In Kate Chopin’s short story “Story of an Hour,” Louise Mallard, a fragile young woman, is told that her husband has just died. As the incredibly truncated length of the short story continues, Louise goes through a whole range of emotions, including intense and utter sorrow upon first hearing that her husband has passed away, to horror and shock. However, as those feelings subside, she begins to feel a sense of agency and freedom, understanding the freedom that comes from no longer having to be married to her husband. The brief relief and freedom that comes to women when given the chance to be free from the social institutions they are trapped in is explored in depth within this story. “Story of an Hour” explores the gender roles of 19th century America, and the feelings of entrapment and subjugation that women often felt in the institution of marriage.
Louise Mallard as a character serves to represent the ideals, feelings and frustrations of many women living in marriages in the19th century, particularly through the events of the story. Right from the beginning, Louis is said to be “afflicted with a heart trouble,” characterizing her as being very emotional and fragile (Chopin, 1894). This kind of coded language is typically used to devalue women’s feelings and desires as being part of their flightiness and overt emotionality, and so the story establishes a hurdle that Louise herself must overcome.
Despite the allegorical nature of her character, however, Louise is a fully three-dimensional character with her own nuances and tics, as well as opinions and thoughts of her own. Once she is told that her husband is dead, she spends the appropriate amount of time wasting away in sorrow, sobbing and being by herself; however, she eventually becomes less sad and morose, and starts to think about her future without her husband. It is here that Chopin begins to tear into the patriarchal notions of marriage and control in greater detail: "There would be no powerful will bending hers in that blind persistence with which men and women believe they have a right to impose a private will upon a fellow-creature" (Chopin, 1894). In this single thought, Louise becomes the mouthpiece for Chopin’s goals to show that women often feel trapped in their marriages, and instead want to have the same freedoms as men do.
The primary theme of “Story of an Hour” is the societal expectations upon women, particularly within marriages (most especially widows). The story itself takes place in 19th century America, in the South in particular; here, the values and wants of women were mostly ignored for the sake of being status symbols for the men they married. In Chopin’s story, there is a very controversial idea (especially for the time) that marriage only serves to entrap women into a life of servitude and submission, giving them little choice to do the things they want to do. The idea that a woman would be okay with her husband having passed away is shocking, to be sure, but her perspective is also understandable from the perspective of advocating for female empowerment. The purpose of this setting is to provide contemporary social criticism on the part of women, showing just how miserable women are with the way of life they are forced into. Just as Louise discovers a newfound sense of freedom and empowerment without her husband, many female readers of the story may well have thought the same thing.
Just as important as Louise’s own thoughts are her treatment by others, showcasing the societal expectation for her to be a grieving, properly behaving widow. Louise is treated like a child by many people around her, including Josephine, her sister; she talks to Louise “in broken sentences; veiled hints that revealed in half concealing” (Chopin, 1894). One of Louise’s husband’s friends, Richards, makes a point to avoid her, as she is likely emotional; he “had hastened to forestall any less careful, less tender friend in bearing the sad message” (Chopin, 1894). The third person perspective furthers this sense of distance and voyeurism, as the reader feels like one of the many people gossiping and speculating about her state of mind.
Because of the huge expectations that have been placed on her, Louise feels a huge emotional weight and pressure to act in the typical manner befitting a widow, which she follows through with initially. She makes a point to sulk for days on end, giving out a small cry “as a child who has cried itself to sleep continues to sob in its dreams” (Chopin, 1894). At the same time, as her sorrow subsides and she begins to feel optimistic about the future, her spirits lift – she even whispers to herself, "Free! Body and soul free!" (Chopin, 1894). By showing Louise’s personality change in this way, Chopin can show both the cliché of the grieving widow, and what happens when one widow chooses to not react in that same way.
The format of “Story of an Hour” is short and sweet, symbolically indicating the small amount of time Louise is allowed to both grieve for her dead husband and feel excitement at the possibility of being without him. The ‘hour’ of the story itself is a rollercoaster of difficult choices and intense emotions for Louise, as she re-evaluates her own marriage and tries to figure out what it actually meant to her. As she buries herself in the intensity of the death of her husband, it does not take her long to start thinking about the ways in which she could be free.
This is exacerbated by the story’s lack of detail regarding her marriage before the husband’s alleged death; for as much as the audience is aware, he may have had nothing overtly wrong with him. However, the fact that she is so quick to imagine herself free and happy without him tells the audience that she was supremely unhappy with the marriage as it was. Because the story is told in a third-person perspective, we are not given much insight into Louise’s innermost thoughts – only as much as it takes to tell the story. The use of repeated phrases like “life might be long” helps the audience to understand the frenetic nature of the short amount of time involved in this story (Chopin, 1984).
With all of these themes and tactics in mind, Chopin’s “Story of an Hour” gives the reader a glimpse into the static and tortured life of married women in the 19th century American South. Louise, like many subjugated women in that time, were forced to be married in order to achieve social stability or raise the status of the men they married. To that end, they were stuck in unhappy marriages that gave them little agency to do what they wanted. Louise, for that brief hour of intense emotion, gets to fantasize about the possibility of being free from her husband, only to die of a mysterious illness right before her husband can come back. The doctors say that Louise died of “heart disease – of the joy that kills” (Chopin, 1894). In this way, she may have died of elation at the sudden realization that her husband was indeed alive, or in shock at the destruction of her dream being shattered by his living.
Works Cited
Chopin, K. (1894). Story of an hour. Vogue.
