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Kate Chopin's Short Story Of An Hour

668 Words3 Pages

This short story written by Kate Chopin in 1894, this is when slavery had just been abolished, women at this time didn’t have the right to vote. From the beginning of the story Chopin engages the readers to feel empathy for Mrs. Mallard, taking a stance for freedom. In this paper I will do an analysis of the themes: the uncertainty of time; how our lives can drastically change in as little as an hour, women’s freedom or lack of it, and mortality; the state of being subject to death.
As we all know everything can drastically change in a short amount of time, when Mrs. Mallard first learned of the devastating news of the railroad disaster, and her husband’s passing, she wept, in her sister’s arms. As the protagonist, she did everything in …show more content…

Mallard didn’t come free, she was restricted in many ways feeling like a prisoner in her own home, bond in a marriage she felt trapped in and by her bad heart. Although, she paid a high price to have the freedom of an upper-class married woman, a prestigious status at that time. “She said it over and over under the breath: free, free, free!” (Chopin pg 65). She began to look forward to the years to come, “And she opened and spread her arms out to them in welcome” (Chopin pg 66). Mrs. Mallard found freedom from her husband’s untimely passing, a new way of life was waiting. While sitting in her room she has new-found freedom, once it arrives she is overjoyed, she now has mental and emotional freedom. “Free! Body and soul free!” (Chopin pg 66) She had now idea that this new-found freedom that had just begun, that she had just begun to look forward to a long life, would be quickly taken away.
Mrs. Mallard had a strange excitement upon learning of her husband passing, she states, “And yet she had loved him – sometimes. Often she had not” (Chopin pg 66). When she walked downstairs and, “Someone was opening the front door with a latchkey. It was Brently Mallard who entered…” (Chopin pg 66). “When the doctors came they said she had died of heart disease- of joy that kills” (Chopin pg 66). Her heart attack is symbolic, representing the loss that she will not be free living the life that she had imagined just an hour

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