Story Of An Hour Feminist Analysis

Have you ever stopped and thought about how the views and roles of women have changed throughout several generations? I certainly have. Kate Chopin’s The Story of an Hour is very powerful short story about a woman, Louise Mallard, who becomes very independent and calmed when she hears some terrible news about her husband, Brently.
We are first introduced to Mrs. Mallard, but the reader is not given a first name until closer to the end due to it is not considered important. Louise Mallard suffers from a heart problem and by reading the story seems very delicate. . They are considered a working class couple where Mr. Mallard is a railroad worker and Mrs. Mallard is a housewife. When looking at the Mallards they seem to be a pretty normal married couple in the nineteenth century. Mrs. Mallard was told that her husband was in a dreadful accident by the railroad. When Josephine, her sister, broke the news to her along with her husband’s friend Richard, at first Louise shut down. She cried in her sister’s arms and then grieved alone in her bedroom. Chopin was very descriptive when she says that Mallard was sitting looking out into the blue sky, then leaning her head back into the cushion falling asleep until a sob came up into her throat and shook her. All of
It was just a standard 19th century marriage; the man ran the home and the marriage. In the story Chopin says “she knew she would cry when she saw the kind, tender hands folded in death; the dace that had never looked save with love upon her, fixed and gray and dead” (Chopin, 100). She feels grief because her husband was the only one who gave her “life”; they depended on each other to live. After feeling grief she felt relief, she realized she could move onto a life without her husband. She desired freedom “There would be no one to live for her during those coming years; she would live for herself” (Chopin,