Marriage In Kate Chopin's The Story Of An Hour

Matias Flores Gleason
Saturday, September 6th, 2014
English “A” Class
Essay on “The Story of an Hour” by Kate Chopin Marriage in “The Story of an Hour” Women in the 19th century had felt the oppression of marriage for centuries, and they had had enough of it. They began to rebel against it and to think differently of it. We can analyze this if we read the literature being published at the time. Great novels and authors such as Flaubert, Tolstoy, Austen and Chopin begin to question its authority and its use. Women are able to go against marriage for the first time, and they do so to express all of their misfortunes. In Kate Chopin’s “The Story of an Hour”, the author uses irony and symbolism in order to emphasize her argument: even
Once on her chair, she starts to let her feelings flow through her, at first, there is sadness and mourning, but later on she realizes that she doesn’t feel all that bad about her husband passing away, instead, she feels happy and rejoiced, and starts to look forwards to those days she had dreaded the day before. “She breathed a quick prayer that life might be long. It was only yesterday she had thought with a shudder that life might be long.” She looks out of the open window in her room and sees the springtime in its bloom, with birds flying about, sparrows singing softly, patches of clear blue sky showing here and there. All of these are symbols for hope and freedom. Birds are creatures without boundaries, without limits and unbound to the ground, which we could take to mean marriage. She now feels like a bird, able to fly off into the sky, leaving her grounding marriage behind. It is basically a symbol of freedom and hope for the future. This also tells us that her marriage, even though it wasn’t a violent and unloving marriage was an oppressive one. ” She knew that she would weep again when she saw the kind, tender hands folded in death; the face that had never looked save with love upon her, fixed and gray and dead.” And “And yet she had loved him—sometimes. Often she had not. What did it matter!” These two excerpts really help us understand
Mallard is that she has heart problems “Knowing that Mrs. Mallard was afflicted with a heart trouble…” In this short story, Mrs. Mallard’s heart disease is a symbol for her marriage and marriage in general in the 19thcentury, in which marriage lies at the heart of society. Marriage is the beating heart of society, what binds it together, and is therefore an unbreakable bond, if you were to go against it you would go against society itself. This, from Chopin’s (Kate) point of view is unacceptable; marriage should be kept only if there is love, unlike Mrs. Mallard and her husband. “And yet she had loved him—sometimes. Often she had not. What did it matter!” The author makes the heart represent marriage, and to show that it is a broken institution she gives Mrs. Mallard heart problems. This is a clear statement against marriage, telling us that it has lost its meaning and has become a sickly form of binding people together. In the story, it also foreshadows the events that happen later on, namely, her death due to a corrupt and broken