Kate Chopin's The Story Of An Hour

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Author, Kate Chopin, in her short story, ”The Story of an Hour”, describes a story in which a woman is ’free’ due to her husband's sudden death. Chopin's purpose is to portray marriage between a man and a women in general. She adopts a negative tone in order to depict the heavy oppression of marriage through her use of motif , symbolism, and irony. One way Chopin uses motif is through Louise Mellard's constant weeping. Louise’s bawling about Brently’s, her husband, death highlight the contrast between unhappiness and happiness. Louise cries or thinks about crying during most of “The Story of an Hour“ only stopping when she remembers her newfound freedom. With Brently, crying is part of her life, but will probably be absent from her life as an ’independent woman’. At the beginning of the story, Louise starts crying when she gets notified of Brently's sudden death, enduring a “storm of grief.” She continues crying even when she is alone in the confinement of her room, though the…show more content…
Every day of her life Louise has to be carefully guarded against a potential shock that could give her a heart attack and lead her to her death. When the other characters in the story believe death has come for Brently, that too is an unexpected shock. They receive the news that he had died in a train incident, which was all too sudden; Brently did not have a disease as Louise has. Most of the story features Louise trying to comprehend and process her husband's death only to realize that he has cheated death after all, causing the unfortunate death of Louis Mallard. It seems as though death is determined to take either of the Mallards' lives that day and takes a different one than originally thought. In a more sinister approach, maybe it was Louise's fate to receive this shock in order to succumb to her own death, which in retrospect the other characters seemed more prepared
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