The Story of an Hour

“The Story of an Hour”

Kate Chopin

Author and feminist Kate Chopin lived in the height of the Victorian Era and was a direct encounter to the tyranny women endured and accepted in the late 19th century. There was a patriarchal code in effect, where the wife submitted completely to the husband. Unlike most women, Chopin decided to rebel against this common law. She responded with scandalous writings displaying explicitly with love, sex, and marriage. In Kate Chopin’s short story, “The Story of an Hour,” the effects of the patriarchal code are seen through the character, Mrs. Mallard, who represents the individualism, self assertion, and freedom wanted by the women of the 19th century.

The first sentence of the story is, “Knowing that Mrs. Mallard was afflicted with heart trouble, great care was taken to break to her as gently as possible the news of her husband’s death.” The first thing we are told about the main character is that she has a bad heart. It seems that Mrs. Mallard is seen as someone who is very weak and old. Her sister, Josephine, decided to tell her about Mr. Mallard’s death. She was careful as she told her, “in broken sentences,” as to keep from shooting the news right to her. Once the news was heard, there was not a pause. It was almost as if Mrs. Mallard knew what her husband’s friend, Richards, came to say and had prepared herself for this particular situation. She began crying immediately in her sister’s arms. She seems to be heartbroken as she makes her way to her room alone, “She would have no one follow her.”

She seems to be devastated once in her room. As she sits alone mourning her now late husband, facing the window and has a feeling that “haunted her body and seemed to reach into her soul.” This seems like she is feeling the hold her husband had on her that she couldn’t seem to escape even after he’s gone. As she sits in the chair gazing out the open window into the “new spring life”, she is describes as a young woman, contrasting what may have been thought of a woman with a “bad heart.” The open window, the face of a young woman, and spring time represents something renewed. The unhappiness of the marriage is realized in a single quote, “And yet she had loved him- sometimes. Often she had not” (faculty.millikin.edu). Self-assertion is now apart of her