This story is about a young woman who is unhappy in her marriage. She is a good wife, but she lives like her husband’s possession. Louise accepts these circumstances because she can’t change them, but deep inside she hopes that her life won’t be long. “Only yesterday she had thought with a shudder that life might be long” (Chopin 4). The title of the story is The Story of an Hour because Louise’s life changes only for an hour, during which she feels intense joy of freedom.
The irony in the story is Louise’s death and the cause of it. There is also irony in the fact that she knows that her husband loved her. Louise thinks about her husband as “the face that never looked save with love upon her” (Chopin 3). However, she is relieved because of his death. Louise had felt imprisoned in her marriage which led to her heart problem. Suddenly she feels alive and reborn. She was feeling repressed for a long time in her marriage.
The central irony in the story is the cause of Louise’s death. She dies of shock and doctors believe that she died “of joy that kills” (Chopin 4). Louise is treated like a child throughout the whole story and we can also see that she was treated like a child in her marriage as well. Her role was to be a wife and she felt captivated. She was diagnosed with a heart problem which couldn’t be treated. Her husband loved her and she “had loved him – sometimes. Often she had not” (Chopin 4). Their marriage wasn’t a happy marriage but it was a typical marriage in the early twentieth century. The only way a woman could be independent was to become a widow. That is exactly what Louise thought happened to her and she was relieved.
In the beginning of the story it is said that Louise suffered from a heart problem and in the end she dies of shock that overwhelms her. Seeing her husband alive was the sight she couldn’t bare after having imagined what her life would be like in the future without him. She would be the master of her own fate.
Louise was a threat to herself all the time because she was unhappy and that was a psychosomatic problem. Her situation was oppressive all the time and in the end her condition ended up lethal.
The crucial point in the story is when Louise feels self-assertion. “What could love, the unsolved mystery, count for in face of this possession of self-assertion which she suddenly recognized as the strongest impulse of her being!” (Chopin 4). This means that Louise wanted to be a modern woman, an individual who makes her own decisions. Suddenly she felt that no matter how much she did or didn’t love her husband, her own life and independence meant to her much more.
All of this is a proof that women and men are equal and that they have the same needs. Louise is not a heartless woman, but she loves herself as well. The news about her husband’s death makes her feel empowered. There is no one she can belong to anymore but to herself and she is happy about it. She feels like a winner. “There was a feverish triumph in her eyes, and she carried herself unwittingly like a goddess of Victory” (Chopin 4).
At first when she was carefully told the news, she felt grief and she retreated to her room to her privacy. That was the place where she could begin to enjoy her solitude and to think about what she would do next.
Louise’s reaction of grief is suddenly transformed into the feeling of joy and fulfillment. She relaxes in her armchair and begins to notice the ordinary but beautiful things in life such as birds singing, the smell of rain in the air and blue sky. She saw “the tops of trees that were all aquiver with the new spring of life” (Chopin 2). Louise also felt that she was at a new beginning which would bring her joy.
Louise was punished for all her feelings of freedom and liberation. Her happiness didn’t last and with the return of her husband the condition of her heart got worse and it couldn’t function anymore. Maybe she felt guilty for being happy for someone else’s death, but she actually had a right to feel good about her own life in the future.
There could be numerous reasons that could have caused her death, but she didn’t die because of joy. Her brief moment of freedom in life is Louise’s story of an hour. She felt her whole life as a torture and she was free for merely an hour.
We can also see that Mr. and Mrs. Mallard had no children, so Louise would be all alone if her husband really died. She didn’t mind that probably because they could not have had children. Such a family was considered dysfunctional in the early twentieth century. Louise probably felt relief because nobody would think about that anymore because she would not marry again and she would be a widow.
The end of this story could have been a happy one if the husband didn’t come in so unexpectedly. Josephine, Louise’s sister and Richards, Brently’s friend could have warned her in a subtle was like they told her about his alleged death. However, it was a twist of fate that Louise came back downstairs at the moment when Brently came in. Josephine tried to protect her sister as well as Richards, but they were too late.
In the end nobody understood what happened to Louise and what kind of a person she was. She was unhappy in her life, but she died happy.
Works Cited
Chopin, Kate. The Dream of an Hour. United States: Vogue, 1894. Print.
