Fiction Essay
The Story of An Hour
Most women dream of a life filled with love and laughter, but many don’t dream that, in an instant, it can be gone and their lives can drastically change. In the 1800’s divorce was frowned upon, and marriage was not always out of love. Many marriages were arranged, and many were set up relative to social status. It was because of these types of marriages that many women were unhappy with their spouses. Marriages were very similar to this during the time period used in the story. Therefore, women that were in unhappy marriages were forced to remain unhappily married. This became a form of imprisonment, which trapped women like Louise Mallard in the small walls of their own lives. In the story “The Story of an Hourglass” by Kate Chopin, the main character, Louise Mallard, was stuck in an unhappy marriage. It was not immediately clear that Mrs. Mallard was unhappy in her marriage, but after the news of her husband’s death had arrived, she started to weep uncontrollably; at first she wept out of sorrow for her beloved, but as she wept it became increasingly clear that she was weeping out of joy. Her tears were dynamic. She realized that her life, with her husband, was going to be long and decided; when she thought about it more in depth, she realized that she didn’t want to be certain in life—she wanted to live alone and live in uncertainty.
For Mrs. Mallard, and many other women of the 1800’s, privacy was seldom known. But it was in this privacy that Louise saw her wants coming true. Before, she had only seen her future with her husband, and when she heard of her his death, she reacted according to how society would say that she should have acted. It’s clear that she overreacted to the news, but that was in front of company. When she went to sit and think about it by herself, she wept and mourned; it was in this privacy that she realized what she really wanted in life. She did not want a life in which she was to answer...