In “The Story of an Hour” by Kate Chopin, describes the last hour in the life of Louise Mallard, who is trapped in an unhappy marriage with a husband she did not really love, but has a brief moment when it appears that freedom is at hand thanks to his untimely death. After all, this was an era when divorce was rare and social, economic and educational opportunities for women were very limited. All of Chopin’s women characters in her fictional work also shared a strong desire to escape from the constraints of Victorian marriage and family life. They were often based on her own experience or that of her mother and grandmother, and sometimes their attempts to win their freedom were successful while at other times they failed. Chopin was born into a French Catholic Creole family in St. Louis, and later lived in Louisiana with her husband until she became a widow, and most of her fiction work takes place in these locations. She never explicitly described herself as a feminist or reformer, although the female heroines in her short stories and novels were highly unconventional by 19th Century standards. Most of her early biographers failed to realize that her work was heavily based on family and personal experiences, including the lives of her mother and grandmother. One of these ancestor stories, “Athenaise” was based on her grandmother’s unhappy marriage to a man who deserted her and left her in poverty to raise seven children on her own.
Today, the fictional work for which Chopin is best remembered, and probably the only one that is widely read is “The Story of an Hour”. Like the trapped wife in Charlotte Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper”, Louise Mallard is imprisoned in a repressed “stultifying marriage” to a man she does not love, and feels “monstrous joy” and “body and soul free” when she hears of his demise in a railroad accident (Toth 22). She does not feel much grief at the death of her husband, but more an intense euphoria that she might finally be free for the first time in her life. Symbolically, she experienced his demise as a chance for her own rebirth, like springtime after a long and cold winter. Of course, the story ends on an ironic note when the husband walks through the door and Louise drops dead of a heart attack when she sees him, but not from the sheer surprise and happiness of seeing him, as the male characters assume. They imagine that her weak heart comes from ‘natural’ female delicacy and weakness, but in fact Louise has never been permitted to be string, given the social and political realities of Victorian America. In reality, her heart trouble comes from being imprisoned in a stultifying domestic situation from which his death was her only way out. In the end, if he did not die than she would have to, because it was clear that she preferred to be dead than go on living this way.
Chopin’s mother Eliza O’Flarity was also called ‘Eliza’ by her family and close friends, and like the Louise of the story also had a sister named Josephine. Her real father, Thomas O’Flaherty, did die in a railroad accident in 1855, and other characters in the story have similar names or initials to others who died in the same accident—or were at least initially reported to have died. Like Louise, Eliza had married an older man for money and security, not love, in order to help her mother and siblings in their impoverished situation. Unlike Louise, she was left a widow with a large estate; she was free of her husband and never remarried (Toth 23). Chopin therefore grew up in a household with no adult male relatives, and she returned to live with her mother in St. Louis after her husband died. Simply by luck, and the high death rate from disease and accidents in the 19th Century, Kate and Eliza Chopin “had through widowhood evaded in some ways the claims of family, community, and husbands” (Toth 25). Kate Chopin never remarried after she became a widow, and considered herself liberated to become a serious writer. Compared to the unfortunate Louise Mallard, who “dies in the world of her family where she has always sacrificed for others”, Chopin found a small niche that freed her from traditional marriage and family values (Toth 24).
Chopin had personal experience of women’s poverty and lack of social and economic opportunities, as well as the widespread feeling of being imprisoned in family and marriage situations over which they had no control. All the characters in her stories hoped to escape from these, and sometimes they succeeded. Although she never openly described herself as a feminist, many of her characters were based on her own family life and domestic situation, and she showed how repressed women were in Victorian America. Unlike the real Kate Chopin, Louise Mallard does not manage to win her freedom from domestic slavery, and perhaps she imagined that her own life might have been much worse had the death of oppressive men not provided her with an escape.
REFERENCES
Literary Analysis of “Story of an Hour” by Kate Chopin: Language, Emotion and Marriage. 2012. Article Myriad. 25 September 2012
<http://www.articlemyriad.com/literary-analysis-story-hour-chopin/>
Toth, E. “Kate Chopin Thinks Back through Her Mothers: Three Stories by Kate Chopin” in L.S. Boren and S. de Saussure. Kate Chopin Reconsidered: Beyond he Bayou. Louisiana State University Press, 1992: 15-25.
