Freedom and Kate Chopins Story of an Hour Essay -- Story Hour essays

Freedom and The Story Of An Hour When I first read Kate Chopins The Story Of An Hour, my instinctual response was to sym meansize with the quotation of Mrs. mallard. This seemed to me to have been intended by the author because the humbug follows her emotional path from the original shock upon hearing of her husbands supposed death to her gradual espousal of the joy she feels in anticipating her new freedom to the irony of her own sharp death. However, superstar fact cannot be overlooked when judging my personal chemical answer to this piece. Because this storys theme is basically an issue of what a woman has the right to stick out from her life, the fact that I am a woman living in a society where freedom and independence are valued to a higher place all else weighs heavily on the way I look upon the actions of Mrs. Mallard and also on the way I judge Chopins message. It is interesting to commemorate that even in the storys opening, before Mrs. Mallards re sponse has run its full course, her reaction to the news of the accident which is presumed to have killed her husband is already being contrasted to the one which society would deem appropriate. It is mentioned that She did not hear the story as many an(prenominal) women have heard the same, with a paralyzed inability to accept its importation(pg 275, P3). Though upon discussion of the story I found that this sentence had set a kernel of suspicion in the minds of some as to the legitimacy of Mrs. Mallards display of emotion, I had taken once, with sudden, wild abandonment(pg 275, P3) endeared her to me all the more(prenominal) because I felt that it meant she was very much in touch with the workings of her heart andimmediately at their mercy, and this made her reacti... .... As a woman who wants what these women wanted, I find this hard to grapple with. I appreciate the fact that this story was written in a time when feminism was unheard of, provided I wish that Chopin, who had been liberated enough to conceive of a lineament who would think like Mrs. Mallard, could also have imagined a situation in which she could have survived. Work Cited Chopin, Kate. The Story of An Hour. The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction. Ed. R.V. Cassill and Richard Bausch. New York W.W. Norton and Company, 2000. 106-109. Works Consulted Cixous, Helene. laughter of the Medusa. Feminisms An Anthology of Literary Theory And Criticism. Ed. Robyn R. Warhol and Diane Price Herndl. New Brunswick, New Jersey Rutgers University Press, 1991. Moi, Toril. versed/Textual Politics. New York Routledge, Chapman and Hall, 1988.