"The Story of an Hour"

The Story of an Hour by Kate Chopin is about the wife of a man who hears that her husband has died in a train crash. She gets very emotional and says that she needs to go to her room to be alone for a little bit. She goes and sits in a comfortable armchair that was facing an open window in her room. From there, the she observes all of the things that are going on outside; the “trees all aquiver with the new spring life,” “the delicious breath of rain,” a “peddler crying his wares,” and someone singing off in the distance (Chopin 554). As she sits there, facing the window and observing everything that is happening, she it hits her that she is no longer under her husband’s “rule” and there would be no more “powerful will bending hers;” she is free (Chopin 555). She starts imagining how wonderful her life will be now that she can just “live for herself” (Chopin 555). Her sister hears her breathing heavily and whispering to herself and mistakes it as intense grief and “implores for admission,” to which Louise Mallard replies “Go away. I am not making myself ill” (Chopin 555). After a while of imagining the new life ahead of her, she finally come out of her room and goes downstairs. Just as she gets to the main floor, though, in walks her husband, alive and well. In the shock of discovering her husband is alive, she dies suddenly due to her heart problems foreshadowed in the first paragraph (Chopin 555).

For such a short, little story, Chopin managed to use many literary devices. When she mentioned the heart problems at the beginning of the story, it was use of foreshadowing. When she mentioned that Louise now prayed that her life would be a long one when “only yesterday she had thought with a shudder that life might be long” (Chopin 555), she used irony. She also used irony when she mentioned that the doctor claimed that she died of “the joy that kills,” because it shows that she was the only one that knew her true feelings pertaining to her husband’s death (Chopin 555).

“The Story of an Hour” shows similarities to the philosophies of Emerson and Thoreau because they both valed the signfigance of the “self” and Louise Mallard embodied this idea in the shape of a suppressed wife who did not feel like her will was her own. Chopin also shows a similarity to Thoreau’s writing because she is contradictory; for example Louise is “happy” her husband is dead, yet she mentioned that “she had loved him” and that her husband had a “face that never looked save with love upon her” (Chopin 555). This contradiction is similar to Thoreau because “Thoreau was a contradictory figure” (Grant 5).


Grant, P. B. "Individual and Society in Walden." McClinton-Temple, Jennifer ed. Encyclopedia of
Themes in Literature. New York: Infobase Publishing, 2011. Bloom's Literary Reference Online. Facts On File, Inc.


Chopin, Kate. "The Story of an Hour" Glencoe Literature. By Jeffrey D. Wilhelm, Douglas Fisher, Beverly Ann. Chin, and Jacqueline Jones. Royster. New York: Glencoe/McGraw-Hill, 2009. 554-555. Print.