Comparing Story Of An Hour And Washington Irving's Rip Van Winkle

By the time she was writing essays, Kate Chopin was not read nor recognized as a major American literature author. Wrote in 1894, the short novel entitled “The Story of an Hour” was not very successful, and it has not spread out of the area of Louisiana. Although the importance of Kate Chopin in our world does not have to be proved thanks to feminist movements, her literary qualities were overlooked at that time.
On the opposite, Washington Irving’s “Rip Van Winkle” wrote in 1819, has become a best-seller book that has quickly matched a large audience on the entire eastern coast, but also in Great Britain and Deutschland. The main character that Irving has invented for the story, Rip Van Winkle, has become very famous since, and it has inspired numerous artistic works such as movies, theatre plays, operas and TV shows.
At first, those
This very bad image of marriage that I felt through the reading has interpellated me, because that was not the view I had of this period. In fact, I started studying American history this semester, and I am trying to integrate the picture of the society at that period. Knowing that the population was strongly influenced by religious ideologies at that time, I realized the importance of such speeches in this particular context. The Story of an Hour is essentially about the desire for a women and furthermore men to more freedom from society, and it is not complicated to see why the book did not met a large audience:
“But she saw beyond that bitter moment a long procession of years to come that would be hers absolutely”. This feeling of liberty towards her companion, and also towards society in its whole, is extremely contemporary, and it is hard to believe that the story was written more than a hundred years