Freedom--claimed and Lost

In Kate Chopin’s “The story of an hour,” a woman who is a Person that openly portrays the true feelings of a woman who feels trapped inside her marriage. In the period in which she lived, there were only two alternatives for Louise Mallard to achieve personal freedom—either she or her husband must die. Having no personal freedom, the only way Mrs. Mallard could express her lack of freedom through a physical illness. Someone can choose to die, in a moment, as an escape to freedom. Mrs. Mallard’s death was a result of her loss of the freedom she had, when she supposed Mr. Mallard dead.

Upon hearing the news of her husband’s death, Mrs. Mallard lets out a brief cry. Then she quickly retreats to her room where time seems to slow. The choice of words used by Chopin “sank”, “pressed down”, “roomy armchair”, “haunted her body” pulls us to empathize with her life which sounds, heavy and burdensome, and it’s been this way for a long time. They weight is not the weight of her loss, it is the weight of her life.

As, Mrs. Mallard sits in her chair, She views nature and life going on outside her window. She sees and experiences freedom, a contradiction to her life with Mr. Mallard She begins to realize that Tension grow as she is sitting in the chair and at the same time being pulled out of it; There is something coming towards her that she would have to fight off. However, she accepts this something, which is her new freedom from her marriage, the thing that was exhausting her life weighing her down.

While, Mrs. Mallard would “weep again” when she saw her husband in his casket, the burden of her life with him was clear. She hints at his cruelty, his “powerful will bending hers with a blind persistence”

Now that he is dead, she sees life differently: “running riot” “spring and summer days” Mrs. Mallard has accepted her husband’s death and is overjoyed by her new sense of freedom that comes with his passing. The pace of the story speeds up, so that Louise can speed past the guilt of finding the long awaited silver lining in his death.

The pace then slows again as Chopin writes that louise “arose at length in feverish triumph,” a “goddess of Victory,” using the imagery of a princess taking in every moment while being crowned queen. There is a regal presence about Mrs. Mallard. She had accepted her new “free” life, and after “shuddering that life might be long,” with her husband was going to take on, “days that would be her own,” a very contradiction to the weighted fraction of the woman she was at the beginning of the story.

The “they” in the ending of the story is her friends. While “they” believe she has died from the shock of intense joy that is not dead. She dies because she lost her freedom. Louise has just discovered a reason to live that she clearly cherishes, brently, alive her of that life. Though she wants out, her husband’s re-appearance isn’t enough to make her suddenly die. Based on Mrs. Mallard’s grieving process while within her room, it is clear that she died not from her husband’s re-appearance, one of them did not “have to die”- it was from the loss of her newly acquired freedom that came with it.