Oppression Of Women In The Story Of An Hour

Pretty bird, pretty bird, all she wanted to do was fly away. Kate Chopin’s opposition to the oppression of the female in society is obvious when examining her story, “The Story of an Hour” through the feminist lens. Where we as readers, can analyze how the sexual identity of women influenced her story through the use of literary devices. I wouldn’t call it, woman intuition, for the sake of males, who lacks that special gift. Nevertheless, that’s what the literary devices allowed us to comprehend.
From reading “The Story of an Hour”, you can see the tension through the text caused by mixed emotions. Where we can analyze that the woman protagonist is being oppressed while the male remains to be seen as the dominant. Being that the male is dominant
with the reference of war, it is safe to assume that this can be viewed as a historical timeframe where women stayed home and did chores or housewife duties. While the men were drafted in the army, in addition to mentioning that they also received word by telegram. This can also be seen as a direct indication to the time period of the 1800s, which can explain why Chopin has written the story the way she did. In addition, this can be viewed as a direct indication of how she felt women were treated.
As the tension converts into a purplex position for the protagonist being that, “It was her sister Josephine who told her, in broken sentences; veiled hints that revealed in half concealing.”, implies the stereotype of the “weaker sex” but also because that stereotype is reinforced by another female character (Chopin).
The way the protagonist, wept with sudden, wild abandonment, in her sister’s arms, not only expresses the emotions she felt but more of how she was viewed as weak and had to submit to the feeling of feeling horrible with the loss of her husband. For all we may even know, she probably didn’t even fully expose the feeling of lost and replaced it with
hope.
As the protagonist, Ms. Mallard sits in her room alone we see how she does away with the mentality women had in her time frame. Even today, Chopin’s words can elicit different reactions from different kinds of readers with the use of figurative language. For example, when she abandoned herself a little whispered word escaped her slightly parted lips. She said it over and over under her breath: “free, free, free!”By using the phrase “She said it over and over,” Chopin hints that the words have become a consoling mantra for the bereaved widow, thus implying a positive interpretation of them. The words “under her breath” might also encourage the reader to feel an intimacy with Louise and thus regard her sympathetically, since the reader is allowed to share a very personal moment (Durrer).
This displays how the theme and tone correlated to express her desire of freedom. In the patriarchal world of the nineteenth-century United States that Chopin depicts, a woman was not expected to engage in self-assertion. Mrs. Mallard in herself was relinquishing the feeling of being submissive and felt as if she could live for herself. Many women readers, for instance, can probably sympathize with Louise’s desire for freedom. “But she saw beyond that bitter moment a long procession of years to come that would belong to her absolutely. And she opened and spread her arms out to them in welcome.” Whereas women of the 1890’s who were struggling for greater rights and freedom, might have viewed Louise’s outburst as an inspirational rejection of a woman’s traditional role (Durrer). Mrs. Mallard’s thought processes also exemplifies a transition of her old life as a subservient wife and her new life as an independent woman. Chopin’s use of images and symbols protrudes her feminist approach to freedom.
Just as she locks herself in her room and locks out her social world. By conditioning her repressed emotions, she awakens individual elements of her natural environment: she notices, as she looks out her bedroom window, the trees, the rain, the air, the peddler’s voice, the notes of a song, the sparrows, the sky, and the clouds (193). Freeing her emotions Mrs. Mallard attends to “the sounds, the scents, the color” in the natural world (193), and they teach her of the sounds, the scents, and the color within her own soul. Louise’s responsiveness to the sounds, scents, and color is her excited and intense responsiveness to beauty. To feel life’s beauty, then, is to see the beauty of one’s own life. For to look at the world of nature is to feel life’s innate, spontaneous beauty: “she was drinking in a very elixir of life through the open window” (194). As Rosenblum said: “The trees are “all aquiver” with new life. Rain has fallen, purifying the air, and now the clouds are parting to show “patches of blue sky.” This scene mirrors Louise’s situation. Finally her soul can awake and she can realize the full potential of her life, so she, like the trees, feels aquiver with life. The clouds again represent her married life, which were dark clouds on her happiness, but now her life is clearing. As she contemplates her future, she imagines “spring days and summer days” only, not autumn or winter days,
because she links herself to the seasons of rebirth and ripening.”
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