Irony In The Story Of An Hour

In many of Chopin’s short stories, ironies are a regular and are typically expected. Chopin uses different types of ironies throughout her essays to create an atmosphere full of surprises and creativity, causing her short stories to be unpredictable and can cause the ending of the story to be unforeseeable. In arguably one of her most known short stories, “The Story of an Hour,” Chopin uses many different examples and types of irony that add color and a sense of uncertainty in the story. One could even claim that the title is ironic, since it doesn’t take an hour to read. In “The Story of an Hour,” situational, verbal, and dramatic irony are the types of irony that Chopin uses to attract the reader and add color and passion to the story.
In
In verbal irony, characters express words that mean something different than the truth. In, “The Story of an Hour,” it says, “she breathed a quick prayer that life might be long” (Chopin 66). Mrs. Mallard’s prayer was ironic, because as the reader reads farther down, the ending is quite the opposite. Instead of having “many spring days, and summer days of her own” (Chopin 66), she would soon find out that she was living in her final moments. Another example of verbal irony in the story is when she caught herself saying, “Free, Free, Free” (Chopin 65). This is ironic because in the end she will, in a sense, be free, but not the way she planned it. “As her pulse was beating faster, and the coursing blood warmed and relaxed every inch of her body” (Chopin 65), she was thinking of all the possibilities of what she could accomplish now that her husband wasn’t holding her back. She didn’t want to be feeling this way, right after her husband had passed away, but she couldn’t keep her emotions and passion in. It is also ironic because she started questioning and telling herself that she couldn’t think like this, but as she kept thinking about her new life without Mr. Mallard, she started to get more and more excited about the future. One could truly say that she died of “joy that kills” (Chopin