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Analysis of Kate Chopin’s The Story of an Hour

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on July 28, 2021

Originally entitled “The Dream of an Hour” when it was first published in Vogue (December 1894), “The Story of an Hour” has since become one of Kate Chopin’s most frequently anthologized stories. Among her shortest and most daring works, “Story” examines issues of feminism, namely, a woman’s dissatisfaction in a conventional marriage and her desire for independence. It also features Chopin’s characteristic irony and ambiguity .

The story begins with Louise Mallard’s being told about her husband’s presumed death in a train accident. Louise initially weeps with wild abandon, then retires alone to her upstairs bedroom. As she sits facing the open window, observing the new spring life outside, she realizes with a “clear and exalted perception” that she is now free of her husband’s “powerful will bending hers” (353). She becomes delirious with the prospect that she can now live for herself and prays that her life may be long. Her newfound independence is short-lived, however. In a surprise ending, her husband walks through the front door, and Louise suffers a heart attack and dies. Her death may be considered a tragic defeat or a pyrrhic victory for a woman who would rather die than lose that “possession of self-assertion which she suddenly recognized as the strongest impulse of her being” (353). The doctors ironically attribute her death to the “joy that kills” (354).

BIBLIOGRAPHY Chopin, Kate. The Complete Works of Kate Chopin. Edited by Per Seyersted. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1969. Koloski, Bernard. Kate Chopin: A Study of the Short Fiction. New York: Twayne, 1996. Seyersted, Per. Kate Chopin: A Critical Biography. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1969. Toth, Emily. Kate Chopin. New York: Morrow, 1990

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The Story of an Hour Analysis & Summary – Essay Example

This sample will help you write a The Story of an Hour analysis essay! Here you’ll find a The Story of an Hour summary. Essay also contains a plot and character analysis.

Introduction

The story of an hour introduction, the story of an hour main plot, the story of an hour conclusion, the story of an hour analysis.

The Story of an Hour is a short story written by Kate Chopin in 1894. This famous piece of literature was controversial for its time, as the story mentioned a female protagonist who felt relieved after her husband’s death. The conclusion of The Story of an Hour is ironic, which makes the ending memorable.

The following The Story of an Hour literary analysis essay will summarize the plot and present an extensive character analysis of Mrs. Mallard. It will be helpful for those writing a The Story of an Hour critical analysis.

Kate Chopin (born Catherine O’Flaherty) was an American writer. She is best known for her narratives of delicate and brave women’s inner lives. Her novel “The Awakening” and her short stories, among them The Story of an Hour, are being read in countries all over the world today. She is widely recognized as one of the most important authors in America.

In 1984, Kate Chopin wrote The Story of an Hour. It portrays a woman, Louise Mallard, who lost her husband in an accident. However, she later discovers that the husband survived. Mrs. Mallard goes through many emotions and feelings, reevaluating her life. That ultimately kills her when she meets her presumably dead husband at the door. The following The Story of an Hour essay will focus on the plot and the protagonist’s self-development.

The Story of an Hour Summary

Louise Mallard, the main character, had always had a heart problem. It was not a secret for her friends and relatives, so everyone tried to protect her from worries.

One day her husband, Brently Mallard, was mistaken for having died in a horrible railroad accident. Richard, Mr. Mallard’s friend, was the one who learned about this death while in the office. Josephine, Louise’s sister, broke the news to her.

Josephine was very cautious because of Mrs. Mallard’s health issue. She feared such a tragedy would cause a heart attack. Bit by bit, she strategized how to tell everything to her sister, aher plan went perfectly well. Mrs. Mallard wept only once. She did not receive the story like many women would, with a helpless incapacity to acknowledge its meaning. She only cried in her sister’s arms with a feeling of a sudden, wild abandonment (Woodlief 2).

Immediately Mrs. Mallard found herself wondering how she could survive without her husband. She went to a room and locked herself to contemplate the consequences of his death. She was devastated, and this sadness was only natural. This man had been close to her, even though only for a short time. Her sister Josephine and Mr. Richard also mourned the loss (Taibah 1).

Mrs. Mallard was alone in that room, thinking about the future. As she was contemplating her fate, instead of grief, she began realizing that this was the beginning of a better part of her life. Louise saw independence and plenty of possibilities to do what her heart desired. Now, she had only to think about herself.

Later, Josephine comes to Louise’s room, crying with a joyous smile. They descend the house’s stairs, where Mr. Mallard appears at the door. He was not involved in the accident and did not understand why Josephine was crying. At the shock of seeing her husband again, Mrs. Mallard collapses. The doctors declare that she died because of the problems with her heart.

Health issues of the central character play a significant role in the story. The author managed to bring suspense in the way she described telling the bad news to a person with a heart problem. Josephine, Louise’s sister, tries her best to be careful and attentive, expecting a painful response. However, Mrs. Mallard reacts better than anticipated.

The story focuses mostly on femininity and the institution of marriage. The analysis of The Story of an Hour has to speculate on it to reveal the core message.

The author was able to illustrate that men entirely dominate the institution of marriage. Mr. Mallard, for instance, treated his wife the way she wanted only from time to time. For years, Louise has done many things to please her husband without looking after her well-being. So, having received the disturbing news, she is quite happy. It seemed that she had never cared for her husband at all.

Or did she? Mrs. Mallard’s reaction to the death of a spouse is complicated. She cannot escape the loneliness and grief that came with the loss. But the possibility of happiness prevails. Louise knew that marriage had made her a subject for him against her will. She only felt sorrow for the loss of his life but not for living without him. She felt deep inside that she had been freed from the chains of living for another person.

Mr. Mallard’s apparent death saddened Louise at first. She was devastated about his fate but regained strength quickly. Louise was well aware of the fact that she could not bring her husband back. So, she came to terms with it, which wasn’t difficult. Mrs. Mallard saw beyond the painful moment, anticipating freedom for the rest of her life.

The room and environment around Mrs. Mallard symbolize her desire for freedom. For example, Mrs. Mallard could see the tops of trees through the window. They were all aquiver with the new spring life on the open square before her house. There was a delicious breath of rain in the air. A peddler was weeping his wares in the street below. There were spots of blue sky showing up here and there through the clouds in the west facing her window, which had met and piled up one above the other (Woodlief 1).

An open window could be interpreted as a metaphor. It reflects new possibilities and resources that Mrs. Mallard now had in her sights without anybody stopping her. She referred to it as the late spring of life.

The story reveals how women were secretly marginalized. At the time, society expected them to pursue wealth and safety, which came with a husband. Liberty should be neither their worry nor their goal. When Louise felt freedom after Mr. Mallard’s death, she kept it secret for obvious reasons. But then, her sister arrived.

Mrs. Mallard was shocked by the sight of her husband alive. All of her newfound liberty and dreams came crashing down at that moment. This shattering experience even goes to the extreme of destroying her life. Whereas she was to be happy to see her husband alive, Louise died from a heart attack.

Situational irony is presented in the author’s stylistic use of words: “She had died of heart disease…of the joy that kills.” People around anticipated this tragedy from the news about Mr. Mallard’s death, not miraculous survival.

The author explored the character of Mrs. Mallard throughout this story. The reader can’t be surprised by her sudden death or miss its irony. Louise is a woman with a great desire for independence, which a man has deprived her of through marriage. Mr. Mallard represents the absence of her liberty that restores after his death. When Mrs. Mallard sees her husband at the door once again, she collapses and never wakes up.

Based on this The Story of an Hour literary analysis, we can draw several important conclusions. Mrs. Mallard couldn’t control her emotions when they concerned the most vital matters. The lack of liberty and independence may have caused her heart problems in the first place. And they cost her life in the end.

Her husband, Mr. Mallard, took Louise’s freedom when he married her. However, as it became apparent from the story, he never valued her. When she died, he had finally faced the consequences of always taking her existence for granted.

Therefore, the oppressor faced even worse tragedy than the oppressed. The dramatic irony of Mr. Mallard’s unawareness of his wife’s true feelings towards him is a big part of the story. So, in the end, it was Mr. Mallard’s presence that killed his wife.

• Chopin, Kate. The Story of an hour . The Kate Chopin International Society. Web.
• Woodlief, Ann. The Story of an Hour . 2011, Virginia Commonwealth University. Web.

What is the symbolism in The Story of an Hour?

Through The Story of an Hour, the author presents us with the inner feelings and thoughts of a woman using various symbols. Mrs. Mallard’s heart problem symbolizes her dissatisfaction with the marriage, while the open window illustrates her aspirations towards a better, independent life.

What is the meaning behind The Story of an Hour?

Kate Chopin’s The Story of an Hour analysis illustrates that the author wanted to tell us how the society of that time was unfair towards women. It also shows the delicate and complicated inner world of a woman.

What does The Story of an Hour critique?

The Story of an Hour criticizes the typical experience of marriage in the 1890s. For women, such marriage was repressive and meant their loss of personal freedoms. Therefore, the story criticizes the society of that time dominated by men.

How do you start a critical analysis of The Story of an Hour?

Start your analysis of The Story of an Hour with a short introduction. Remember to say a few words about its author and her life. Next, talk about the story and let the reader know what it is about.

What are the two main themes in The Story of an Hour?

Firstly, the theme of a female search for self-identity is featured strongly in the story. The second theme is that of repressive marriage. The reader sees it in the way Mrs. Mallard’s reaction toward her husband’s death shifts.

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A Summary and Analysis of Kate Chopin’s ‘The Story of an Hour’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

Some short stories can say all they need to do in just a few pages, and Kate Chopin’s three-page 1894 story ‘The Story of an Hour’ (sometimes known as ‘The Dream of an Hour’) is a classic example. Yet those three pages remain tantalisingly ambiguous, perhaps because so little is said, so much merely hinted at. Yet Chopin’s short story is, upon closer inspection, a subtle, studied analysis of death, marriage, and personal wishes.

Written in April 1894 and originally published in Vogue in December of that year, the story focuses on an hour in the life of a married woman who has just learnt that her husband has apparently died.

‘The Story of an Hour’: plot summary

What happens in that brief hour, that story of an hour? A married woman, Mrs Louise Mallard, who has heart trouble, learns that her husband has died in a railroad accident.

Her sister Josephine breaks the news to her; it was her husband’s friend Richards who first heard about the railroad disaster and saw her husband’s name, Brently Mallard, at the top of the list of fatalities. Her first reaction is to weep at the news that her husband is dead; she then takes herself off to her room to be alone.

She sinks into an armchair and finds herself attuned to a series of sensations: the trees outside the window ‘aquiver with the new spring life’, the ‘breath of rain’ in the air; the sound of a peddler crying his wares in the street below. She finds herself going into a sort of trancelike daze, a ‘suspension of intelligent thought’.

Then, gradually, a feeling begins to form within her: a sense of freedom. Now her husband is dead, it seems, she feels free. She dreads seeing her husband’s face (as she knows she must, when she goes to identify the body), but she knows that beyond that lie years and years of her life yet to be lived, and ‘would all belong to her absolutely’.

She reflects that she had loved her husband – sometimes. Sometimes she hadn’t. But now, that didn’t matter: what matters is the ‘self-assertion’, the declaration of independence, that her life alone represents a new start.

But then, her sister Josephine calls from outside the door for her to come out, worried that Louise is making herself ill. But Louise doesn’t feel ill: she feels on top of the world. She used to dread the prospect of living to a ripe old age, but now she welcomes such a prospect. Eventually she opens the door and she and Josephine go back downstairs.

Richards is still down there, waiting for them. Then, there’s a key in the front door and who should enter but … Mrs Mallard’s husband, Brently Mallard.

It turns out he was nowhere near the scene of the railroad accident, and is unharmed! Mrs Mallard is so shocked at his return that she dies, partly because of her heart disease but also, so ‘they’ said, from the unexpected ‘joy’ of her husband’s return.

‘The Story of an Hour’: analysis

In some ways, ‘The Story of an Hour’ prefigures a later story like D. H. Lawrence’s ‘ Odour of Chrysanthemums ’ (1911), which also features a female protagonist whose partner’s death makes her reassess her life with him and to contemplate the complex responses his death has aroused in her.

However, in Lawrence’s story the husband really has died (in a mining accident), whereas in ‘The Story of an Hour’, we find out at the end of the story that Mr Mallard was not involved in the railroad accident and is alive and well. In a shock twist, it is his wife who dies, upon learning that he is still alive.

What should we make of this ‘dream of an hour’? That alternative title is significant, not least because of the ambiguity surrounding the word ‘dream’. Is Louise so plunged into shock by the news of her husband’s apparent death that she begins to hallucinate that she would be better off without him? Is this her way of coping with traumatic news – to try to look for the silver lining in a very black cloud? Or should we analyse ‘dream’ as a sign that she entertains aspirations and ambitions, now her husband is out of the way?

‘The Dream of an Hour’ perhaps inevitably puts us in mind of Kate Chopin’s most famous story, the short novel The Awakening (1899), whose title reflects its female protagonist Edna Pontellier’s growing awareness that there is more to life than her wifely existence.

But Louisa Mallard’s ‘awakening’ remains a dream; when she awakes from it, upon learning that her husband is still alive and all her fancies about her future life have been in vain, she dies.

‘The Story of an Hour’ and modernism

‘The Story of an Hour’ is an early example of the impressionistic method of storytelling which was also being developed by Anton Chekhov around the same time as Chopin, and which would later be used by modernists such as Katherine Mansfield, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf.

Although the story uses an omniscient third-person narrator, we are shown things from particular character perspectives in a way that reflects their own confusions and erratic thoughts – chiefly, of course, Louisa Mallard’s own.

But this impressionistic style – which is more interested in patterns of thought, daydreaming, and emotional responses to the world than in tightly structured plots – continues right until the end of the story.

Consider the final sentence of the story: ‘When the doctors came they said she had died of heart disease – of joy that kills.’ The irony, of course, is that Louisa appears to have accepted her husband’s death and to have taken his demise as a chance to liberate herself from an oppressive marriage (note Chopin’s reference to the lines on her face which ‘bespoke repression and even a certain strength’ – what did she need that strength for, we wonder?).

So it was not joy but disappointment, if anything, that brought on the heart attack that killed her. But the (presumably male) doctors who attended her death would not have assumed any such thing: they would have analysed her death as a result of her love for her husband, and the sheer joy she felt at having him back.

Chopin’s story also foreshadows Katherine Mansfield’s ‘The Garden Party’ , and Laura Sheridan’s enigmatic emotional reaction to seeing her first dead body (as with Chopin’s story, a man who has died in an accident). If you enjoyed this analysis of ‘The Story of an Hour’, you might also enjoy Anton Chekhov’s 1900 story ‘At Christmas Time’, to which Chopin’s story has been compared.

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General Education

Imagine a world where women are fighting for unprecedented rights, the economic climate is unpredictable, and new developments in technology are made every year. While this world might sound like the present day, it also describes America in the 1890s . 

It was in this world that author Kate Chopin wrote and lived, and many of the issues of the period are reflected in her short story, “The Story of an Hour.” Now, over a century later, the story remains one of Kate Chopin’s most well-known works and continues to shed light on the internal struggle of women who have been denied autonomy.

In this guide to Kate Chopin’s “The Story of an Hour,” we’ll discuss:

• A brief history of Kate Chopin and America the 1890s
• “The Story of an Hour” summary
• Analysis of the key story elements in “The Story of an Hour,” including themes, characters, and symbols

By the end of this article, you’ll have an expert grasp on Kate Chopin’s “The Story of an Hour.” So let’s get started!

“The Story of an Hour” Summary

If it’s been a little while since you’ve read Kate Chopin’s “The Story of an Hour,” it can be hard to remember the important details. This section includes a quick recap, but you can find “The Story of an Hour” PDF and full version here . We recommend you read it again before diving into our analyses in the next section! 

For those who just need a refresher, here’s “The Story of an Hour” summary: 

Mrs. Louise Mallard is at home when her sister, Josephine, and her husband’s friend, Richards, come to tell her that her husband, Brently Mallard, has been killed in a railroad accident . Richards had been at the newspaper office when the news broke, and he takes Josephine with him to break the news to Louise since they’re afraid of aggravating her heart condition. Upon hearing the news of her husband’s death, Louise is grief-stricken, locks herself in her room, and weeps.

From here, the story shifts in tone. As Louise processes the news of her husband’s death, she realizes something wonderful and terrible at the same time: she is free . At first she’s scared to admit it, but Louise quickly finds peace and joy in her admission. She realizes that, although she will be sad about her husband (“she had loved him—sometimes,” Chopin writes), Louise is excited for the opportunity to live for herself. She keeps repeating the word “free” as she comes to terms with what her husband’s death means for her life. 

In the meantime, Josephine sits at Louise’s door, coaxing her to come out because she is worried about Louise’s heart condition. After praying that her life is long-lived, Louise agrees to come out. However, as she comes downstairs, the front door opens to reveal her husband, who had not been killed by the accident at all. Although Richards tries to keep Louise’s heart from shock by shielding her husband from view, Louise dies suddenly, which the doctors later attribute to “heart disease—of the joy that kills .”

Kate Chopin, the author of "The Story of an Hour," has become one of the most important American writers of the 19th century. 

The History of Kate Chopin and the 1890s

Before we move into “The Story of an Hour” analysis section, it’s helpful to know a little bit about Kate Chopin and the world she lived in. 

A Short Biography of Kate Chopin

Born in 1850 to wealthy Catholic parents in St. Louis, Missouri, Kate Chopin (originally Kate O’Flaherty) knew hardship from an early age. In 1855, Chopin lost her father, Thomas, when he passed away in a tragic and unexpected railroad accident. The events of this loss would stay with Kate for the rest of her life, eventually becoming the basis for “The Story of an Hour” nearly forty years later.

Chopin was well-educated throughout her childhood , reading voraciously and becoming fluent in French. Chopin was also very aware of the divide between the powerful and the oppressed in society at the time . She grew up during the U.S. Civil War, so she had first-hand knowledge of violence and slavery in the United States. 

Chopin was also exposed to non-traditional roles for women through her familial situation. Her mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother chose to remain widows (rather than remarry) after their husbands died. Consequently, Chopin learned how important women’s independence could be, and that idea would permeate much of her writing later on. 

As Chopin grew older, she became known for her beauty and congeniality by society in St. Louis. She was married at the age of nineteen to Oscar Chopin, who came from a wealthy cotton-growing family. The couple moved to New Orleans, where they would start both a general store and a large family. (Chopin would give birth to seven children over the next nine years!) 

While Oscar adored his wife, he was less capable of running a business. Financial trouble forced the family to move around rural Louisiana. Unfortunately, Oscar would die of swamp fever in 1882 , leaving Chopin in heavy debt and with the responsibility of managing the family’s struggling businesses. 

After trying her hand at managing the property for a year, Chopin conceded to her mother’s requests to return with her children to St. Louis. Chopin’s mother died the year after. In order to support herself and her children, Kate began to write to support her family. 

Luckily, Chopin found immediate success as a writer. Many of her short stories and novels—including her most famous novel, The Awakening— dealt with life in Louisiana . She was also known as a fast and prolific writer, and by the end of the 1900s she had written over 100 stories, articles, and essays. 

Unfortunately, Chopin would pass away from a suspected cerebral hemorrhage in 1904, at the age of 54 . But Kate Chopin’s “The Story of an Hour” and other writings have withstood the test of time. Her work has lived on, and she’s now recognized as one of the most important American writers of the 19th century. 

American life was undergoing significant change in the 19th century. Technology, culture, and even leisure activities were changing. 

American Life in the 1890s

“The Story of an Hour” was written and published in 1894, right as the 1800s were coming to a close. As the world moved into the new century, American life was also changing rapidly. 

For instance, t he workplace was changing drastically in the 1890s . Gone were the days where most people were expected to work at a trade or on a farm. Factory jobs brought on by industrialization made work more efficient, and many of these factory owners gradually implemented more humane treatment of their workers, giving them more leisure time than ever.

Though the country was in an economic recession at this time, technological changes like electric lighting and the popularization of radios bettered the daily lives of many people and allowed for the creation of new jobs. Notably, however, work was different for women . Working women as a whole were looked down upon by society, no matter why they found themselves in need of a job. 

Women who worked while they were married or pregnant were judged even more harshly. Women of Kate Chopin’s social rank were expected to not work at all , sometimes even delegating the responsibility of managing the house or child-rearing to maids or nannies. In the 1890s, working was only for lower class women who could not afford a life of leisure .

In reaction to this, the National American Woman Suffrage Association was created in 1890, which fought for women’s social and political rights. While Kate Chopin was not a formal member of the suffragette movements, she did believe that women should have greater freedoms as individuals and often talked about these ideas in her works, including in “The Story of an Hour.” 

Kate Chopin's "The Story of an Hour" a short exploration of marriage and repression in America.

“The Story of an Hour” Analysis

Now that you have some important background information, it’s time to start analyzing “The Story of an Hour.”

This short story is filled with opposing forces . The themes, characters, and even symbols in the story are often equal, but opposite, of one another. Within “The Story of an Hour,” analysis of all of these elements reveals a deeper meaning.

“The Story of an Hour” Themes

A theme is a message explored in a piece of literature. Most stories have multiple themes, which is certainly the case in “The Story of an Hour.” Even though Chopin’s story is short, it discusses the thematic ideas of freedom, repression, and marriage. 

Keep reading for a discussion of the importance of each theme! 

Freedom and Repression

The most prevalent theme in Chopin’s story is the battle between freedom and “repression.” Simply put , repression happens when a person’s thoughts, feelings, or desires are being subdued. Repression can happen internally and externally. For example, if a person goes through a traumatic accident, they may (consciously or subconsciously) choose to repress the memory of the accident itself. Likewise, if a person has wants or needs that society finds unacceptable, society can work to repress that individual. Women in the 19th century were often victims of repression. They were supposed to be demure, gentle, and passive—which often went against women’s personal desires. 

Given this, it becomes apparent that Louise Mallard is the victim of social repression. Until the moment of her husband’s supposed death, Louise does not feel free . In their marriage, Louise is repressed. Readers see this in the fact that Brently is moving around in the outside world, while Louise is confined to her home. Brently uses railroad transportation on his own, walks into his house of his own accord, and has individual possessions in the form of his briefcase and umbrella. Brently is even free from the knowledge of the train wreck upon his return home. Louise, on the other hand, is stuck at home by virtue of her position as a woman and her heart condition. 

Here, Chopin draws a strong contrast between what it means to be free for men and women. While freedom is just part of what it means to be a man in America, freedom for women looks markedly different. Louise’s life is shaped by what society believes a woman should be and how a wife should behave. Once Louise’s husband “dies,” however, she sees a way where she can start claiming some of the more “masculine” freedoms for herself. Chopin shows how deeply important freedom is to the life of a woman when, in the end, it’s not the shock of her husband’s return of her husband that kills Louise, but rather the thought of losing her freedom again.

Marriage as a “The Story of an Hour” theme is more than just an idyllic life spent with a significant other. The Mallard’s marriage shows a reality of 1890s life that was familiar to many people. Marriage was a means of social control —that is to say, marriage helped keep women in check and secure men’s social and political power. While husbands were usually free to wander the world on their own, hold jobs, and make important family decisions, wives (at least those of the upper class) were expected to stay at home and be domestic. 

Marriage in Louise Mallard’s case has very little love. She sees her marriage as a life-long bond in which she feels trapped, which readers see when she confesses that she loved her husband only “sometimes.” More to the point, she describes her marriage as a “powerful will bending hers in that blind persistence with which men and women believe they have a right to impose a private will upon a fellow-creature.” In other words, Louise Mallard feels injustice in the expectation that her life is dictated by the will of her husband.

Like the story, the marriages Kate witnessed often ended in an early or unexpected death. The women of her family, including Kate herself, all survived their husbands and didn’t remarry. While history tells us that Kate Chopin was happy in her marriage, she was aware that many women weren’t. By showing a marriage that had been built on control and society’s expectations, Chopin’s “The Story of an Hour” highlights the need for a world that respected women as valuable partners in marriage as well as capable individuals.

While this painting by Johann Georg Meyer wasn't specifically of Louise Mallard, "Young Woman Looking Through a Window" is a depiction of what Louise might have looked like as she realized her freedom.

"The Story of an Hour" Characters

The best stories have developed characters, which is the case in “The Story of an Hour,” too. Five characters make up the cast of “The Story of an Hour”:

Louise Mallard

Brently mallard.

• The doctor(s)

By exploring the details of each character, we can better understand their motivations, societal role, and purpose to the story.

From the opening sentence alone, we learn a lot about Louise Mallard. Chopin writes, “Knowing that Mrs. Mallard was afflicted with a heart trouble, great care was taken to break to her as gently as possible the news of her husband’s death.”

From that statement alone, we know that she is married, has a heart condition, and is likely to react strongly to bad news . We also know that the person who is sharing the bad news views Louise as delicate and sensitive. Throughout the next few paragraphs, we also learn that Louise is a housewife, which indicates that she would be part of the middle-to-upper class in the 1890s. Chopin also describes Louise’s appearance as “young,” “fair, calm face,” with lines of “strength.” These characteristics are not purely physical, but also bleed into her character throughout the story.

Louise’s personality is described as different from other women . While many women would be struck with the news in disbelief, Louise cries with “wild abandonment”—which shows how powerful her emotions are. Additionally, while other women would be content to mourn for longer, Louise quickly transitions from grief to joy about her husband’s passing.  

Ultimately, Chopin uses Louise’s character to show readers what a woman’s typical experience within marriage was in the 1890s. She uses Louise to criticize the oppressive and repressive nature of marriage, especially when Louise rejoices in her newfound freedom. 

Josephine is Louise’s sister . We never hear of Josephine’s last name or whether she is married or not. We do know that she has come with Richards, a friend of Brently’s, to break the news of his death to her sister. 

When Josephine tells Louise the bad news, she’s only able to tell Louise of Brently’s death in “veiled hints,” rather than telling her outright. Readers can interpret this as Josephine’s attempt at sparing Louise’s feelings. Josephine is especially worried about her sister’s heart condition, which we see in greater detail later as she warns Louise, “You will make yourself ill.” When Louise locks herself in her room, Josephine is desperate to make sure her sister is okay and begs Louise to let her in. 

Josephine is the key supporting character for Louise, helping her mourn, though she never knows that Louise found new freedom from her husband’s supposed death . But from Josephine’s actions and interactions with Louise, readers can accurately surmise that she cares for her sister (even if she’s unaware of how miserable Louise finds her life). 

Richards is another supporting character, though he is described as Brently’s friend, not Louise’s friend. It is Richards who finds out about Brently Mallard’s supposed death while at the newspaper office—he sees Brently’s name “leading the list of ‘killed.’” Richards’ main role in “The Story of an Hour” is to kick off the story’s plot. 

Additionally, Richard’s presence at the newspaper office suggests he’s a writer, editor, or otherwise employee of the newspaper (although Chopin leaves this to readers’ inferences). Richards takes enough care to double-check the news and to make sure that Brently’s likely dead. He also enlists Josephine’s help to break the news to Louise. He tries to get to Louise before a “less careful, less tender friend” can break the sad news to her, which suggests that he’s a thoughtful person in his own right. 

It’s also important to note is that Richards is aware of Louise’s heart condition, meaning that he knows Louise Mallard well enough to know of her health and how she is likely to bear grief. He appears again in the story at the very end, when he tries (and fails) to shield Brently from his wife’s view to prevent her heart from reacting badly. While Richards is a background character in the narrative, he demonstrates a high level of friendship, consideration, and care for Louise. 

Brently Mallard would have been riding in a train like this one when the accident supposedly occurred.

  Mr. Brently Mallard is the husband of the main character, Louise. We get few details about him, though readers do know he’s been on a train that has met with a serious accident. For the majority of the story, readers believe Brently Mallard is dead—though the end of “The Story of an Hour” reveals that he’s been alive all along. In fact, Brently doesn’t even know of the railroad tragedy when he arrives home “travel-stained.”

  Immediately after Louise hears the news of his death, she remembers him fondly. She remarks on his “kind, tender hands” and says that Brently “never looked save with love” upon her . It’s not so much Brently as it’s her marriage to him which oppresses Louise. While he apparently always loved Louise, Louise only “sometimes” loved Brently. She constantly felt that he “impose[d] a private will” upon her, as most husbands do their wives. And while she realizes that Brently likely did so without malice, she also realized that “a kind intention or a cruel intention” makes the repression “no less a crime.” 

Brently’s absence in the story does two things. First, it contrasts starkly with Louise’s life of illness and confinement. Second, Brently’s absence allows Louise to imagine a life of freedom outside of the confines of marriage , which gives her hope. In fact, when he appears alive and well (and dashes Louise’s hopes of freedom), she passes away. 

The Doctor(s)

Though the mention of them is brief, the final sentence of the story is striking. Chopin writes, “When the doctors came they said she had died of heart disease—of the joy that kills.” Just as she had no freedom in life, her liberation from the death of her husband is told as a joy that killed her.

In life as in death, the truth of Louise Mallard is never known. Everything the readers know about her delight in her newfound freedom happens in Louise’s own mind; she never gets the chance to share her secret joy with anyone else.

Consequently, the ending of the story is double-sided. If the doctors are to be believed, Louise Mallard was happy to see her husband, and her heart betrayed her. And outwardly, no one has any reason to suspect otherwise. Her reaction is that of a dutiful, delicate wife who couldn’t bear the shock of her husband returned from the grave. 

But readers can infer that Louise Mallard died of the grief of a freedom she never had , then found, then lost once more. Readers can interpret Louise’s death as her experience of true grief in the story—that for her ideal life, briefly realized then snatched away. 

In "The Story of an Hour," the appearance of hearts symbolize both repression and hope.

“The Story of an Hour” Symbolism and Motifs

  Symbols are any object, word, or other element that appear in the story and have additional meanings beyond. Motifs are elements from a story that gain meaning from being repeated throughout the narrative. The line between symbols and motifs is often hazy, but authors use both to help communicate their ideas and themes. 

  In “The Story of an Hour,” symbolism is everywhere, but the three major symbols present in the story are: 

•   The heart
• The house and the outdoors
• Joy and sorrow

Heart disease, referred to as a “heart condition” within the text, opens and closes the text. The disease is the initial cause for everyone’s concern, since Louise’s condition makes her delicate. Later, heart disease causes Louise’s death upon Brently’s safe return. In this case, Louise’s ailing heart has symbolic value because it suggests to readers that her life has left her heartbroken. When she believes she’s finally found freedom, Louise prays for a long life...when just the day before, she’d “had thought with a shudder that life might be long.”

As Louise realizes her freedom, it’s almost as if her heart sparks back to life. Chopin writes, “Now her bosom rose and fell tumultuously...she was striving to beat it back...Her pulses beat fast, and the coursing blood warmed and relaxed every inch of her body.” These words suggest that, with her newfound freedom, the symptoms of her heart disease have lifted. Readers can surmise that Louise’s diseased heart is the result of being repressed, and hope brings her heart back to life. 

  Unfortunately, when Brently comes back, so does Louise’s heart disease. And, although her death is attributed to joy, the return of her (both symbolic and literal) heart disease kills her in the end. 

The House and the Outdoors

The second set of symbols are Louise’s house and the world she can see outside of her window. Chopin contrasts these two symbolic images to help readers better understand how marriage and repression have affected Louise. 

First of all, Louise is confined to the home—both within the story and in general. For her, however, her home isn’t a place to relax and feel comfortable. It’s more like a prison cell. All of the descriptions of the house reinforce the idea that it’s closed off and inescapable . For instance, the front door is locked when Mr. Mallard returns home. When Mrs. Mallard is overcome with grief, she goes deeper inside her house and locks herself in her room.

In that room, however, Mrs. Mallard takes note of the outdoors by looking out of her window.  Even in her momentary grief, she describes the “open square before her house” and “the new spring life.” The outdoors symbolize freedom in the story, so it’s no surprise that she realizes her newfound freedom as she looks out her window. Everything about the outside is free, beautiful, open, inviting, and pleasant...a stark contrast from the sadness inside the house . 

The house and its differences from outdoors serve as one of many symbols for how Louise feels about her marriage: barred from a world of independence.

Joy and Sorrow

  Finally, joy and sorrow are motifs that come at unexpected times throughout “The Story of an Hour.” Chopin juxtaposes joy and sorrow to highlight how tragedy releases Louise from her sorrow and gives her a joyous hope for the future. 

At first, sorrow appears as Louise mourns the death of her husband. Yet, in just a few paragraphs, she finds joy in the event as she discovers a life of her own. Though Louise is able to see that feeling joy at such an event is “monstrous,” she continues to revel in her happiness. 

  It is later that, when others expect her to be joyful, Josephine lets out a “piercing cry,” and Louise dies. Doctors interpret this as “the joy that kills,” but more likely it’s a sorrow that kills. The reversal of the “appropriate” feelings at each event reveals how counterintuitive the “self-assertion which she suddenly recognized as the strongest impulse of her being” is to the surrounding culture. This paradox reveals something staggering about Louise’s married life: she is so unhappy with her situation that grief gives her hope...and she dies when that hope is taken away. 

Key Takeaways: Kate Chopin's “The Story of an Hour” 

Analyzing Chopin’s “The Story of an Hour” takes time and careful thought despite the shortness of the story. The story is open to multiple interpretations and has a lot to reveal about women in the 1890s, and many of the story’s themes, characters, and symbols critique women’s marriage roles during the period .

There’s a lot to dig through when it comes to “The Story of an Hour” analysis. If you’re feeling overwhelmed, just remember a few things :

• Events from Kate Chopin’s life and from social changes in the 1890s provided a strong basis for the story.
• Mrs. Louise Mallard’s heart condition, house, and feelings represent deeper meanings in the narrative.
• Louise goes from a state of repression, to freedom, and then back to repression, and the thought alone is enough to kill her.

Remembering the key plot points, themes, characters, and symbols will help you write any essay or participate in any discussion. Kate Chopin’s “The Story of an Hour” has much more to uncover, so read it again, ask questions, and start exploring the story beyond the page!

What’s Next? 

You may have found your way to this article because analyzing literature can be tricky to master. But like any skill, you can improve with practice! First, make sure you have the right tools for the job by learning about literary elements. Start by mastering the 9 elements in every piece of literature , then dig into our element-specific guides (like this one on imagery and this one on personification .)

Another good way to start practicing your analytical skills is to read through additional expert guides like this one. Literary guides can help show you what to look for and explain why certain details are important. You can start with our analysis of Dylan Thomas’ poem, “Do not go gentle into that good night.” We also have longer guides on other words like The Great Gatsby and The Crucible , too.

If you’re preparing to take the AP Literature exam, it’s even more important that you’re able to quickly and accurately analyze a text . Don’t worry, though: we’ve got tons of helpful material for you. First, check out this overview of the AP Literature exam . Once you have a handle on the test, you can start practicing the multiple choice questions , and even take a few full-length practice tests . Oh, and make sure you’re ready for the essay portion of the test by checking out our AP Literature reading list!

Ashley Sufflé Robinson has a Ph.D. in 19th Century English Literature. As a content writer for PrepScholar, Ashley is passionate about giving college-bound students the in-depth information they need to get into the school of their dreams.

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Analysis of "The Story of an Hour" by Kate Chopin

Self-Determination and Louise Mallard Living for Herself

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"The Story of an Hour" by American author Kate Chopin is a mainstay of feminist literary study . Originally published in 1894, the story documents the complicated reaction of Louise Mallard upon learning of her husband's death.

It is difficult to discuss "The Story of an Hour" without addressing the ironic ending. If you haven't read the story yet, you might as well, as it's only about 1,000 words. The Kate Chopin International Society is kind enough to provide a free, accurate version .

At the Beginning, News That Will Devastate Louise

At the beginning of the story, Richards and Josephine believe they must break the news of Brently Mallard's death to Louise Mallard as gently as possible. Josephine informs her "in broken sentences; veiled hints that revealed in half concealing." Their assumption, not an unreasonable one, is that this unthinkable news will be devastating to Louise and will threaten her weak heart.

A Growing Awareness of Freedom

Yet something even more unthinkable lurks in this story: Louise's growing awareness of the freedom she will have without Brently.

At first, she doesn't consciously allow herself to think about this freedom. The knowledge reaches her wordlessly and symbolically, via the "open window" through which she sees the "open square" in front of her house. The repetition of the word "open" emphasizes possibility and a lack of restrictions.

Patches of Blue Sky Amid the Clouds

The scene is full of energy and hope. The trees are "all aquiver with the new spring of life," the "delicious breath of rain" is in the air, sparrows are twittering, and Louise can hear someone singing a song in the distance. She can see "patches of blue sky" amid the clouds.

She observes these patches of blue sky without registering what they might mean. Describing Louise's gaze, Chopin writes, "It was not a glance of reflection, but rather indicated a suspension of intelligent thought." If she had been thinking intelligently, social norms might have prevented her from such a heretical recognition. Instead, the world offers her "veiled hints" that she slowly pieces together without even realizing she is doing so.

A Force Is Too Powerful to Oppose

In fact, Louise resists the impending awareness, regarding it "fearfully." As she begins to realize what it is, she strives "to beat it back with her will." Yet its force is too powerful to oppose.

This story can be uncomfortable to read because, on the surface, Louise seems to be glad that her husband has died. But that isn't quite accurate. She thinks of Brently's "kind, tender hands" and "the face that had never looked save with love upon her," and she recognizes that she has not finished weeping for him.

Her Desire for Self-Determination

But his death has made her see something she hasn't seen before and might likely never have seen if he had lived: her desire for self-determination .

Once she allows herself to recognize her approaching freedom, she utters the word "free" over and over again, relishing it. Her fear and her uncomprehending stare are replaced by acceptance and excitement. She looks forward to "years to come that would belong to her absolutely."

She Would Live for Herself

In one of the most important passages of the story, Chopin describes Louise's vision of self-determination. It's not so much about getting rid of her husband as it is about being entirely in charge of her own life, "body and soul." Chopin writes:

"There would be no one to live for her during those coming years; she would live for herself. There would be no powerful will bending hers in that blind persistence with which men and women believe they have a right to impose a will upon a fellow-creature."

Note the phrase men and women. Louise never catalogs any specific offenses Brently has committed against her; rather, the implication seems to be that marriage can be stifling for both parties.

The Irony of Joy That Kills

When Brently Mallard enters the house alive and well in the final scene, his appearance is utterly ordinary. He is "a little travel-stained, composedly carrying his grip-sack and umbrella." His mundane appearance contrasts greatly with Louise's "feverish triumph" and her walking down the stairs like a "goddess of Victory."

When the doctors determine that Louise "died of heart disease -- of joy that kills," the reader immediately recognizes the irony . It seems clear that her shock was not joy over her husband's survival, but rather distress over losing her cherished, newfound freedom. Louise did briefly experience joy -- the joy of imagining herself in control of her own life. And it was the removal of that intense joy that led to her death.

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Home — Essay Samples — Literature — The Story of An Hour — The Story of an Hour: A Critical Analysis

The Story of an Hour: a Critical Analysis

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The suppression of mrs. mallard, symbolism and foreshadowing, the irony of the conclusion.

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The Story of An Hour - Study Guide

Kate Chopin 's The Story of An Hour (1894) is considered one of the finest pieces of Feminist Literature. We hope that our study guide is particularly useful for teachers and students to get the most from the story and appreciate its boldness shaking up the literary community of its time.

Here's the story: The Story of An Hour , Character Analysis & Summary , Genre & Themes , Historical Context , Quotes , Discussion Questions , Useful Links , and Notes/Teacher Comments

Character Analysis & Summary

Plot Summary : Chopin basically summarizes the external events of the story in the first sentence: "Knowing that Mrs. Mallard was afflicted with a heart trouble, great care was taken to break to her as gently as possible the news of her husband's death."

Genre & Themes

Challenge Social Conventions : Rather than conform to what's expected, honor your own needs. Just because it's the way it's always been, doesn't mean it has to continue at your expense.

Situational Irony : Life's a bitch-- just when you think you're free from obligation, you go and die yourself, which kind of makes liberation a bit pointless. Chopin's story is a great example of the literary device called situational irony .

Historical Context

Feminist literature, both fiction and non-fiction, supports feminist goals for the equal rights of women in their economic, social, civic, and political status relative to men. Such literature dates back to the 15th century (The Tale of Joan of Arc by Christine de Pisan), Mary Wollstonecraft in the 18th century, Virginia Woolf , Elizabeth Cady Stanton , Florence Nightingale , Elizabeth Perkins Gilman , and Louisa May Alcott . Kate Chopin 's best known novel, The Awakening (1899) and Mary E. Wilkins Freeman 's A New England Nun (1891) led the emerging modern feminist literary movement into the 20th century, during which women earned the right to vote, fought for economic, social, political, educational, and reproductive rights with Gloria Steinem and the Women's Liberation Movement. The 21st century has brought a resurgence of interest in Margaret Atwood 's The Handmaid's Tale with a new streaming video series , and the Women's March After President Trump's Inauguration (2017) drew more than a million protesters in cities throughout the country and world.

It's helpful to know the list of grievances and demands a group of activitists (mostly women) published in The Declaration of Sentiments in 1848. Principal author and first women's conference organizer was Elizabeth Cady Stanton , with high-profile support from abolitionist Frederick Douglass . Many more struggles and attempts to change public opinion followed the conference; it took 72 more years for women to secure the right to vote.

A brief History of Feminism

“Knowing that Mrs. Mallard was afflicted with a heart trouble, great care was taken to break to her as gently as possible the news of her husband's death."

“She did not hear the story as many women have heard the same, with a paralyzed inability to accept its significance."

“When the storm of grief had spent itself she went away to her room alone. She would have no one follow her."

“She was beginning to recognize this thing that was approaching to possess her, and she was striving to beat it back with her will--as powerless as her two white slender hands would have been."

"'Free, free, free!'' The vacant stare and the look of terror that had followed it went from her eyes. They stayed keen and bright."

"What could love, the unsolved mystery, count for in the face of this possession of self-assertion which she suddenly recognized as the strongest impulse of her being!"

"When the doctors came they said she had died of heart disease--of the joy that kills."

Discussion Questions

9. Elaborate on Chopin's uses of irony: 1) Situational Irony : when she gets her freedom, she dies anyway 2) Verbal irony : What is said explicitly is much different than the text's inferences (thinking rather than saying). Reacting to news of a spouse's death with relief, nevermind "monstrous joy" is an "inappropriate" response, for sure. She keeps these thoughts in her head (whispering her chant), with the door closed.

10. Discuss the concept of repression and Chopin's assertion of her real cause of death: "the joy that kills."

11. Read Chopin's allegory about freedom from a cage, her short-short story, Emancipation: A Life Fable . Compare its theme, tone, symbols, and use of irony to this story.

Essay Prompt : Tell the same story from Josephine's point of view (remember, Louisa keeps her door shut most of the time).

Essay Prompt : Consider reading the one act play by Susan Glaspell , Trifles (1916), about a murder trial which challenges our perceptions of justice and morality. Compare it to Chopin's The Story of An Hour

Essay Prompt : Read Kate Chopin 's biography (feel free to extend your research to other sources). How does her personal story reflect her writing?

Useful Links

Biography and Works by Kate Chopin

American Literature's biographies of featured Women Writers

ELA Common Core Lesson plan ideas for "The Story of An Hour"

Veiled Hints and Irony in Chopin's "The Story of An Hour"

Feminist Approaches to Literature , read more about the genre

Kate Chopin's "The Awakening": Searching for Women & Identity

KateChopin.org's biography and assessment of her work

Is It Actually Ironic? TED-Ed lessons on irony

Notes/Teacher Comments

Visit our Teacher Resources , supporting literacy instruction across all grade levels

American Literature's Study Guides

The Story of an Hour

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Analysis: “The Story of an Hour”

The title “The Story of an Hour” references the amount of time that elapses in Chopin’s tale, which tracks the emotions and thoughts of the protagonist , Mrs. Louise Mallard , upon learning of her husband’s death. Though the story barely exceeds 1,000 words, Chopin creates a sense of temporal expansion by intricately plotting the transition of Louise’s feelings from grief, to liberation, to joy, to determination, and finally to shock at her husband’s unexpected return. By employing a third-person omniscient narrator, Chopin balances these observations of Louise’s interior life with observations of contemporary social expectations for women in 1890s America. She uses psychological realism , a literary genre that prioritizes character interiority over action, and that was popular with late 19th-century writers who were also influenced by the naturalist and realist literary movements.

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Literary Analysis: The Story of an Hour by Kate Chopin Essay

Introduction, works cited.

An overlook of the short story “ The story of an hour ” by Kate Chopin indicates that Mrs. Mallard was lacking the fullness of her life. Chopin uses literary devices to help the leader come to terms with the situation having been narrated.

The story starts by showing the health condition of Mrs. Mallard having a heart complication, and how the sister Josephine and the husband’s friend Richard found it difficult to break the news of the demise of her husband. Mrs. Mallard immediately started to weep over her husband after her sister Josephine took the responsibility of informing her about the husband’s death. The story shows that Mrs. Mallard’s character had a poor passion for her dead husband. In addition to it, she possessed the urge of being self-governing that could be seen trough the statement “she did not hear the story as many women have heard the same, with a paralyzed inability to accept it’s significant” (Chopin 547).

Symbolism is used by Kate Chopin in the majority of paragraphs to represent an implicit meaning and inner understanding. The implication of sorrow and death wishes are well elaborated in the story through the author’s statement that “There were patches of the blue sky……in the west facing her window” (Chopin 547-548). In paragraph 8, the narrator indicates Mrs. Mallard as a “young with a fair…….” and has a “two white slender hands” (Chopin 547-548).

It is a symbolic feature to specify that the main heroine is a gentle, tranquil, and composed lady. The author also states that “There was something coming to her and she was waiting for it, fearfully” (Chopin 547-548). The use of the word “something” illustrates a symbol of rebellion from permitting the death of the husband to succeed in her calm-faced identity and control since she felt relieved from the husband’s rules and regulations.

In paragraph 7, metaphors are also applied, which can be found in the phrase “except when a sob………sleep continue to sobs in dreams” (Chopin 547). Herewith, the author compares a child who cries while sleeping to Mrs. Mallard locking herself in a room alone to sob in order to separate herself from the others. The phrase also shows the behavior of a kid after being cautioned.

Paragraph 8 explicitly expresses the personification of Mrs. Mallard: “She was young with a fair….. strength” (Chopin 548) as well as illustrates her uncertain change from a repressed individual to a person in grief over her husband, who kept her restrained from beyond.

Chopin incorporates similes in her work stating, “There was ….unwittingly like a goddess of victory” (Chopin 548) providing a very powerful, bold, and vicious representation of a woman who had overcome all the sorrow and grief over the loved husband.

The story title “ The story of one hour ” is ironic in nature. At first glance, the title implies that the story occurred within an hour, however, Chopin ironically increased the time span and made it occur within several days. The ironic part is that usually, the death of a spouse takes months or even years to get over it, but in Mrs. Millard’s case, it took her about an hour to control herself. Mrs. Willard’s death is also ironic in the sense that Chopin illustrates the need for Mrs. Willard to live in the story but at the tail end, the heroine had nothing more worth living for without her husband.

Thus, the story contains a message of appreciation of life a person lives and the need to perfect it while alive. This is clearly shown by Mrs. Millard’s life who did not realize that freedom and individual identity had been an important aspect of life until her end.

Chopin, Kate. The Story of an Hour, Vogue, United States, 1894. Print.

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• The Story of an Hour Critical Analysis Essay
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Literary Analysis of The Story of an Hour

Kate Chopin’s The Story of an Hour is a short story that details women’s experiences in marriages in the 19 th Century. The story was initially published in 1894, with a huge focus on the view of society during that time. Chopin highlights how societal norms and expectations were repressive, especially for married women limited to household chores. According to Zea (2005), Chopin is popular for exemplifying unconventional ideas of marriage, including women’s independence and divorce, which attracted numerous criticism of her works during the Victorian period. The author utilizes progressive women at the center of her novels to criticize how society has limited their freedom and expression. The Story of an Hour illuminates such progressive thoughts using realistic fiction that details a woman’s point of view and experiences. The author uses Louise Mallard’s reaction to the news of her dead husband, Brently Mallard, to highlight relationships in marriage and women’s independence. Using effective characterization, symbolism, and irony, Chopin efficiently illustrates women’s challenges in marriage and the repressive society that fosters male domination.

Characterization Analysis

Chopin employs adequate characterization to give readers a deep insight into the protagonist’s experiences and predicaments in a patriarchal society. Louise exemplifies the feelings of many women in marriages constrained by societal norms and chains, even though most women hide their genuine feelings (Wan, 2009). Louise is a devoted and loving wife to Brently, as is expected of any married woman during the 19 th Century. The author describes, “Great care was taken to break to her as gently as possible the news of her husband’s death” (Chopin, 2018, p.1). The description implies that she is not as strong as her husband because women are perceived as weak. Louise receives the news of her husband’s death from her sister, Josephine, because she does not often go outside. She is restricted in her house to take care of the household chores. Chopin writes, “She did not hear the story as many women have heard the same” (Chopin, 2018, p.1). Cunningham (2004) points out that Louise’s restriction in the house portrays her isolation and seclusion from society because of her gender. Louise’s freedom is limited as she only stays home without interacting with other people.

Symbolism and Irony

Similarly, Chopin utilizes various symbols that illustrate the protagonist’s feeling of oppression and isolation in a male-dominated society. Louise Mallard yearns to be free even though she does not outwardly express it to anyone, including her husband. Her marriage restricts her as she cannot express herself fully and independently. Louise’s heart condition symbolizes her lack of freedom and her attitude toward marriage. The author emphasizes that Louise has “a heart trouble” that makes her weak and vulnerable, and thus has to be treated with great care.

Similarly, the “open window” from which Louise observes the outside world symbolizes the prospects of impending freedom and independence (Chopin, 2018, p.1). The author writes, “She could see in the open square before her house the tops of trees that were all aquiver with the new spring life” (Chopin, 2018, p.1). The open window and square symbolize new openings as she anticipates a life without restriction. Spring life represents new beginnings as Louise visualizes a life without her husband (Na’im & Qazi, 2020). As she views the changes outside, she gets connected to her desire to embrace a new life independently without the constraints of being married.

Correspondingly, Chopin utilizes irony to effectively illustrate the protagonist’s short-lived freedom, even though she yearned for it her entire life. Before receiving the news about her husband’s death in an accident, Louise had not thought much about her autonomy as a woman. However, in this moment of sadness, the prospects of a new beginning overwhelm her imagination as she envisions a life without restrictions (Paudel, 2019). Although she does not immediately show her joy, she gradually experiences a growing awareness of the independence and freedom that her new life promises. Although grieving, she slowly recognizes that she will be “Free! Body and soul free!” (Chopin, 2018, p.2). She realizes that not only her body would be free but also her mind as she unclutches herself from the shackles of marriage. However, her joy is short-lived when Brently Mallard opens the door confirming that he was not involved in an accident. Louise collapse and dies as doctors confirm that “she had died of heart disease-of joy that kills” (Chopin, 2018, p. 3). This statement is ironic because she did not die because of the happiness of seeing her allegedly dead husband alive. Instead, her short-lived feeling of joy and freedom as an independent woman leads to her demise.

Overall, Chopin’s The Story of an Hour efficiently illustrates the desire for married women in the 19 th Century to attain self-independence. Chopin utilizes the character of Louise Mallard with effective symbolism and irony to illustrate the predicaments of women in repressive societies and marriages. Chopin utilizes her experiences and observation of society to critique the marriages that fostered male dominance while limiting women’s freedom. At the center of the story is Louise Mallard, representing women in the 19 th Century and how they struggled to have autonomy and freedom in marriages. Nonetheless, Chopin’s message is universal and timeless as it advocates for gender equality.

• Chopin, K. (2018).  The Story of an Hour . Joe Books Ltd.
• Cunningham, M. (2004). The Autonomous Female Self and the Death of Louise Mallard in Kate Chopin’s “Story of an Hour.” English Language Notes ,  42 (1), 48-55.
• Na’im Ezghoul, D., & Qazi, K. A. (2020). A Lacanian Interpretation of Chopin’s Story of an Hour & Storm.  Journal of English Language and Literature ,  13 (3).
• Paul, K. (2019). Existential angst in Kate Chopin’s The Story of an Hour. Ncc Journal ,  4 (1), 97-99.
• Wan, X. (2009). Kate Chopin’s View on Death and Freedom in “The Story of an Hour” English Language Teaching ,  2 (4), 167-170.
• Zea, C. (2005). Kate Chopin, Unfiltered: Removing the Feminist Lens.  Historical Perspectives: Santa Clara University Undergraduate Journal of History, Series II ,  10 (1), 6.
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Literary Analysis: The Story of an Hour

• April 1, 2023

The Story of an Hour Analysis: Introduction

This is the story of a woman who appears lively than ever when she thinks her husband is dead and dies when she learns that he is alive. Kate Chopin's (1894) The Story of an Hour gives insights about life and death, marriage and more by using significant literary devices and symbols. This paper analyses the story in every aspect to explain its plot structure, characters, theme, and symbols. Through the main character Louise Mallard's exaggerated and somewhat cruel response to her husband's assumed death and "resurrection", Kate Chopin depicts the limitations of the marriage institution and the domestic sphere's imprisonment for women in 1890s America.

Body Paragraphs

First, we will take a look at our characters. Our main character, Louise Maillard, is a woman with heart disease. She thinks differently of women's place in the social structure in 1890s America. She also disagrees with the marriage institution. She believes that the relationship between a woman and a man is based on restricting one another. However, she doesn't reveal these thoughts. She pretends like she doesn't have any problem with her societal role. When she was informed that her husband is dead, she acts accordingly, thinking how every woman would act. She immediately takes the position of a devastated person, jumping into her sister’s arm. Her later reaction was acting like a newborn when she was alone, speaking to herself how free she is now. These explicit reactions show us she is hysterical and a very emotional person. At the end of the story, this deduction reveals itself when she dies as a result of her feelings.

Our side characters consist of Brent Maillard, the husband of Louise. Although Louise tells us that they loved each other and Brent always cared for her, his marriage institution position makes him an "oppressor" for her. Josephine, who tells Louise that her husband died and who is her sister. Lastly, Richards, a friend of Brent, also first saw the news about the train accident.

Secondly, we will explain the plot structure and the style used by Chopin. As its name implies, this story tells an hour of the main character Louise Maillard's life. Accordingly, Chopin preferred short paragraphs as the story itself is less than three pages. However, this exact reason makes this story incredibly dense. Because the reader doesn't know anything about any part of the story, every sentence gains importance and have to be read and interpreted carefully. The author's short and compact style also makes the reader sense the emotionally overwhelmed Louise Maillard's feelings.

At the beginning of the story, Chopin presents exposition, as Louise is lying on her bed alongside her sister, Josephine, who is worried about the devastating news about Louise's husband. Our rising action is where Richards and Josephine reveal the terrible news to Louise. Most of the readers think that Louise will cry and be devastated, Chopin shows the story's climax. Mrs Maillard realizes that she is free now that her husband is dead. She screams happily through her window that she is "Free, free, free!" (Chopin para. 11). We understand that her soul starts to fill with the happiness of freedom (Dagenhart para. 6). The writing style also changes. In the part where she is filled with joy, Chopin favoured positive words such as the blue sky or keen and bright. Susana comments, "the scene is full of energy and hope" (para. 4).

The story's falling action is the point where Mr Maillard is back from his trip, thinking how strange everyone looks so shocked. And the resolution is right after that, where Mrs Maillard falls dead on the ground. Doctors said she died of "joy"; however, in reality, her death resulted from her realization that the freedom she so eagerly wanted was never actually belonged to her.

The themes of the story are the hindered joy of freedom and the oppressive nature of marriage institution. When Louise learns that her husband died, she doesn't think about crying even though she loves him. She knows that she will weep and mourn later, but the joy of being independent overwhelms her. After that, she is shattered by seeing her husband before her. The story prominently emphasizes the dependent nature of marriage. For Louise to be free, the only way to be a widow because society didn't appreciate divorced women (Dagenhart para. 9). When she thought she is a widow, she prays to live a long life, where before, she complained that she would have a long life. This story revolves around this theme as Louise felt happier than ever when she thought the chains were gone.

Last but not least, we will have a look at the symbols that Chopin used. First, the heart disease of Louise indicates both physical and mental condition. She is overwhelmed and oppressed by her marriage; therefore, when she learns that her husband is dead, he can walk and run and scream like she never even had heart disease. This signifies that her burden is gone. Also, the open window represents the free and independent life Louise has in front of her. It can be interpreted as the open window is the future of Louise.

The Story of an Hour: Conclusion

In conclusion, Kate Chopin's The Story of an Hour tells the story of an oppressed woman under the marriage constitution. The oppression enables one to feel joy when the main character Louise's husband dies. This story is exciting and dense. To explain further, this paper analyzed the characters one by one, broke down the story's plot structure, pointed its themes and finally described given symbols in the story. Kate Chopin portrays the marriage's restraints and the oppressiveness of the domestic realm for women in 1890s America using the lead character Louise Mallard's embellished and cruel reaction to her husband's supposed death and his "revival."

Chopin, Kate. The Story of an Hour. , Vogue, 6 Dec. 1894.

Dagenhart, Natalia. "Literary Analysis of 'the Story of an Hour by Kate Chopin." Natalia Dagenhart Website, 13 Sept. 2017.

Susana, Catherine. "Analysis of 'the Story of an Hour by Kate Chopin." ThoughtCo, ThoughtCo, 19 Mar. 2014, www.thoughtco.com/analysis-story-of-an-hour-2990475. Accessed 8 Apr. 2021.

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"The Story of an Hour" by Kate Chopin Close Reading Analysis Worksheet

Subject: English

Age range: 13 - 18

Resource type: Worksheet/Activity

Last updated

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Help high school students go beyond basic reading comprehension and support the development of critical thinking and literary craft analysis skills with this close reading worksheet covering the “The Story of an Hour” by Kate Chopin. The brevity of the narrative helps fill awkward scheduling gaps, while the nature of the activity maintains academic rigor. An answer key and copy of the public domain narrative are provided. Materials are delivered in editable Word Document and printable PDF formats. By completing this close reading activity, students will:

• Identify what the text states explicitly as well as implicitly
• Utilize dictionaries to ensure knowledge of word meanings
• Infer the intended effects of the author’s word choices and narrative techniques
• Describe the tone of a given excerpt
• Explore how complex characters think, behave, interact, and develop
• Apply knowledge of literary devices including foreshadowing and paradox
• Support claims and inferences with sound reasoning and relevant evidence
• Write about fiction with clarity, accuracy, and precision
• Come to class better prepared to discuss literature

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Short Stories by Kate Chopin - Quizzes, Close Readings, and Vocabulary Games (Bundle)

Facilitate vocabulary development, evaluate general reading comprehension, and support critical thinking and literary craft analysis skills with this bundle of materials for teaching three compelling short stories by Kate Chopin: "The Story of an Hour," "A Pair of Silk Stockings," and "Desiree's Baby." A quiz, close reading worksheet, vocabulary application activity, crossword puzzle, and word search game are provided for each narrative. Answer keys for everything are also included. Materials are delivered in editable Word Document and printable PDF formats. By engaging with these materials, students will do the following: * Identify what the text states explicitly and implicitly * Determine the meaning of unfamiliar and complex words * Consult reference materials in order to learn and verify word meanings * Discern the most proper application of words as they are used in sentences * Infer the intended effects of the author's word choices and narrative techniques * Describe the tone of a given excerpt * Explore how complex characters think, behave, interact, and develop * Apply knowledge of literary devices including foreshadowing, metaphor, paradox, simile, and situational irony * Consider themes in context * Support claims and inferences with sound reasoning and relevant evidence * Write about fiction with clarity, accuracy, and precision * Come to class better prepared to discuss literature

"The Story of an Hour" by Kate Chopin Quiz, Close Reading Activity, and Vocabulary Games Bundle

Evaluate general reading comprehension, facilitate vocabulary development, and sharpen critical thinking and literary craft analysis skills with this bundle of activities for teaching "The Story of an Hour" by Kate Chopin. A plot-based quiz, a close reading analysis worksheet, a vocabulary application activity, a crossword puzzle, a word search game, the public domain short story, answer keys are provided. Materials are delivered in editable Word Document and printable PDF formats. By engaging with these materials, students will: * Identify what the text states explicitly and implicitly * Determine the meaning of unfamiliar and complex words * Consult reference materials in order to learn and verify word meanings * Determine the most proper application of words as they are used in sentences * Infer the intended effects of the author's word choices and narrative techniques * Describe the tone of a given excerpt * Explore how complex characters think, behave, interact, and develop * Apply knowledge of literary devices including foreshadowing and paradox * Support claims and inferences with sound reasoning and relevant evidence * Write about fiction with clarity, accuracy, and precision * Come to class better prepared to discuss literature

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The Story of an Hour

Kate chopin, ask litcharts ai: the answer to your questions.

The Life, Death—And Afterlife—of Literary Fiction

Those of you who are reading this essay, let me ask you, right away—is your smart phone next to you? Or is it in your hand? Are you reading this on your phone, swiping up the paragraphs, swipe , swipe , swipe , wondering how far you're going to have to swipe to actually finish this thing? (Just so you know, it’s gonna take a lot of swiping.) Or are you reading on your computer screen, as I've been writing this on mine? I happen to know you’re not reading this in a print magazine. Ha! And ouch!

As you read, is your smart phone or computer or iPad simultaneously acquiring notifications, texts and emails, along with promotions, advertisements and daily venues of news, opinions and games such as Wordle and Spelling Bee, an altogether constant onslaught of information, incessantly demanding that you spend every waking hour of every day focused on this unrelenting digitality that keeps showing up on the screen in front of you, that screen with which you likely indulge in more back-and-forth than you generally do in person with an actual human being, like, say, your husband, wife, son, daughter, brother, sister, friend, lover, boss, employee?

Are you multi-tasking as well, working online, Zooming, Googling, communicating with your fellow employees, but also darting off now and then to your favorite venues (like, maybe, this), and then back to your job, back and forth, back and forth, back and forth?

Another question: when you’re reading a short story (on this same site, for instance) or a novel, do you remain immersed in the narrative, able to stay there for quite some time without going anywhere else? As if you were having sex for fifteen or twenty minutes, maybe even half an hour, unwilling to allow any interruptions? Or as if you had dived into a swimming pool or a lake or a sound or a sea and were floating across the water, staring up at the sky?

Can you read anything at all from start to finish, ie. an essay or a short story, without your mind being sliced apart by some digital switchblade? Without your seeking distraction as a form of entertainment, or entertainment as a form of distraction? Or is all of this just ordinary life in the internet era, with your every thought and feeling and perception being diverted or fractured or dissolved or reiterated endlessly with utter normality in a digitalized world to which nearly all of us are fixated, or might we say, addicted? Did you ever even know a different world?

I did know a different world, at least once upon a distant time. I arrived at Esquire in the late eighties to work with the legendary fiction editor Rust Hills , whose passion for literature arose in him every single morning like daylight. He and I would occasionally drink two or three Negronis at lunch, sometimes at the New York Delicatessen on 57 th Street, and talk about the writers and novels and short stories we loved (and hated). Often we met with the writers themselves, and if they were young and didn’t have much money, Rust might slide them across the table a check of his own, just so they could keep scribbling away in their precocious days of writing. Then he and I would happily weave our way back to the office at 1790 Broadway, plop down in our cubicles and make enthusiastic phone calls to writers and agents, our voices probably a little louder than usual. Rust always believed that we could ask anyone for anything. “Let de Gaulle do his own refusing,” he liked to say. Our jobs never felt like work—we played for a living.

The tech world back then seems almost non-existent by comparison to that of this century, even though New York City in the 1980s was economically soaring, having been resurrected from its financial crisis in the mid-Seventies. Yes, cable television had arrived en masse that decade, as had VHSs, Blockbuster movie rentals, dual-cassette answering machines, and far more CDs than the sadly dying vinyl records.

But for all of that, computers were only slowly listing their way into homes and businesses, considered then more like superior typewriters than electronic versions of a personal post office. Back then, we dropped tokens like coins into the subway tolls—no MetroCards to slide through a slot on the turnstile. In those days, rather than staring at their phones, subway riders spent their journey reading books, magazines, and newspapers, with besuited straphangers adept at folding the New York Times broadsheet into an eighth of its original size, and reading the newspaper while holding it in a single hand. Out on the streets, we waved our hands in the air to lure taxi cabs our way. “Uber” would have been considered nothing more or less than an intriguing word from another language. As for “zooming,” well, that just meant we were speeding down the avenue, transported by a wild or exuberant or desperate cabbie. Cell phones had not yet arrived to any significant degree, so pay phones cluttered the sidewalks of the city. At home in our apartments, we still suffered from the expense of long-distance phone calls. And at Esquire , our receptionist, who also worked as the switchboard operator, would connect incoming calls to us. If we missed the calls, she would give us handwritten messages and phone numbers when we came by her front desk. Yes, handwritten.

As for magazines, they were physically everywhere—on our coffee tables at home, in waiting rooms, libraries, airplanes and trains; and being sold at newsstands, bookstores, drugstores and magazine shops that vended only magazines, hundreds of different periodicals, maybe even thousands, including literary journals. Which meant that fiction as a whole, and short stories in particular, were also everywhere to be found. And bought.

Back then, magazines in general, Esquire included, stood rather jauntily in the center of American culture, alongside the towering industries of television, movies, and music. Editors in that era often achieved national renown as editors. And to borrow Marshall McLuhan’s longtime axiom, magazines then were mediums for the message, with literary fiction being one of the prime and abiding messages, as it had been in periodicals for more than a century. In the 1920s, for example, F. Scott Fitzgerald made his living not as a writer who had published The Great Gatsby , one of the greatest American novels to this day, but instead as a short story writer, who was paid for 160 stories delivered in various magazines, most frequently the Saturday Evening Post .

“Decades ago,” wrote the tech and media journalist Simon Owens in 2020, “short fiction was a viable business, for publishers and writers alike.” He cites the ideal venues for short stories as the so-called “glossy” magazines (who calls them that now?) such as Esquire , The New Yorker , Playboy, and The Atlantic , along with what were once known as “pulp” magazines, among them Asimov’s Science Fiction and Analog , all of which benefited from hundreds of thousands, and in some cases, millions of subscribers. I was always impressed as well by Redbook and McCall’s , two popular monthly women’s magazines, both now departed from the print world, which for close to a century routinely published accomplished fiction, including stories by Willa Cather, Edith Wharton, Anne Tyler, and a condensed version of Toni Morrison’s novel Song of Solomon . Even the renewed Vanity Fair , prior to its celebrity obsession when Tina Brown took it over in 1984, devoted itself to extraordinary fiction, at one point buying and printing Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s novella Chronicle of a Death Foretold .

For a while in the nineties, it still seemed to Rust and me and many other writers, editors, and marketers that fiction in magazines would last, well, forever. As would magazines themselves. As would literary fiction, period, anywhere and everywhere. Esquire , The Atlantic , Playboy , The New Yorker, and Harper’s published short stories in nearly every one of their issues. Several of those magazines— Esquire , The Atlantic, and The New Yorker —also put out a summer issue solely dedicated to fiction. I even loved using novelists and short story writers to research and compose nonfiction—John Edgar Wideman, for instance, who wrote a rich, imaginative investigation into Michael Jordan and his influence on race in America, and Denis Johnson , who roamed around the world, reporting on multiple catastrophes, including the civil war in Liberia and the take-over of Afghanistan by the Taliban. Another brilliant fiction writer, Joy Williams , Rust’s wife, fired out dazzling and sarcastically ferocious essays, one against hunting entitled “ The Killing Game ” (which infuriated hunters who subscribed to Esquire ), and another in defense of nature, called “ Save the Whales, Screw the Shrimp .”

And yet for all of that, a radical change in the structure of literary culture was already approaching. I remember one afternoon in the early-to-mid nineties when the novelist and short story writer Mark Helprin alerted me that tiny computers the size of transistor radios were heading our way. That we would carry them in our hands, stuff them in our pockets, and even pay bills and receive income through these little, unimaginable instruments. That magazines and newspapers and books might even disappear into or pop out of that miniature machine. How could he have known this? I have no idea. Laptop computers in those days seemed at least as big as briefcases, with office computers the size of altars. I recall saying to him with a bit of a laugh and much more astonishment: “Really? The size of a transistor radio?” It struck me as science fiction. Turned out to be science. Helprin was right.

As was the novelist, so-called metafictionalist, and Johns Hopkins professor John Barth, who back in 1993 declared: “I happen to not be optimistic about the future of literature in the electronic global village.” The only thing wrong with his intuition: the word “village.” It’s not a village anymore, if it ever was; it’s a universe.

At times, the digital universe feels to me like the technological equivalent of a black hole, swallowing everything around it, including the un-digital idiosyncrasy of humans, to the point that we are unable to re-emerge from that hole into a freer, more open constellation. In God, Human, Animal, Machine , the writer Meghan O’Gieblyn, who lost her faith after having been raised as a fundamentalist Christian, has created a fascinating inquiry into the nature and power of informational technology, as if that technology might be a new God, in the process of mathematizing uniqueness, and algorithmizing all of us, whether we are religiously faithful, agnostic, or atheistic. She describes how the Israeli intellectual Yuval Noah Harari argues that we already accept “machine wisdom” when it comes to the recommendation of “books, restaurants and potential dates.” He believes that “dataism” is replacing humanism as “a ruling ideology,” invalidating the conviction that an individual’s feelings, ideas, and beliefs make for a “legitimate source of truth.” According to Harari, “Dataism now commands: Listen to the algorithms!”

In the past twenty-five or so years, the magazine industry has shrunk in the midst of this “dataism,” particularly in its rendition of literary fiction. Three years ago, Adrienne LaFrance, executive editor of The Atlantic , decided to help devise an online destination for such fiction, short stories in particular, beginning with one by Lauren Groff. “The thinning of print magazines this century,” she writes , “meant a culling of fiction.” The internet, in her estimation (and mine), “makes fairly efficient work of splintering attention and devouring time.” As a result, she concludes that literary reading is “far too easily set aside.”

Simon Owens, the previously mentioned tech and media commentator, could not fathom the economic incentive behind LaFrance’s online venue for fiction. “Short stories don’t generate a lot of traffic,” he writes. In the past, he explains, a writer could make “a middle class living writing nothing but short fiction, and a few did.” Now, he writes, “that’s not the case.”

I often think of how writers, editors, copy-editors, fact-checkers, and even publishers are losing their work just like coal miners in Appalachia have over the last twenty years, with both professions having jobs taken away, seemingly forever, by what has been described in regard to West Virginia, for instance, as “automated technology.”

The power of the internet has not just affected writers economically. It has influenced the very nature of their own creativity. What Will Self, one of my favorite novelists over the last thirty years, calls BDDM—“bi-directional digital media”—is having a severe effect not just on reading, but on writing. Self confesses : “If there are writers out there who have the determination—and concentration—to write on a networked computer without being distracted by the worlds that lie a mere keystroke away, then they’re far steelier and more focused than I.” His vision of the literary future, despite his love for literature (even apparently for e-books), is dark indeed. “If you accept [over the next twenty years] that the vast majority of text will be read in digital form on devices linked to the web,” he asks, “do you also believe that those readers will voluntarily choose to disable that connectivity? If your answer to this is no, then the death of the novel is sealed out of your own mouth.” Writers in this age, he states, are “less imposing” than many of the relatively recent past, which is a “…a reflection of a culture in which literature is no longer centre stage (or screen).”

Given that this new medium is bi-directional and mathematical, and that, to quote Marshall McLuhan once again, “the medium is the message,” literary criticism itself has become dully numerical. Writers and writing tend to be voted upon by readers, who inflict economic power (buy or kill the novel!) rather than deeply examining work the way passionate critics once did in newspapers and magazines. Their “likes” and “dislikes” make for massive rejoinders rather than critical insight. It’s actually a kind of bland politics, as if books and stories are to be elected or defeated. Everyone is apparently a numerical critic now, though not necessarily an astute one. Or even honest. Consider, for instance, Cecilia Rabess’s recent debut novel Everything’s Fine , about a young Black woman employed by Goldman Sachs, who becomes enamored of a racist white co-worker. Six months before the book was even published—and read—members of the digital venue Goodreads , owned by Amazon, blasted the future publication with a flood of one-star reviews, accusing Everything’s Fine of prejudice and racism. Numbers, numbers, numbers, all in attack, rather than a variety of detailed immersions into the actual text, subsequently shared in what we call “writing.”

It’s as if the internet, with its ostensibly forthright venues, has actually turned nearly all of its posters into marketers and up-and-down voters, rather than readers and reviewers. That may be one of the reasons that the publishing and academic world has now become so consumed with propriety in relation to literary writing; otherwise editors, publishers and professors fear that old and new literature, along with themselves, may be treated as viciously as Rabess’s novel.

My perception is that, perhaps because of online mass condemnations, there’s simply too much of an ethical demand in fiction from fearful editors and “sensitivity readers,” whose sensitivity is not unlike that of children raised in religious families who’ve been taught that unless they do everything right, Hell (a longstanding venue of “cancellation”) is their likely destination. That instruction, common in the Protestant South where I grew up, has now—strangely—segued into the secular world of academics and publishing. Too many authors and editors fear that they might write or publish something that to them, at least, is unknowingly “wrong,” narratives that will reveal their ethical ignorance, much to their shame. It’s as if etiquette has become ethics, and blasphemy a sin of secularity.

The power of literary fiction—good literary fiction, anyway—does not come from moral rectitude. Consider, if you will, Harriet Beecher Stowe, who was a morally righteous author in the 1850s and whose famous anti-slavery novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, became immensely popular (at least in the North) and in time, a historical version of American sanctimony. Yet, as James Baldwin wrote nearly a century later in his essay “Everybody’s Protest Novel,” it was also “a very bad novel.” For one thing, it praises the enslaved for turning their cheeks, as it were, to be slapped again—or killed—rather than fighting back, a notion of Christian virtue and acceptance that results in brutal suffering and death on an unjust earth that will finally send Uncle Tom out of America to a less violent place known as Heaven. In Baldwin’s words, Stowe “was not so much a novelist as an impassioned pamphleteer; her book was not intended to do anything more than prove that slavery was wrong… This makes material for a pamphlet but it is hardly enough for a novel, and the only question left to ask is why we are bound still with the same constriction.”

And yet constriction has become even more constricted at this point of the 21st century, narrowing the fearless explorations that have been inherent in literature. A new American edition of To the Lighthouse , Virginia Woof’s 1927 British classic, to be published this year by Vintage, opens with an apologetic preface proclaiming that the publication is not an “endorsement” of the novel’s “cultural representations or language.” And just like in the 1850s, there are present-day writers—Sally Rooney, Ben Lerner (I remain a fan of his first two novels, but not his third), Celeste Ng, and Emma Cline, to name a few—composing fiction that Becca Rothfeld, in a brilliant essay appearing in Liberties Magazine , describes as “sanctimony literature,” in which the authors endorse and applaud their pious protagonists for living correctly. In contrast to the four novelists cited above, Rothfeld lauds Jane Austen for creating what she calls “morally mottled characters.” In Rothfeld’s view, political and ethical merit are not inherently identical. The truth is, pretty much all of us are mottled, and to immerse ourselves as readers into the complexity—not the clarity—of existence is illuminating. We can feel as close to the characters as we do to ourselves.

For me, good literature investigates morality. It stares unrelentingly at the behavior of its characters without requiring righteousness. The problem these days with a vast amount of fiction ( and its criticism) is that morality is treated as if it were mathematically precise, obvious, undeniable, and eternal. It is none of those things. Morality evolves, devolves and evolves again. It is not a rule that comes from outside of ourselves, as when the Ten Commandments supposedly floated down to the top of a mountain into the hands of Moses. That’s fiction, too, folks, as if the Bible were a very good book of magical realism, written by Garcia Marquez . Truth does not have to be literal. It can arrive at reality, dressed in a dream. Paradoxically, fiction is often truer than journalism in regard to the nature of life, even though it is largely invented, aka “fiction.” And genuine morality, as opposed to contemporary etiquette, arises from within us, over time, with thought, with feeling, and, crucially… with curiosity. In Buddhist meditation, for example, curiosity leads to a greater and more generous awareness.

Curiosity, in my view, is also what tends to make for far better fiction, and nonfiction as well. Too many publishers and editors these days seem to regard themselves as secular priests, dictating right and wrong, as opposed to focusing on the allure of the mystifying and the excitement of uncertainty. Ethics and aesthetics appear in this era to be intentionally merged, as if their respective “good” is identical. By contrast, the late, brilliant editor Robert Gottlieb, who worked with Toni Morrison , Robert Caro , Cynthia Ozick , Doris Lessing , and Joseph Heller , among many others, blended himself into the prose and intentions of his authors, supporting and allowing the independence of their freestanding literature. He was an editor-in-chief at the The New Yorker for several years, but never a dictator. He could judge and sharpen the distinctive power of an author’s voice without condemning its unique, often defiant point of view.

In their best moments, writers scribble on their pads and type on their keyboards like children playing with their buddies outside on the street or in the woods or at a park, far away in soul, if not place, from their parents. As the scholar and literary critic Peter Brooks declares in the book Seduced by Story , a beguiling and recent analysis of the nature of narrative, both fiction writing and children’s play “are about the creation of a space of freedom within the inexorable mechanisms of the real. That play, in the case of the successful fiction, delivers us back to reality changed, enhanced, with a greater wisdom in our stock.” Novelists love novels, he suggests, because such literature doesn’t constrain its creation by rules. “Fiction,” writes Brooks, “is playful precisely in its refusal to accept belief systems, its insistence on the ‘as if.’”

Or, as my friend, the novelist Darcey Steinke, says: “I actually think the best writing has paradox and ambiguity built right in. You can’t write without accepting it. Novels are about people that are f***** up!”

Oh, dear literature! Will you die or shrink or practically disappear into a tiny, elitist realm like opera has into Lincoln Center on the Upper West Side of Manhattan? James Shapiro, an English professor at Columbia, has only owned a smart phone for the past year. And yet his literary life has radically altered. “Technology in the last twenty years has changed all of us,” he tells Nathan Heller in a New Yorker piece about the diminishment of English majors in college. “…I probably read five novels a month until the two-thousands. If I read one a month now, it’s a lot. That’s not because I’ve lost interest in fiction. It’s because I’m reading a hundred web sites. I’m listening to podcasts.”

John Guillory, another professor, recently retired from New York University, and the author of Cultural Capital and Professing Criticism , says his fellow academics need to confront “the declining cultural capital of literature in a wildly expanded media universe.”

There’s even anxiety that artificial intelligence might make human writing superfluous. The Italian writer Italo Calvino , one of my favorite novelists (read The Baron in the Trees !), foresaw this in a lecture he gave way back in 1967, entitled “Cybernetics and Ghosts.” He laid out questions that strike me as astonishingly prescient, given the recent attempts of AI at composing literature. “Will we have a machine capable of replacing the poet and the author?” Calvino asked during his speech. “Just as we already have machines that can read, machines that perform a linguistic analysis of literary texts, machines that make translations and summaries, will we also have machines capable of conceiving and composing poems and novels?”

The answer, as Calvino likely already knew, even though he died at the age of 61 in 1985, is: You betcha . A couple of years ago, a former Esquire colleague of mine, Adam Fisher, relayed to me a poem composed by AI. It wasn’t that good, but it wasn’t that bad, either. It probably would have gotten a solid B in an MFA program.

Will readers like us therefore need to become the literary equivalents of the Amish, living peacefully and slightly outside the technological world? Can reading and writing literature become our version of riding in horse-drawn buggies cantering peacefully down a car-jammed highway? Or do we simply need to accept new forms of art, whatever they might be, as when Bibles were first printed by the Gutenberg Press back in 1455, and a new bright vision arose from reading?

Not long ago, I was waiting in a long line to the cashiers at the Barnes & Noble bookstore by Union Square in Manhattan, lugging a stack of books and magazines that I was about to buy. Just ahead of me stood a lovely, dark-haired woman, probably in her forties or fifties, also carrying a stack of books, who pulled a flip phone out of her coat pocket, opened it for a second, then flipped it back shut with seeming delight. I fell in love with her instantly. Yes, she was beautiful, and I didn’t mind that, but it was the flip phone that made me want to ask her out, to sit with her in a bar or coffee shop, discussing the similar nature of our particular universe, and then to subsequently marry and share a digitally-free—or at least digitally-modest—life.

Her flip phone made me believe I already knew her. That she also loved reading literary fiction (the books she was lugging implied that, too, including Haruki Murakami’s short story collection First Person Singular , which I was also buying). That she appreciated direct contact with humans, talking and listening in physical presence, not just staring at a phone in the midst of humanity. That there was a calmness in her, and strength as well. In my view, she had either rebelled against smart phone obsession or never succumbed to it in the first place. I’m reminded of a wonderful line from Lola Shub, a high school senior from Brooklyn, quoted by Alex Vadukul in the New York Times last December in an article about young Luddites: “When I got my flip phone, things instantly changed,” she said. “I started using my brain.”

My own brain decided to hide my intermittently-smart Samsung phone in the back pocket of my jeans and wondered what to say to the flip phone woman. In the end, however, I said nothing. Instead, I smiled at a little kid, also hauling a stack of books, who just came running into the line ahead, and then leaning against that very woman. The boy grinned back at me. I went up, bought my books and magazines, stuffed them in my knapsack, took them home, sat down on my favorite chair, turned off my phone, and began to read.

Outside my window, a big moon sailed slowly across the sky above New York City. It felt like my head was its own moon, albeit somewhat smaller, peacefully floating over Murakami’s story “Cream.” The very process of reading in itself is a generous, enriching form of solitude, meditational in fact, but it is also a calm instigation of independence, and maybe even an ongoing incentive for intellectual revolution. It allows a reader, especially in this digital age, to think more freely rather than being dictated by aggressive algorithms. Murakami’s recently-published stories also made me realize how fiction at large, and short stories in particular, remain as exhilarating as ever, the embodiment of an infinite variety of visions and voices, and powerful alternatives to the standard nature of the current mind, regardless of whether literary fiction is now harder to find, publish, promote, and write in this era of digital dictatorship.

Twenty-five years ago, I wrote and published the following paragraph in the introduction to an anthology I edited called Why I Write , that features original essays by 28 fiction writers, including Denis Johnson , Joy Williams, Darius James, Mary Gaitskill , Ann Patchett , and David Foster Wallace :

The very act of reading literature, the anticommunalism of it, the slow drift into reverie, the immersion into the charismatic black-and-white grids of the page—all of this emphatically unplugs us from that other grid, that beeping, noisome electronic grid that attempts to snare us in a web of reflex, of twitch and spasm. Does this make the pursuit of literature a Luddite maneuver, with all the shadowings of melancholy and futility attendant on such rebellions? I suspect that to the contrary, passionate reading will become a form of permanent opposition…

I feel this way now more than ever. And I suspect I will for the rest of my life. Will you?

Will Blythe is the author of a New York Times bestseller To Hate Like This is To Be Happy Forever . A former literary editor at Esquire , he quit the magazine in protest to a last-minute cancellation of a novella by David Leavitt that included scenes of gay sex.

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The Met Gala’s Strange but Fitting Literary Inspiration

In 1962, J.G. Ballard published “The Garden of Time,” a short story about aristocrats overrun by “an immense rabble.” Now it’s the dress-code theme for the year’s most lavish ball.

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By Jim Windolf

• May 6, 2024

In an Instagram post on Feb. 15, Vogue rather cryptically announced the dress code for this year’s Met Gala: “The Garden of Time.”

An article published that same day on the Vogue website cleared things up a little, noting that “The Garden of Time” was the title of a short story by J.G. Ballard , a British author who specialized in dystopian works of fiction.

“The Garden of Time” appeared in the February 1962 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction and was included in the “The Complete Stories of J.G. Ballard,” a collection published not long after the author’s death in 2009. The story describes the last days of Count Axel and his wife, known only as the Countess, who reside in a Palladian villa surrounded by a garden.

They pass the days in seclusion. The count busies himself by attending to rare manuscripts. The countess plays Bach and Mozart on a harpsichord.

The threat to their peaceful existence arrives in the form of an army on the horizon. As it moves closer, Count Axel develops a clearer view of this “vast throng of people, men and women, interspersed with a few soldiers.” In an effort to turn back the advance of this “immense rabble,” he reverses time by plucking blooms from the garden’s most exquisite plant, the time flowers.

Soon enough, the last flower is plucked, and the mob overruns the property. The villa lies in ruins, and all that remains of the count and countess is a pair of statues “gazing out over the grounds” from behind a stand of thorn bushes.

“The Garden of Time” is a fitting but ironic choice as a theme for the year’s most lavish celebration. It’s fitting because the Met Gala celebrates the contemporary equivalents of aristocrats at a time of widespread social anger toward elites; it’s ironic because the reference suggests that the guests and hosts may be doomed.

The same Ballard story inspired a 2021 fashion collection by the designer Thom Browne. The clothing was understated and classic, and the clay-like makeup worn by some of Mr. Browne’s models suggested creatures halfway between statue and human.

The sympathies of “The Garden of Time” seem to lie with the count and countess. And yet the author slips in hints that their lovely existence may be empty. When Count Axel puts his arm around his wife’s waist, he realizes that “he had not embraced her for several years.”

In a 1975 interview with Science Fiction Monthly, Mr. Ballard denied that the story suggested that he missed a bygone way of life. “I think some social changes that took place in this country in the mid-’60s are the best and greatest thing that ever happened here,” he said, adding that it was “marvelous” to see the breakdown of old class divisions.

Our Coverage of the 2024 Met Gala

Zendaya Makes Two Arrivals: The actress wore a second John Galliano design to make a late (re)entrance at the Met Gala . The first was a custom Maison Margiela couture dress he created specifically for her.

A Fitting Literary Inspiration: In 1962, J.G. Ballard published “The Garden of Time,” a short story about aristocrats overrun by “an immense rabble.” It was a fitting but ironic choice as this year’s  dress-code theme .

The Body Spectacle: The night saw Kim Kardashian engaged in a kind of body modification  via extreme corseting. While Tyla, the South African singer and songwriter, appeared coated in sand .

Arrests and Protests: As expected, protesters gathered near the Met Gala to protest the war in Gaza, creating an atmosphere far different  from the one inside the event.

The ‘Naked’ Trend: What better way to distinguish oneself  from hundreds of well-dressed competitors than to wear almost nothing at all?

A Night of Firsts: Here’s the story behind Rebecca Ferguson’s sequin, bird-covered dress , Da’Vine Joy Randolph’s all-denim look , Pamela Anderson’s new incarnation , Christian Cowan and Sam Smith’s debut as a couple , and Amanda Seyfried’s semi-recycled look .