Hello one and all!
As a full-time uni student that’s also very dedicated to her job and personal projects, making new blog content isn’t always a high priority. I’ve also felt a shift in the kind of content I’m interested in making recently, but in general I’m struggling to find the heart to make new content. However, this is something I’ve wanted to do for a long time but have only done a few times in my senior year of high school, and now we’re going to start doing it more often!
As a long-time English and writing student, you can imagine I have written many pieces for school, be it literary analyses, narrarives, or something else. Many of these I really love and feel would be a good fit for the blog. This also helps me post more consistently even when I don’t have time to write a whole new piece.
The following essay was written for my critical theory class, about the iconic feminist writer Kate Chopin’s “The Story of an Hour.” If you haven’t read the story yet, read that first, and then check out the feminist messages and symbols I found in the story. Please leave comments about your own thoughts on the feminist ideas in the story!
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Kate Chopin’s “The Story of an Hour” is a groundbreaking piece of American feminist literature. The story is about the role of women in society and expectations placed on them. This is a large role of feminist criticism, which looks into the way gender affects our world and the way it is portrayed in literature. When “The Story of an Hour” is read through the feminist lens, there is clear message of the subtle repression that women face in society. This story illustrates the gender roles and expectations that have been forced on women for centuries, and how the only truly safe place for women to be free of these expectations is with themselves.
Feminist theory is a study of how gender affects the world, and how the world affects gender. Literature has a great deal to do with society’s view of the world; stories are representations of reality and the things that people think and care about. Thus gender portrayal in literature can create a reality of either strength and freedom or judgment and pressure. An important concept in feminist criticism is the patriarchy, which is a unit of standard power in the world that causes negative effects, such as oppression or negative societal expectations as opposed to choice. Understanding the patriarchy is essential to understanding feminist criticism, because it is the general cause of why the world has issues in the way it views gender. Patriarchy is the general, if unspoken, enemy in “The Story of an Hour.”
“The Story of an Hour” is a piece about women that defy expectations, whether publicly or privately, giving women a more diverse and inclusive representation in literature. The story begins with the protagonist, Louise Mallard, being told of her husband’s untimely death. It is implied in the third paragraph that Mrs. Mallard already goes against the grain of the expectations of women upon receiving this news: “She did not hear the story as many women have heard the same, with a paralyzed inability to accept its significance. She wept at once, with sudden, wild abandonment….” (Chopin) This quote automatically implies that women have expectations put upon them by society to behave a certain way. This is something Mrs. Mallard is having to deal with even in the face of a personal tragedy. When considering the effect the patriarchy has on the behavioral expectations of people of all genders, this statement shows the courage of Mrs. Mallard in breaking out of the norm, and gives a wider representation of the many different ways a person might react to the loss of a loved one.
As Mrs. Mallard goes to her room to mourn her husband alone, the setting reflects a beautiful and peaceful feeling that is not expected of her, but that is true nonetheless. While it is said that a “physical exhaustion haunted her body,” the scene is described: “She could see in the open square before her house the tops of trees that were all aquiver with the new spring life. The delicious breath of rain was in the air…. The notes of a distant song… reached her faintly, and countless sparrows were twittering in the eaves. There were patches of blue sky showing here and there through the clouds….” (Chopin) Despite the tragic news she just received, Mrs. Mallard experiences beauty in her first moments alone. When looked at through feminist criticism, the text is thick with symbolism of the freedom women desire to give themselves versus the roles the patriarchy wishes to force on them. The blooms on the trees, the song being sung, and the birds calling are all clear signs of life, while Mrs. Mallard is at the beginning of a new life for herself. The rain, which is frequently a dreary symbol, is described as “delicious.” Other people aware of Mrs. Mallard’s situation might see the rain as a symbol of her mourning, but to her it is beautiful. Only outside the confines of the patriarchy, when she is in her own company, is this able to be realized. The sky is generally bright. The sentence in which this is described is given its own paragraph for emphasis. The patriarchy would have women like Mrs. Mallard standing in the shadow of their husbands, able to only have life attached to a husband and not have one of their own. In the blue sky Mrs. Mallard is able to see in the private of her bedroom window, that shadow is gone.
The subconscious, based on Freudian psychocriticism, is what begins Mrs. Mallard’s awakening to the unexpected joy of her new situation. As theorized by Sigmund Freud and expanded on by others, people have a subconscious that makes them able to think even when they are not consciously thinking. Mrs. Mallard experiences this as she starts to calm, “except when a sob came up into her throat and shook her, as a child who has cried itself to sleep continues to sob in its dreams.” Between sorrow and joy, Mrs. Mallard has a moment of numbness that allows her subconscious thoughts to come out. Whether or not she had before realized it, having a husband came with expectations for Mrs. Mallard, some that were more constrictive than she would like. In their article, “It’s a Man’s World: Re-examination of the Female Perspective in Chopin’s ‘Desiree’s Baby’ and ‘The Story of an Hour,’” Adisa Ahmetspahic and Damir Kahric describe it as thus: “It would appear that Louise’s gender dictates her rules of conduct; that is, her role as a woman in the nineteenth-century American society, and moreover her position of wife in her own marriage would force her to lament her husband’s passing.” (Ahmetspahic, Kahric) The thought had not previously crossed Mrs. Mallard’s mind that life could be joyful for her following her husband’s death, because that was not a possibility in a world run by a suffocating patriarchy. Only in this subconscious moment does she realize that this is a chance for her to experience a freedom that she hasn’t known, at least since before marriage. It is then described, as she is transitioning from subconscious to conscious thought, “There was something coming to her and she was waiting for it, fearfully. What was it? She did not know; it was too subtle and elusive to name. But she felt it, creeping out of the sky….”
At this point in the story, Chopin illustrates through Mrs. Mallard’s experience that it is only in their own company that women are allowed to experience the freedom they desire. As Mrs. Mallard becomes more aware of what she is feeling, it is described as a feeling of surrender when she comes to the realization, saying she “abandoned herself.” The pressures of the patriarchy dictate so much of what people do. It is only by making herself free that she was able to accept what her real desires were, that she wanted to choose to be joyful rather than sorrowful. She even has to push back the urge to question if she is feeling “a monstrous joy.” It is a constant fight for women to push away the gender roles that the patriarchy has placed on them and others. However, Mrs. Mallard chooses to indulge in the unusual, which is what she really wants.
Over the next few paragraphs, Mrs. Mallard revels in her newfound freedom. This is described by Ahmetspahic and Kahric as “the story of a heroine who, at least within the course of an hour, manages to harbor thoughts of a life created in an alternate sphere.” These visions of freedom that Mrs. Mallard is experiencing are so opposing to the patriarchy that it is not even described as reality by most. The gender roles that have been forced on people for centuries have become a strong part of reality, so that when freedom in gender roles is expressed, it seems like a fantasy. At times she feels to question her joy, but she is always reminded of the true feeling of liberty that she is facing for the first time, saying, “There would be no one to live for her during those coming years; she would live for herself.” Despite the fact that she had been loved by him, this moment was not about him at all. This was a moment purely about her, a moment in which women were in charge of their own narratives. This is not all to say that the intentions of men are all not good, but it is rather to say that it is not always, if ever, about the intentions of men. The people affected hold the most stock in the situation and are the ones that should be listened to. In Mrs. Mallard’s marriage, it appears that she felt powerless in her own situation, even though it had as much to do with her as it did with her well-intended husband. Thinking of the limitations put on her by her marriage, it is narrated, “A kind intention or a cruel intention made the act seem no less a crime as she looked upon it in that brief moment of illumination.” (Chopin)
At the conclusion of the story, Mr. Mallard comes home, apparently not being anywhere near the scene of the accident where he was supposedly killed. Upon seeing her husband, Mrs. Mallard is killed by her heart disease, overcome with shock. “When the doctors came they said she had died of heart disease–of joy that kills.” (Chopin) When looking through the lens of the patriarchy, this is so. The reality forced on the world by the patriarchy dictates that a woman can only be happy when married to a man. In Mrs. Mallard’s reality, the one where she is allowed to choose for herself, she died of heartbreak. This again has nothing to do with her husband; it is really about the situation that Mrs. Mallard is in where the voices of women are drowned out by the voices of men. Having a husband meant no longer being her own person, and after the joy she had just experienced of newfound freedom, the rain in the sky turned bleak, and she died of shock. She still did what she was expected to do in the beginning–die of heartbreak–but she did it in secret. Patriarchy shifts the world view so that people see only what is considered normal. In the safe secrecy of her own mind, Mrs. Mallard died from the loss of freedom.
With feminist criticism, Kate Chopin’s story illustrates the safety that women find in themselves and nowhere else. Patriarchy affects people’s relationships with gender and other aspects of identity, painting a picture that is not accurate to the personal relaties of individuals, which are vast, despite fact that many different aspects of identities are shared among people. The reality of this individualism in women was well illustrated when Chopin wrote: “She saw beyond… years to come that would belong to her absolutely. And she opened and spread her arms out to them in welcome.”
Works Cited
Ahmetspahic, Adisa, and Damir Kahric. “It’s a Man’s World: Re-examination of the Female Perspective in Chopin’s ‘Dess Baby’ and ‘The Story of an Hour’.”The ESSE Messenger, vol. 29, no. 1, summer 2020, pp. 23+.iree’
Chopin, Kate. “The Story of an Hour.” Literature to Go, edited by Michael Meyer, Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2011, 13-15.
