Author: Kate Chopin (American, 1850-1904)
Published: 1894
Category: Character Study
Text: VCU, Ann Woodlief's English Web
Summary:
Life, is it what you expect?
Analysis:
What do you expect from life? And who sets those expectations? You? Your family? Your friends? Your husband? Do your expectations shape your life? Can changing your expectations, change your life? For a few precious moments, Mrs. Mallard, the protagonist in Kate Chopins' "The Story of An Hour", discovered they do, and they can.
Mrs. Mallard's expectations of life were shaped by her husband, whose "kind intentions" masked a "powerful will" which sought, with "blind persistence", to force her life into a shape of his choosing; his loving looks "fixing" her in a "gray and dead...procession of years" the "thought" of which made her "shudder [,] that life might be long."
Young, she lived as a child in a "dream", presenting "a fair, calm face" to the world; locking up her troubled thoughts in a troubled heart. It was only on receiving news of her husband's death that she dared, for a moment, to release them.
Fearfully, at first, then wildly, with a powerless abandonment, she allowed her old expectations of a long and dreary life to be replaced with the expectation of a new life holding the promise of a freedom of both "body and soul"; and, to her surprise, she discovered that with the release of the old expectations, came the release of "a monstrous joy". A joy that refused to be locked away when her husband walked through the front door, alive and well.
There were signs that Mrs. Mallard knew her expectations of life were not her own; her "heart trouble" for one, the "physical exhaustion" that "haunted her soul"; her sense of "something coming to her" for which she had been "waiting". And there were signs that her sister, Josephine, and her husband's friend, Richard, colluded with her husband's expectations for her; both acted to shield her from the news of his death, to break it to her gently, with "veiled hints"; an implicit recognition that her life was not her own, but his.
When Mrs. Mallard, on hearing the news of her husband's death, locked herself up in her room her sister, ironically, implored her to "open the door", fearing she would make herself ill, when she had been ill her entire married life. And although it was Mrs. Mallard who had entered the room, it was Louise who came out, joyful, victorious, "clasping her sister's waist", giving, rather than needing, support; standing tall above Richard, a man, waiting below.
Joyful and victorious until the "latch-key" turned and the front door of her larger world opened, re-admitting her "stained" husband, who carried with him the "grip-sack" of her old expectations, and her death.
