The Story of An Hour

    Society's expectations of women being weak and needing a man to survive have been perpetuated for centuries. Chopin's "The Story of An Hour" gives a perspective that not many people in the 1890s would get to see in the public eye, a woman's. The description of Mrs. Mallard and her reaction to her husband's supposed death displays the expectations that have been placed on her throughout her life and how much they have weighed on her.

    The connection between the body and the soul throughout the story has obvious and subtle appearances. The more obvious ones are when she feels that she is "pressed down by a physical exhaustion that haunted her body and seemed to reach her soul" after she is told that her husband died. The physical exhaustion she feels is actually an emotional one. The overwhelming emotions she feels from hearing the news, and also the physical manifestation of the expectations that have been placed on her as a woman in the modern-day society of her time. Later on in the story, she screams out, "Free! Body and soul free!" She was not weighed down because of her grief, she was being weighed by the shackles that were already there due to her almost loveless marriage. At the end of the story, she dies of "heart disease-- of the joy that kills." Though she doesn't actually die of a joy that kills, the weight of societal pressures were placed on her once again when her husband walked through the door. Her emotional state definitely impacts her physical state.

    More subtly, we are told at the beginning of the story that Mrs. Mallard has heart problems. When told of her title and of her afflictions, one would assume that she was an older woman, yet the story describes that she is a young woman. Her older emotional health shows how locked down she is in her role. She was never given a space to explore who she was. Additionally, her joyful reaction to her husband's death was something she tried to repress within herself because those feelings go against the script that had been written for her. This suppression of her true self reflects itself in her heart, leading to her death when her heavy grief was thrust upon her once again after she had already received the sweet taste of freedom. Chopin is challenging the notion that a woman is only happy when she is married and has a family and is making the claim that women are thrust into marriages too early and are doomed for a life of dissatisfaction and unhappiness.


Samantha Rodriguez

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