How Does Kate Chopin Use Imagery In The Story Of An Hour

When your heart is merely the image of entrapment and all hope once near is lost, where does your freedom stand with life or death? In Kate Chopin’s text “The Story of an Hour” a woman is presented with what appears to be the death of her husband. She explores the world through the eyes of a free woman who was once oppressed. Despite the seeming emphasis on mrs. mallards grief and affliction with her husband's death, a closer look at the author's word choice and imagery describing mrs.mallard reaction leads us to see that she was more afflicted with her new sense of freedom rather than her grief for husband. We begin to understand the opposition of despair and hope. The use of imagery throughout the story creates this idea of a woman grieving over her husband's death. On page 15 in the third paragraph it states, “she wept at once, with sudden, wild abandonment, in her sister's arms.” (Chopin 15).This leads the reader to believe she was overwhelmed by grief. The author uses word such as

mallards independence she questions whether her joy was monstrous because of how it followed her husband's death. At the end of the story when her husband is waiting down stairs at the door she descends down the stairs. This symbolizes as well as the name of the story, “The Story of an Hour”how sudden that sense of freedom, hope and monstrous joy lasted. Though the ending became somewhat ironic it brought me to an foreshadowing moment in the story. In the beginning of the text it stated mrs. mallard was afflicted with a heart trouble and at the end it says, “when the doctors came they said she died of a heart disease.” (Chopin 16). Both of these moments mention problems with her heart which makes one question what that affliction or problem pertained to. It is through that moment of revelation that one could understand her affliction of the heart (freedom) out weighing her grief for her husband causing her death emphasising the opposing theme of despair and