Compare and Contrast What Its like to Be a Black Girl and Child of the Americas

The Story of an Hour

Colleen Cooper

Eng. 125

Rozlyn Truss-Lynder

April 1, 2012

The Story of an Hour

The short story "The Story of An Hour" by Kate Chopin is a powerful story of marriage and with her husband. The tone, imagery, and symbolism of the story helps to us understand and feel like we are there.

The theme of this story is an unhappy marriage. Throughout the story there are hints that she feels free. When she first heard of her husband's death she started to weep and went to her bedroom to be alone. After she sat there a while looking out the window she realized that she was free from the marriage. The other part that is so ironic is that she has a heart condition and we learn that right in the beginning of the reading.

The tone of the story has a couple. This is a story of woman who seems to have hated marriage and was not really in love the story the tone is one of dawning comprehension, hopeful even. The diction and sentence structure is liberating, using words such as "free" to describe her self now that she is not married. Her description of what she sees out the window in paragraph 5 or 6, the blue skies emerging from the clouds, is symbolic of Louise's own emergence from the clouds of marriage.

The end of the story however, is very ironic. She dies because of all the possibilities she lost when her husband wasn't killed, and she found out that she would have to live under the oppression of marriage again. And then the doctors diagnosed her of dying of a joy that kills.

It is important to note however, that Chopin makes a point to describe the husband in a positive light, describing him as a man who never looked upon his wife but with love. So it's not the husband that is the problem, it's the institution of marriage itself (Smith, 2011).

The imagery was so explicit in this example "She wept at once, with sudden, wild abandonment, in her sister's arms". This is pictured in my mind that her sister is holding her and Mrs. Mallard is so upset I can see her. Another example "She could see in the open square before her house the tops of trees that were all aquiver with the new spring life. The delicious breath of rain was in the air. In the street below a peddler was crying his wares. The notes of a distant song which some one was singing reached her faintly, and countless sparrows were twittering in the eaves. There were patches of blue sky showing here and there through the clouds that had met and piled one above the other in the west facing her window" (Clugston, 2010). This example of imagery made me picture Mrs. Mallard sitting in her chair and weeping