Story of an Hour Plot Analysis Essay

Differences in Responses To Kate Chopin’s “The Story of an Hour” Kate Chopin’s “The Story of an Hour” seems to explore a woman’s surprising reaction to her husbands assumed death and miraculous reappearance, but actually Chopin offers this story to exploit the complexity of marriage as a whole. Chopin depicts this marriage as one where the wife is so unhappy with the marriage as a whole that she is actually overcome with a sense of freedom by the news of her husband’s death. Marriage often creates a wall between a husband and a wife. I feel like Chopin was doing some foreshadowing in the first paragraph by stating that Mrs. Mallard was afflicted with heart trouble. This plants the idea in your mind that she already has heart trouble and gives a hint of what is yet to come. Mrs. Mallard did not react the way most women would react. She grieved with wild abandonment because of the shock of the news but also because of the shock of how she felt in relation to the news. I feel that Mrs. Mallard was a victim of her time. She felt unable to control her own life in this male-dominated society. She felt she did not have the freedom to just divorce her husband that she would only experience freedom through his untimely death. I feel that Mrs. Mallard was shocked by her own response and overcome by her sense of guilt at the reappearance of her husband that she had just been told had died. When my husband read “The Story of an Hour” his reaction to Mrs. Mallard was different than my own. He sees Chopin’s story as a classic case of the fact that men never know what it takes to make a women happy. Mrs. Mallard’s husband has no idea that his wife is unsatisfied with their marriage. My husband believes that Mrs. Mallard is a horrible person because she is experiencing a monstrous joy over the fact that her husband is deceased. He believes that Mr. Mallard is a hardworking man who is out trying to support his family and all he is guilty of is trying too hard to please a women who will never be happy. He feels that in the end her untimely death benefits her husband who did not deserve to be in that kind of marriage. My husband’s interpretation of “The Story of an Hour” is dramatically different than my own. My husband is 12 years younger than myself and is a child of divorce. He seems to relate this back to the fact that he feels it is very hard to make a women happy. He watched is parent’s divorce and in his opinion his father was a hard- working man who could never seem to make his mother happy. He feels that Mrs. Mallard is evil because all Mr. Mallard did was try to provide for his family and put a roof over their head and was only hated by a women that was never happy. My husband sympathizes with Mr. Mallard and views him a victim. My mother’s interpretation of “The Story of an Hour” is different from my husbands but similar to mine. My mother agrees like myself that Mrs. Mallard was a victim of her time period. My mother feels that a wife in that era was made to feel submissive to her husband. She view that a women’s needs and wants were not taken into consideration. My mother grew up in an era where she watched her mother’s needs go unmet by her father.

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