Love and marriage have always been an inexhaustible topic in the literature of all nation and all times. Depiction of various shades of emotion in this context has offered the reader a great enjoyment as well as some food for thought. The short story The Story of an Hour by an American writer Kate Chopin is one of the examples of Considering the moral conventions of the her time, especially with regard to female rights and behavior, this story was definitely an unusual approach to interpreting the relationship between the sexes: the female protagonist hears about the abrupt death of her husband and silently celebrates her liberation while the world thinks she is mourning her husband deeply. This notion of freedom from a suffocating marriage is what makes The Story of an Hour topical nowadays: despite the fact that widowhood is no longer the only socially acceptable way out of an unhappy marital union, the issue of female unhappiness is marriage has not ceased to exist. The subtle use of irony, extreme attention to the scenery, and abundance of precise metaphors allow the author to tell the story of a tumult of joy inside a woman’s heart along with the stillness of mourning on her face.
In The Story of an Hour, implied irony is undoubtedly the most powerful literary device in relation to the theme because it enables to supply a relatively short text with a great number of absolutely unexpected twists and turns of the plot. At the first glance, few events really happen within the space of an hour: the protagonist, Mrs. Mallard is informed about her husband’s accidental death, but an hour later this information turns out to be false because her husband comes home alive. This is what passes before the eyes of the whole world. What happens inside Mrs. Mallard’s side is entirely another matter. Irony allows Kate Chopin to ensure transition between these two planes of the protagonist’s existence. For example, when Mrs. Mallard allows no one to follow her into her room, the reader expects that she is about to cry her heart out because of her painful and profound grief. This kind of the reader’s reaction was appropriate in the end of the nineteenth century, when the story was written and published, and it remains expected even now, when there is a greater deal of freedom for women. Ironically, the powerful word that creeps into Mrs. Mallard’s mind is not “lonely” or “dead”, but “free, free, free” (Chopin). In other words, Chopin is artfully developing the situation which ends with the opposite towards what the reader actually expects. The most salient example of irony is the last sentence of the piece: “When the doctors came they said she had died of heart disease – of the joy that kills” (Chopin). The outside world thinks that, as a good wife, Mrs. Mallard died of a great joy when she saw her husband alive after having been told about his death. However, the reader, who was allowed into her room when no one else was, realizes that it was not the joy, but the extreme and painful disappointment. At this point, the irony of the situation allows Chopin to expose the irony of the conventional marital behavior: the real situation in the individuals’ hearts and minds is very much different from what they actually allow the society to see.
Scenery is another literary device which allows Chopin to explore the conflict between “proper” marital behavior and female longing for freedom. As Mrs. Mallard retreats to her room, she comes to the window and contemplates “the tops of trees that were all aquiver with the new spring life” (Chopin). This vibrant picture of live presents a deep contrast with the grim news the protagonist was informed about earlier. The reader expects Mrs. Mallard to grieve and hate the nature for the new life while she had to deal with the death of the closest person in her life. However, it turns out later that this element of scenery performs a double function: on the one hand, it misleads the reader into thinking like the people of society, who were not allowed into Mrs. Mallard bedroom at the described moment of crisis, but on the other hand, it leads the reader to realize that “the new life” outside the window is not the opposition to Mr. Mallard’s death, but the omen of the renovation in Mrs. Mallard’s life. The descriptions of the scenery take little room in order to make some space for the description of the protagonist’s state of mind. However, the former is in many cases the background for the latter, and The Story of an Hour is no exception.
Finally, one should remark the precision of the metaphors Chopin supplies her description with, allowing the story to flow seamlessly even in the moments of seemingly rough plot transitions. No words take their place in the story in vain, every word marks an emotion. Such metaphors as “the storm of grief”, “the delicious breath of rain”, “patches of blue sky”, “feverish triumph” make the reader to actually feel the words while reading them, thus leading to the establishment of the needed rapport between him or her and the story and preparing him or her to embracing the final piece of news (Chopin). As a literary device, the metaphor conveys feelings through the combination of words, which the connotations of separate words are hardly able to convey. By using this literary device extensively, Chopin induces the audience to sympathize with her protagonist and not to judge her harshly for longing for freedom instead of mourning in her widowhood.
The Story of an Hour by Kate Chopin is a short but extremely ample piece of writing that explores the issue of freedom in marriage. It makes the reader realize that, although one spouse does not abuse the other, it still does not mean that the marriage is successful and the love is mutual. Very often, for the sake of societal conventions, women have to pretend that they are happy in their marriage while they are actually longing for freedom. Using such literary devices as irony, scenery and metaphor, the author leads the reader into the intricate world of a female soul.
Works Cited
Chopin, Kate. “The Story of an Hour”, Virginia Commonwealth University. Web.
http://archive.vcu.edu/english/engweb/webtexts/hour/
