Katie

On Hour of the Day

In “The Story of an Hour” is one of Kate Chopin’s best know piece of short fiction. Kate Chopin creates the image of an old and fragile woman that has a weak heart. During the hour that this story takes place in we see that thought the use of symbolisms that everything is not what it seems in the Mallard house. In Kate Chopin’s “The Story of an Hour” the use of symbolisms depicts what is happing inside Mrs. Mallard mind.

From the first line in “The Story of an Hour”, “Knowing that Mrs. Mallard was afflicted with a heart trouble, great care was taken to break to her as gently as possible the news of her husband's death” (1). We see an old woman that just has a heart problem and that she is in fact just weak and fragile, but thought the use of symbolism we learn that she in fact that her heart condition is her hard life and is wise beyond her years. In her response to hear the bad news of her husbands death she wept and went at once in her sisters arms and went into the grieving process at once while most woman cannot

accept that fact that their husbands have died.

While she sits alone mourning her now late husband she sits in the armchair facing the window she has a feeling that come over her, “haunted her body and seemed to reach into her soul” (12). In the story the reader just sees this as sadness but it could also symbolizes that even with her husband gone she can’t escape his hold and control of her. This could be looked at as physical abuse. In Kate Chopin’s time men solely ran the house hold and woman were docile and submissive and it wan not uncommon for a man to hit his wife. When is sitting there something posses her and “she was striving to beat it back with her will” (6). The reader later learns that the word is free is what is possesses her. When is fighting the word she was “as powerless as her two white slender hands would have been”(9). The reader asks themselves why she would want to try to hold back such a good thing. She must have been feeling guilty about being happy when death is such a bad thing. The mention of her hands being powerless brings up the topic of abuse aging.

The author’s use of monstrous joy is used to describe Mrs. Mallard was felling. Joy being monstrous invokes the thought that she should have been happy in the first place. When she talks about her love for him the author tell you that, “she loved him some times” (11). This could symbolize that he was always first and when the author tells the reader how he looked at her with, “the face that never looked save with love upon her” (12). It could mean that he never looked at her with compassion, tenderness, or kindness of her. Her living without those for years in an abuse marriage would give her the reason of felling a monstrous joy.

Through out the story we only know the main character names as Mrs. Mallard, but towards the end we learn her first name, Louise. The author waited to tell the reader her first name to symbolize that she was always seen as Brentlys Wife, and not as her own person. With him gone she was a separate entity. The author informs us that, “she was drinking in a very elixir of life through that open window” (31). The elixir symbolizes her cure for all of her life’s troubles and the open wind from which she drinks the elixir symbolizes a window of opportunity.

As Louise decides to walk