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What Is The Difference Between The Story Of An Hour And A Wagner Matinee

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Morgan Jacobsen Gore English III 1 May 2023 People Don’t Realize They Need Freedom Until They Get It Have you ever been in a situation where you needed to be free, but you didn’t know you needed to be free? Well, Kate Chopin and Willa Cather describe this predicament in their stories “The Story of an Hour” and “A Wagner Matinee”. The women in both of these stories were trapped in a situation that they didn’t realize they wanted to escape from until they got a taste of that freedom. Kate Chopin and Willa Cather get this idea across using imagery and irony. In Kate Chopin’s “The Story of an Hour” there are several uses of irony and imagery that get across the idea of not realizing how badly one wants/needs to be free from a situation. In this …show more content…

Mallard, Aunt Georgiana goes through this new sense of freedom in Willa Cather’s “A Wagner Matinee.” In “A Wagner Matinee,” Aunt Georgiana eloped to Nebraska with her young love (Cather 671). After he dies, she inherits an estate, which must be settled in Boston, where she is originally from (Cather 671). Her nephew, Clark, meets her at the train station and plans to take her to the Boston Symphony Orchestra where they are performing a Wagner programme (Cather 671). Being that Aunt Georgiana loved music so much, he thought this would be a great idea. When they finally go, this quote conveys how Aunt Georgiana is feeling at the beginning of the performance: “When the musicians came out and took their places, she gave a little stir of anticipation, and looked with quickening interest down over the rail at that invariable grouping; perhaps the first wholly familiar thing that had greeted her eye since she had left old Maggie and her weakling calf” (Cather 675). This quote uses imagery appealing to the sense of sight to convey to the reader that she’s excited to see something she enjoys; she’s been alone in Nebraska for so long, away from everything she loves. This helps convey that she’s realizing she wants to be free from that life in Nebraska. By the end of the performance, the reader is able to understand how Aunt Georgiana is feeling. This is shown in the following quote: “The concert was over; the people filed out of the hall chattering and laughing, glad to relax and find the living level again, but my kinswoman made no effort to rise. I spoke gently to her. She burst into tears and sobbed pleadingly, ‘I don't want to go, Clark, I don't want to go!’" (Cather 678). This quote uses irony to convey that although she lived in Nebraska for so long and seemed to be happy, now that she’s free of it and has experienced something she loved, she doesn’t want to go back to that life. Through the use of imagery and irony, Willa Cather explains how unhappy

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