Chopin’s “The Story of an Hour” is a short story in the Mallard home during the late nineteenth century. Hundreds of years prior, women were characterized as properties of their dads and spouses, late eighteenth and the start of the nineteenth centuries. Western culture knew an exceptionally colossal development of women’s cognizance where they became mindful of their social existent and autonomous individuals in the public eye (Winslow 172). The story describes the sentiments and feelings of Louisa Mallard when she learns the news about her husband. The author masterly expresses the negative attitude of wives towards the supremacy of their husbands in their life and their will to be more independent.
The readers can see the sudden reaction of the person to the demise of her significant other. When she hears the news, she leaves her room and sits before the window, where she unexpectedly feels an unusual inclination she has never felt (Chopin 1). She attempts to escape from it, yet it was an overwhelming inclination. It is a feeling of freedom, regardless of whether she realizes that her husband has passed as she began to see nature.
However, when she ponders the future years that she will die without him and what she would appreciate, she feels cheerful and essential. She wants for herself the opportunity as she murmurs, “free! body and soul free” (Chopin 2). Relaxation meets Louisa, and she feels another inclination, a blend between social and real choice. It appeared to be that she unwinds from her heart, thumping quicker. Chopin delivers how the character’s emotions gradually develop from confused and calm to excited and happy.
Becoming a widowed woman allows Louisa to live the way she wants. The widowed woman envisions the coming time she would have without her husband, who she comprehends she has never cherished. At this point, she realizes that the life and the time she was enthusiastically sitting tight for comes (Chopin 2). Louisa will be at long last in a situation to feel the opportunity. She wishes that that opportunity arrives now, and she invites it is a period where she will not be for someone; she will be for herself. When she is not in marriage, she will be free, and there are no standards that can force her.
Additionally, her looking from the open window the nature during springtime gives her a new life and a fresh start. After her significant other’s demise, there would be nobody she needs to live for except for herself. The line from the content, ” there would be no powerful will bending her in that blind persistence,” addresses spouses as more remarkable than women and even gives them a decision job (Chopin 2). The last scene shows her change from her fictional universe where she was the head of her own body and soul and herself with her new opportunity to the truth that she got away from and confronting the reality of her better half’s return.
The story addresses the negative picture of marriage in a comic light. Chopin shows the significance of freedom for women of the 19th century. Abdullah Alajlan and Aljohani accurately describe the women’s role in the household and people’s relationship with them. The authors also discuss the concept of marriage presented in the presented short story. According to them, wives viewed marriage as a constraint for them instead of an affectionate connection among them and their spouses (Abdullah Alajlan and Aljohani 127). This appears to be clear when the hero was cheerful as she got the information on her significant other’s passing (Chopin 1).
She felt such inclination since he left her with an unlimited opportunity to partake in her everyday routine and experience it as she needed. Their marriage additionally did not depend on affection, so the story depicts the possibility of an unfavorable marriage. Toward the finish of the story, it is referenced that the hero died due to the coronary illness, which represents an infection of marriage. The story shows that Louisa would never be free as long as the man rules her. Likewise, the sickness which influenced her heart shows that she experienced stress issues in her marriage.
Similarly, Atwood presents sexuality as vigorously molded by social standards, regularly to the disadvantage of women. In “Happy Endings,” women’s sexuality is frequently socially subject to men, whose necessities are put first, far beyond women’ (Atwood 1). Mary and John’s relationship makes express the way that, around then, for men, sex is about delight, while for women, sex is full of gendered assumptions for self-sacrifice (Atwood 2). Indeed, even toward the finish of her life, then, at that point, Mary utilizes her body as an apparatus to get a man to cherish her (Atwood 2). Atwood makes the case that the gendered assumptions encompassing sex regularly advantage men and harm women.
In conclusion, Chopin implies in her short story that the free world is man’s reality instead of women’s. Kate Chopin’s work fabricates an impression and triggers readers to consider how contrastingly her female protagonist might have acted together not to encounter what she lived—despite the far-off predicaments, scrutinizing the instance of women around the 19th century. Atwood’s story similarly resembles the idea that women were the victims of marriage and frequently used men to fulfill their needs.
Works Cited
Abdullah Alajlan, Lama, and Faiza Aljohani. “The Awakening of Female Consciousness in Kate Chopin’s The Story of an Hour (1894) and Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper (1892).” Arab World English Journal For Translation and Literary Studies, vol. 3, no. 3, 2019, pp. 123–139. Web.
Atwood, Margaret. “Happy Endings.” Literature: An Introduction to Fiction, Poetry, Drama, and Writing. Ed. X.J. Kennedy and Dana Gioia. 11th ed. New York: Longman, 2010. 1-3.
Chopin, Kate. “The Story of an Hour.” Holt, Reinhart and Winston, 1894. 1-3.
Winslow, Barbara. “Feminist Movements.” A Companion to Global Gender History, 2020, pp. 165–182. Web.