Story Of An Hour Analysis

The author, Kate Chopin uses marriage to show how powerless women were compared to men during the late eighteen hundreds in her short story entitled, “The Story of An Hour “. At the beginning of the story the main character, Mrs. Louise Mallard has a heart condition. Due to her illness, her sister Josephine and her husband's friend Richards has the hard task to tell Louise that her husband Brently Mallard has died in a train wreck. During this first hour Mrs. Mallard experiences the sorrow of her husband's death and the loneliness she would feel, but also the conflicting and exciting feelings of being able to feel alive and the freedom she will have in the future being alone without her husband.

Today, Kate Chopin is considered in today's standard is a classic writer. She published about one hundred short stories in the 1890's. (Biography, par27). Kate Chopin wrote this short story on April 19, 1894. Vogue Magazine was the first to publish “The Story of an Hour” on December 6, 1894 (The Story of an Hour, par2) however, “The Story of an Hour” was not the original title of this short story. The original title was “The Dream of an Hour”. “ the Story of an Hour” was reprinted on January 5, 1895 by the ST. Louis Life.(The Story of an Hour, par2) This story was considered very controversial in those days,
(Schmoops Editorial Team, par3) A narrative point of view is when the author tells the story instead of using the first person. When a story is being told using the first person, the author uses a character to tell the story. One example of the Narrator's point of view is the knowledge Louise did not really love her husband, because as the story stated, “yet she had loved him – sometimes. Often she had not” (Chopin, par13). The author also uses metaphors, for example. “The Storm of grief” (Chopin, par3) to describe how much pain she must have been feeling. (The Story of an Hour,