself.

Because she lived in the time when men were controlling women and they do not have any rights of their own. Her opinion does not mater and because she had to leave her parents house where her father was controlling her and moved to her husband house where he controls her. But now that he is dead she can do what ever she pleases to do without any ones telling her she cannot do it. Even though her joy had come from the death of her husband, she still wouldn’t have wish death on him because he had been a kind and loving husband (450). The narrator also lets us know that she had stop loving him because she had never had her freedom because of the institution of marriage. Be cause one person since to think