The story of an Hour, by Kate Chapin - Essay Example

Most of the parts of the story reveal her inner feelings and her wild dreams about her future enjoyment as she lives alone in freedom, showing the effects of the historical background of the theme and setting. The story was written in the last decade of the nineteenth century when women were still regarded to have the role of selfless motherhood without any assertion to their needs but to be in full submission to their husbands (enotes.com). This theme is expressed in the sentence “What could love, the unsolved mystery, count for in the face of this possession of self-assertion which she suddenly recognized as the strongest impulse of her being!

” The story does not express any other stronger reason for Mrs. Mallard’s joy for the death of her husband but this. Not that she wanted her husband dead but she wanted her freedom more than being placed under someone’s authority and is left to no self-identity but the wife of Brently Mallard. Despite her love for her husband which is expressed in the story as inconsistent, and the love of her husband to her which is suggested to be of the same affect in the statement “ the face that had never looked save with love upon her”, referring to her husband’s treatment of her, she longed for a freedom that is totally hers.

The issue in this story then is her being a wife, commonly regarded to do nothing else but stay in the house, raise children and play the role of a dutiful husband and mother. However, the main character wants more than that, she wanted to have the same freedom as her husband, able to go to places she wanted to and do things she desired and express herself in whatever means available without the power of a man or even his influence to whatever she does. Mrs. Mallard was first presented as a woman with a heart failure which could be symbolic to the disease in her marriage (Myriad).

Although love was in the relationship, it seemed to have limited the expression of it by the norms during their existence as suggested by the world they lived in. As mentioned earlier, women were regarded to have lesser rights and are bound in the four corners of the house however, to the heroine, she wanted a different version of her story. She knew her husband loved her as much as she loved him, assuming the ‘sometimes' she regarded to love him are the same times he looked at her with love yet she wanted more than that.

As a human being, she felt the need to socialize, to go out and find herself, see what she could do beyond the walls that are keeping her from the outside world. She wanted to see the beautiful things in this world in an encounter and not just from a distance, through the windows of her room. This was very important matter in the relationship of the couple which was killing their love, as the heart would be the most important part of a person’s body, which when collapses, would kill the person.

Her weeping after hearing the news of the death of her husband shows the love she had for her husband, not feeling as other women had in similar circumstances, feeling numb and unable to think clearly, trying to internalize and accept the news. To her, the news reached home and hurt her, so the immediate reaction was her weeping, without regard to who would be watching or what worries would there be about her. Her feelings later show the other side of