The Story Of An Hour
One twist, two twists, a widow cries, a widow laughs all in the space of an hour.
The Facts
Text: The Story Of An Hour Author: Kate Chopin
Genre: Victorian, Feminist, Year: 1894
Available: Public Domain (Free!)
Content warning: Death of a spouse. Spoilers for the story below! I recommend this week's story first then this post!
The Fiction
The widow has long been a source of anxiety in Western societies. She is a woman with knowledge of married life, a woman often made independent and wealthy by the death of her husband, . A confusing breed of woman who no longer fits into the patriarchal sphere where she is under the household of a man and this makes her dangerous. At least from a man's perspective.
Although a figure of a grief, the widow as written about by a woman, especially a woman in the Victorian era, might look very different. You might even catch her smiling under that veil.
The Story of An Hour by Kate Chopin is a very short, but very effective story. It tells of Mrs. Louise Mallard a woman with a heart condition who is told of her husband's sudden death in a railway accident. After being told Louise weeps and then asks to be alone. She locks her self in a room and feels a huge wave of emotion about to crash into her--not grief but joy. The news of her husband's death brings to Louise a sense of exhilarating freedom. She notes that he was not awful to her, but she did not particularly love him much either, and with his death she has decades ahead of her as her own woman.
She imagines her future sprawling out before her and eventually leaves her solitary celebration at her sister's worried knocking on the door. The two women descend the stairs only to hear a key being put in the lock at the front door. Its Brently Mallard! Still alive, nowhere near the railroad accident, there had been some kind of mistake. Mrs. Mallard falls down dead at the sight of him with doctor's diagnosing that her heart disease had been unable to take the sight of her husband alive. The joy had killed her.
The Feeling
The amazing thing about this week's short story is that is uses a great twist not once, but twice and pulls it off both times. First Chopin sets Louise Mallard up the dutiful grieving widow. Then she goes to be alone and Mrs. Mallard is not shaking with sobs but with laughter. This shocks and intrigues the audience. It shocks in both senses of the term: it is a surprising twist, but it also goes against most Western sensibilities of propriety. A widow laughing? How scandalous.
Like the first story one this blog, The Yellow Wallpaper, The Story Of An Hour, is not only excellently told, but carries with it a social message about women and marriage. The widow's joy, although perhaps disturbing to a Victorian audience and especially to men, speaks to how confined and trapped women at the time felt in their marriages and their place in society. Louise Mallard can't help but repeat over and over that she is free. Free! She notes that her husband wasn't awful, or abusive and in fact loved her, which doesn't allow men reading to have an easy out to rationalize her joy. She is not an exception in a terrible marriage, but a woman in a perfectly ordinary one. And yet she reacts with such joy to the prospect of being a widow, and to being free. And it forces the reader, but especially men, to ask why.
The second excellent twist in this story comes not in the character but the plot: Mr. Mallard isn't really dead! If we as readers had not followed Louise Mallard into her room alone we would think as most people would that the news of the husband still being alive and this all being a mistake would be excellent! However, we know better, and because of that we understand that this news is devastating. The final lines of the story explaining how Louise Mallard's heart gave out in joy (or so the doctor's think) play a sweet, sweet song of irony. We the reader know Louise's joy didn't kill her, it was the sorrow expected at the beginning of the story, and the shocking new of her husband's fate that her heart couldn't take.
This story is such an excellent inversion of expectation. Instead of a widow dying from shock at the news of her husband's death it is the story of a widow dying from shock at the news he is still alive. Fantastic! What a fascinating character! What a well told story! What else is there to say? This one is good!
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