The Story of An Hour College Essays Samples For Students

Kate Chopin's short story "The Story of an Hour" is concerning an unhealthy wife who for a short time supposes her husband is deceased and visualizes a complete new life of independence for herself. The speaker’s portrayal of Mrs. Mallard gives you an idea about someone who removes off the ideas of love and even the greatest of marriages for the wonderful thought of pure independence. This paper provides the complication of the concept of Freedom for Mrs. Mallard as the lead character of the story. It gives the impression like an awful thing to Mrs. Mallard, who's constrained in ...

“The Story of An Hour” is a work of American writer, Kate Chopin, who undoubtedly was a great master of short stories since she succeeded in showing character’s complex personality using only a few pages. This story is about a young woman, Mrs. Mallard, who suddenly knew about her husband’s death in a train accident. Firstly, she became upset and depressed but later through her feelings and thoughts it became apparent that she had no reasons to cry. With the death of Mr. Mallard, she could finally find freedom. The author opens another, a real part of Mrs. Mallard’s life that does ...

The Story of an Hour is set in the late nineteenth century in an American house. The story takes place over just one hour, as the story suggests. Chopin uses a variety of narrative techniques to add depth to her story, such as symbolism, foreshadowing, and point of view.
The Story of an Hour is written in third person narrative. The story works well in third person, especially as it begins in the viewpoint of one character and then moves onto another which turns out to be the protagonist. The Story of an Hour begins in the viewpoint of ...

Literature

The story of an hour centers on a young woman who is married, and it is indicating her reaction to her husband’s death in a train accident (Chopin n.d). The cat in the rain is also a short story of an American wife who is suffering from the mistreatment she is receiving from her husband. She figures herself in the cat that she sees in the rain thus goes ahead to look for that Cat (Hemingway, n.d). This paper will discuss how the two authors use contrasting or similar elements of fiction, the impact of those items on ...

Kate Chopin’s “Desiree’s Baby” and “The Story of an Hour” are both intelligently written and gripping short stories. They have many similarities such as their settings, protagonists and the presence of literary techniques such as symbolism and foretelling. However, there are also many differences, such as the nature of the marriages that are explored in each. Over all, there are many elements which make each story memorable individually, but it is clear that both are written by the same author.
“Desiree’s Baby” is set the mid-nineteenth century United States of America, on two plantations in ...

Literary Comparison of The Story of an Hour and The Necklace

The Story of an Hour by Kate Chopin and The Necklace by Guy de Maupassant are both short stories associated with the trials and tribulations of marriage, as well as love. Both stories also deal with the emotional and physical changes that are attributed to personal life changing events. In The Story of an Hour, the plot revolves around a woman, Louise Mallard, and her reaction to her husband’s death. In The Necklace, the plot is based upon a married couple M. Loisel and his wife Mathilde, and the turmoil a necklace has caused them. Although there are similarities in the ...

Compare and Contrast

Introduction
Marriage is an essential component of many societies, as it involves the union between two people in love with one another who would eventually create a family. As a form of social organization, marriage has become the subject of several controversies, with some outside of the purpose of romantic union. Notable pieces of literature attest to that fact, and this study aims to construct an analysis between two literary works – The Story of an Hour by Kate Chopin and A Marriage Proposal by Anton Chekhov, with both literary works establishing that marriage, as a social practice, has found associations with ...

These two masterpieces “the Story of an Hour” by Kate Chopin and “A Good Man is Hard to Find” by Flannery O’ Conner are a real picture of the time period when it was written. A Good Man is Hard to Find, is an example of gothic literature which portrays the background of slavery and Civil War, whereas, the historical background of The Story of an Hour is based on women’s behavior and the female desire for independence which was more preferred than love and marriage. It was a time when a typical American woman of the nineteenth century would be a ...

The Story of an Hour

Kate Chopin’s The Story of An Hour is, on the surface, a romantic tale of a woman who wiles away the boring, husbandless hours she encounters alone in her room, waiting for her spouse to return. Through a strange mix-up concerning his death, and subsequent resurrection, she finds herself suffering from a life-ending heart attack herself. Those around her believe she has died from the sheer joy of find her husband has not died after all. Anybody who truly knew her would know she had actually died from a tragically broken heart, for she was a woman forlorn ...

The 20th century was a remarkable period for many women who are fed up with the discrimination they faced based on gender. Females in the previous centuries were confined to the spheres of their homesteads and not allowed to participate in public activities. The patriarchal perceptions dominated the thoughts of most Americans. The work of Kate Chopin, a renowned feminist, motivated woman to evaluate their situations critically so that they could realize the unfair burden society placed on them. One of the pieces she wrote was the Story of an Hour. Succinct analysis indicates that Chopin tackled complicated issues ...

I was attracted to Kate Chopin’s “The Story of an Hour” even before I read it. The title was enchanting on some deep level. The story of an hour is a unique turn of phrase, just because we do not usually think of units of temporal measurement as having a unique story to tell. The story explores love from different angles.

After reading it, it is clear that the story is not actually about an hour, but about what happens in that hour. Chopin writes with a beautiful prose. It is simple, but powerful. Her use of simile has a poetic ...

Kate Chopin was born in Missouri and she has represented the rebellious spirit of her era. She led an unconventional lifestyle, which was depicted in all her writings and was the kind of woman who dared to stand up for her true beliefs and ideas. According to her biographers and literary critics, ‘Kate Chopin’s writing style was a result of her passionate love for the writing style of Guy de Maupassant.’(1996, Le Marquand). Chopin was influenced by Guy de Maupassant who wrote about people’s everyday lives, but she went a step forward. She created her own unique way ...

Introduction

Modernism was born out of the instability caused by World War I. People began to question the foundations of authority, as well as their social and cultural traditions. This unease is brought not only by the war, but also the increasing developments in politics, economics and science (Wrenn, 2010), liberating many traditions and perspectives. It is marred by “the struggle for knowledgesenselessness and alienation” (Wrenn, 2010). Literature was not immune to these changes, thus the modernist literary movement emerged. Here we analyze Chopin’s The Story of the Hour and Hemingway’s The Cat in the Rain to look ...

It needs to be taken into account that literature goes on to reflect the true nature of the society of this world. The stalwart literary artists have for long engaged in portraying the dynamics of the interpersonal relationships in their works, and the theme of domination and its subsequent subversion has come to find commonality in the works of many literary artists of the world. If one closely introspects on some specific works, it would be easier to gauge how the thematic content of domination has been portrayed in the literary texts over the span of the history of ...

The point of view is a perspective from which the author chooses a narrator to tell a story. The third-person narrators are usually observers but not characters in the story. Kate Chopin in “The Story of an Hour” uses the third-person omniscient narrative, which captures the reader and makes him sympathetic to Louise Mallard. The reader has a possibility to see how the woman interacts with other characters, her thoughts, and feelings. Indeed, the omniscient narrator is able to tell the story of Louise’s hour of evolution and freedom but the happiness lasted only for an hour before ...

William Faulkner once said that “the human heart in conflict with itself” is the only subject that is truly worth writing about. There are many authors who have applied this advice to their characters throughout literature. From the complicated Nineteen Eighty-Four’s Winston Smith to the simplistic Sam I Am’s Sam, there are too many characters to name who spend the pages of their novel feeling in conflict with their own hearts. Two more examples of such characters are Bernard Marx, from Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and Louise from Kate Chopin’s The Story of an ...

Literature possesses a vast territory for expressing meaningful human feelings, abstract emotions, or themes. Desperation and comfort is a common theme in literature, encompassed in short stories, poems and dramas and reflected differently through the mechanisms of each literary genres, the style of each literary piece or the personality of the authors.
Various literary genres like short stories, poems or dramas, possess their unique mechanisms for reflecting the theme of desperation and comfort. Looking at Dylan Thomas’ “Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night”, the poet uses techniques specific to poetry space for transmitting his desperate adversity to resisting ...

Question 2.

In reading the stories “Hills like White Elephants” and “The Unicorn in the Garden”, the authors Ernest Hemmingway and James Thurber have introduced strong symbolisms. The first aspect to strike when reading both these stories is how the characters themselves are symbolic of life and death. In “Hills Like white Elephants”, the girl Jig, symbolizes life. She is the one who wants to have a baby. She wants to break away from the life of staleness where all she and her husband ever do is “look at things and try new drinks”. Instead she wants to welcome life – a baby (which she ...

In “The Story of an Hour,” Kate Chopin presents readers with a view of marriage that is not very commonly heard of these days. After learning that her husband has died, Mrs. Louise Mallard, the main character of the short story, experiences the delight and glee of freedom instead of the depression and sorrow of having lost her life partner. Chop has chosen such a structure for her short story that seems to be well suited for its subject matter. The Story of an Hour by Kate Chopin is one of her most famous work because of how she is able ...

In “The Story of an Hour,” Kate Chopin strongly employs symbolism throughout the story to intensify the drama. The symbols fit the subject matter of the story perfectly. The short story contains several symbols that make the readers feel a sense of comfort, wellness, and wonderfulness in their mind, somewhat the same feelings that overcome Mrs. Mallard when she learns of the “news of her husband's death.” The symbols in the short story embody Mrs. Mallard’s sense of freedom from the moment she murmurs “free” to herself and intensify the story’s twist ending.
The very first symbol ...

‘Desiree’s baby’, written by Kate Chopin, is one of the most anthologized and critically acclaimed short stories of the nineteenth century. First published in the year 1893, the story captures with vivid detail, the societal attitudes that prevailed during the dawning years of that century. It is set in the days where rich, White, plantation owners, had slaves working for them tirelessly, yet did not have the heart or will, to treat the blacks equally, despite the many laws that legally abolished slavery. African Americans were not the only ones, being discriminated and marginalized, but the society of ...

Introduction

Females are often misunderstood both in real life and even in literature, this can be perceived from analyzing how the minor characters treat the main female characters in stories such as “The Story of an Hour” by Kate Chopin and “A Rose for Emily by William Faulkner. Reading the two stories create a notion that the society where the main female characters live in as well as the minor characters does not understand what the woman feel or think. The demonstrated treatment of the minor character towards the female characters suggests gender, sociological and psychological tendencies of neglect, death, abandonment ...

During the era after the Civil War, many authors started writing more about real life tales. These authors wanted to present life in an accurately realistic light. They particularly started writing about fate because they believed that everyone’s destiny was ruled by fate. The Story of an Hour by Kate Choplin, Eveline by James Joyce, and A Rose for Emily by William Faulkner were also written in the era after the Civil War. Even though these short stories were written by three different authors, it is surprising that the primary characters of these stories are female and have a ...

Kate Chopin's The Story of an Hour is a thrilling story about a woman called Mrs. Mallard, whose husband is suspected to be involved in an accident. One of her husband’s friends, Richard, receives the message that Mr. Mallard had died in the accident and tells it to a number of people. Some people close to the wife of Mr. Mallard wonder how they are going to break the news to Mrs. Mallard. When Mrs. Mallard is finally informed by her sister Josephine, she is so grief-stricken that she goes to sit alone in a room, contemplating how ...

There is never an opportune moment for death. Death occurs when people least expect it. Edgar Allen Poe in his “The Cask of Amontillado” and Kate Chopin in her “The Story of an Hour” talk about how death comes at inopportune moments - when it is least expected. Death is the central theme in both of these works, with the protagonists wishing for someone else’s death. The results however are completely different. Even though the protagonists wish for the other person to die, they really do not have a strong reason for them to die. Montresor talks of ...

The first wave of feminism swamped the world in the second half of the twentieth century and was swooped up by a great amount of women, who finally got the opportunity to sound off their discontents and complains. The supporters and mediators of feminism appeared from different fields of activities and of various strata of society. As the issue of feminism gathered momentum, it fell under thorough research and detected that feminist ideas appeared centuries ago and can be found in literary works of unrecognized authoresses and poetesses. Kate Chopin was one of them, who cherished feminist spirit in ...

Experience:

After reading Kate Chopin's "The Story of an Hour", I was very surprised by the tragic ending. I did not expect such a brutal plot twist at the end of the story. However, I realized the story was short, therefore I suspected that it would have a dramatic climax for an ending.
1. The setting of "The Story of an Hour" is in a house (primarily the bedroom), evidently a rather large one that overlooks a square.
2. The major theme of this story is that life is not what it seems to be on the outside. Externally, the ...

In a world obsessed with so much technology, it is fairly easy to get sucked into electronic devices, social media and virtual networking. This has not only affected our interpersonal relationships, but our relationship with the written word as well. There are many people that could not even tell you the last time that they picked up a book. It seems as though in our busyness and with our hectic lifestyles that we have lost a certain level of companionship and intimacy that we once had with one another and with the world. Literature and/or reading, has always had the ability to ...

There are various approaches of women and feminism in the literature of the early 20th century. For depicting the feminine psych, authors use various literary devices for allowing readers to enter the mind of their characters. Susan Glaspell’s “Trifle” uses symbolism and irony for resenting her character, Mrs. Wright and for illustrating her hardships that drove her to murdering her husband. Moreover, after studying Glaspell’s “Trifle”, the manner in which she develops the narration indicates that she considers Mrs. Wright’s action as justified. Mrs. Wright, a character of the early 20th century, resembles Kate Chopin’s Mrs. ...

The story of Louse Mallard, who dies of a heart condition from the surprise showing up of her presumed dead husband suggests a succesful conspiracy to cover up major issues in their marriage. The fact that Louise died concealing the abusive nature of her husband reveals the dreadful reality of women surviving in abusive relationships and opt to conceal the truth. This paper seeks to analyze Allen Stein's Women and Autonomy in Kate Chopin's short Fiction and Joseph Rossenblum's The story of an hour.
Allen supports Kate Chopin efforts in revealing the reality of difficulties that women encounter in the ...

“The Story of an Hour,” “I Want a Wife” and “Trifles” all touch on the subject of marriage and especially the role of a woman according to the standards set by society. They highlight the irony of married women, though sailing in the same boat that is marriage; all face the same problems all on their own. In the three stories, the importance of a woman is secondary to the man in the institution of marriage.
Perhaps one of the more prominent themes in all the three books is how both genders identify with each other and their accepted defined roles ...

Kate Chopin, the author of the short stories, "The Storm" and "Story of an Hour," was a tremendously forward-thinking and feminist author - in both of these tales, marriage is viewed as a restrictive hold on the women who are the subjects of each story. In "The Storm," the desperate Calixta temporarily frees herself of her stifling marriage by engaging in a passionate love affair with a paramour from her past who finds himself in her house in the wake of a nasty storm. Meanwhile, in "Story of an Hour," a woman discovers that her husband has passed away, and starts to have fantasies about ...

I have chosen to examine four short stories whose characters are people with physical markings or mental disorders. People who have these traits are unusual and regarded as odd by "normal" people. Usually, they develop some mental powers and become able to achieve much more than people who have neither physical nor mental problems. Maybe these "marked" people achieve success because they believe in themselves, whereas, "normal", healthy people tend to be paradoxically more self-conscious which hold them back. However, they are always there to judge the challenged ones. The stories that were particularly interesting to me are: Roman ...

Nothing beats the joy of coming to terms with one’s identity. However, defining one’s identity is always a challenge, especially in the face of cultural restrictions. It also becomes more challenging when there are stereotypes that restrict chances of personal growth. In an attempt to overcome these challenges, and define their identity, some people may be forced to break ranks with their past. Although culture and stereotypes influence people’s way of life, the ability to define one’s identity lies with self.
Culture has a great impact on how people define their growth. Through the beautiful poem “ ...

Cate Chopin in her book The Story of an Hour tells of a story of how repressive marriage can be especially to women. The protagonist of the story, Louise Mallard just gets the feeling of freedom right after she heard of his death, a thing that is not anticipated in any marriage whatsoever but her happiness about it makes the reader understand the fact that in as much as she was married and lived with him, she was never happy in the marriage. Freedom to Mrs. Mallard is only achievable in the absence of the other party therefore implying that marriage ...

In “The Story of an Hour” by Kate Chopin, describes the last hour in the life of Louise Mallard, who is trapped in an unhappy marriage with a husband she did not really love, but has a brief moment when it appears that freedom is at hand thanks to his untimely death. After all, this was an era when divorce was rare and social, economic and educational opportunities for women were very limited. All of Chopin’s women characters in her fictional work also shared a strong desire to escape from the constraints of Victorian marriage and family life. They were often based ...

The Story of an Hour by Kate Chopin is full of irony and incongruity in the feelings of the main character Mrs. Mallard. Marriage is shown as constraining and her desire for freedom and independence is expressed vividly. Her public demonstration of sadness at her husband’s death stands in stark contrast to the ‘monstrous joy’ she feels at the thought of having a ‘Body and soul free!’
The narrator describes the emotions of Mrs. Mallard with powerful and vibrant words. The character has a deep inner life with a lot of desires, feelings and emotions. The thoughts she has in ...