Hello! This week I’m going to be taking a bit of a break from the science fiction and fantasy stories that I normally cover, to talk about one of Kate Chopin’s tales, “The Story of an Hour.”
This story, as the title suggests, takes place over the course of an hour. We begin with one Louise Mallard, a young woman with a heart condition, who is about to receive some very bad news. That news being that her husband has just died in a railroad accident. As one can guess, her husband’s friend Richards and her sister Josephine want to break the news to her gently.
Also, as one can guess, she doesn’t take the news particularly well, collapsing into a weeping pile of grief before retiring into her own room. She sinks down into an armchair, and begins to contemplate her situation. It’s here that she starts to realize something, albeit reluctantly.
With no husband to tie her down, she’s free to do whatever she wants.
This leads to a kind of euphoria. Which isn’t to say that she didn’t at least sometimes love her husband, although she admits that a lot of the time she kind of didn’t. She’s mostly just happy that she actually gets to live for herself for once.
Josephine then knocks on the door, insisting that Louise will make herself sick if she stays cooped up. Louise refuses, and then contemplates her newfound freedom:
Her fancy was running riot along those days ahead of her. Spring days, and summer days, and all sorts of days that would be her own. She breathed a quick prayer that life might be long. It was only yesterday she had thought with a shudder that life might be long.
Eventually, she does leave the room, with “a feverish triumph in her eyes, and she carried herself unwittingly like a goddess of Victory.” Upon coming downstairs, someone opens the door with a key.
And that turns out to be her husband, who was accidentally listed among the dead and wasn’t anywhere near the fatal accident. The shock causes Louise to drop dead of a heart attack, which the doctors call “the joy that kills.”
One thing to keep in mind here is that Kate Chopin was an early feminist writer, and that this story was published in 1895. This was not a super great time to be a woman in quite a few parts of the world, as there were heavy expectations for them to both marry and be subservient to their husbands. It’s pretty clear to me that Louise had chafed under the institution, and that the heart attack was less joy at not being a widow and more dismay at her loss of freedom.
Seriously, though, being a woman in the Victorian age kind of sucked, so I can see where she’s coming from here.
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