Kate Chopin's The Story Of An Hour

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The Story of an Hour Character Analysis The setting of the Story of an Hour was during the time of a social repression that women felt in a male-dominated society in 1890s. The narrator, Kate Chopin, uses several symbols to present the theme of freedom, independence and marriage throughout the story. Even though Mrs. Mallard was young and beautiful, she was trapped in marriage for a long time, and a reader can tell this by looking at her joy over her husband’s death. After hearing the news about her husband’s death, Louise tries to reach out for a freedom that she feels from an open window of her room. During the time when this story was written, women were viewed as a mans’ property and controlled by them, once they were married. Mrs. Mallard’s heart condition reinforces the trouble in her marriage to Mr. Mallard. After discovering the death of her husband, she shows grief for a moment and then she comforts herself with the prospect of freedom. Chopin tells to the reader that, “She could see in the open square before her house the tops of trees that were all acquire with the new…show more content…
Through the open window, she sees a feeling of happiness, “patches of blue sky showing here and there through the clouds that had met and piled..in the west facing her window” (Chopin 476). Instead of grieving or putting herself in the dark, Louise is looking at this bright blue sky. Now that she is no longer tied to marriage, she stares outside the window and begins to see the all the liveliness around her. Her attitude toward life changes drastically after the news of her husband’s death and the view of this window makes her eager to live out the rest of her life freely. Chopin does a great job in showing a character like Louise Mallard as an intelligent and independent woman, who feels elation in her new independence rather than grief about her
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