Story Of An Hour Literary Analysis Essay

“The Story of an Hour” by Kate Chopin is a short prose that portrays a negative point of view of the women of the Victorian Era. It unveils a woman’s true inner conflict between reality and idealism. Marriage is viewed as a constrained and male dominant relationship. Louise Mallard is led to believe that she is a widow after being incorrectly informed of her husband’s death. She is consumed with a strong mixture of emotions. At this point Louise feels a great sense of “monstrous joy”, in which keeps her in an unrealistic state of independence and freedom. In this scene we assume that she would have grievance over the death of her husband, but then she retreats to her solitary confinement and escapes into her trance of sudden independence. The chair in which she sank into, displayed her longing repose and aversion to the residuum of her oppressive past. She always felt this sense of escape during her marriage but now she realized that her moment has arrived. The fact that she is consumed with “monstrous joy” after knowing the death of her husband is clearly ironic. This whole story is based on irony and Chopin integrated that device for a strong purpose; and that being a message. It contained a short and sardonic plot. Her character, as well as her reaction to this
situation was strange and unordinary, but it was in fact quite reasonable to the women of her time. Chopin utilized the window and its unfolding opportunities to describe Louise’s newfound and idealistic life.
She used the upcoming clouds to delineate her imminent danger, which in her case, her death and rejection to the realization of her circumstance. Her husband plays a predominant role to her oppression. There is no solid evidence to provide a factual conclusion to why she was in that situation, but an assumption can be made that he was not very lenient as a husband in her case. Though it was stated that he did very much love her, she did not seem to express the same intimacy in return, in which led to the conclusion that it might have been her own oppression after
all. Louise Mallard is given the characteristics of being young, fair and slender, in which would render us to thinking that she is a well composed woman of her time. She shows a great disconnection to her actual reality and her introverted self. Her feelings change from the beginning to the end. She experiences two opposing emotions of having a “monstrous joy” to experiencing massive shock. Her reaction to Brentley’s return was another ironic scenario. She was said to die from the over joy that kills, but little did they know it was from the feeling of shock and depression over her loss of freedom.