"The Story of an Hour" Response

"The Story of an Hour" by Kate Chopin raises more questions than it answers about love, marriage, and society in just one page. There is no clear-cut answer to any of these questions, for they are a matter of opinion and perception.

Personally, having lost my best friend this past summer, it is hard for me to condone Mrs. Mallard's reaction to the death of her husband. While societal expectations of marriage were different in this time, life and love were not. Life is too short and love is often lost too soon. Mrs. Mallard attempts to rationalize her joy at the death of her husband by thinking, "she had loved him - sometimes. Often she had not. What did it matter! What could love, the unsolved mystery, count for in face of this possession of self-assertion" (Chopin 149). She asserts that her joy is justified because she only loved him "sometimes," and these infrequent feelings were much less significant than her independence. Her quantified definition of love is invalid, however, for love is infinite.

This is not to say I do no support self-assertion. In fact, I think of myself as a strongly independent woman. It is my belief that everyone, regardless of age, gender, ethnicity, or any other classification society throws people into, has the right to pursue whatever it is that brings him/her joy. I do not support, however, using the death of another as an escape from the limitations of your own life. Had Mrs. Mallard truly been oppressed by society and her marriage, she should have done something about it long before the news of her husband's death came. Mrs. Mallard’s reaction becomes all the more inappropriate when juxtaposed with the reactions of others who lost husbands in the accident. These women heard the story “with a paralyzed inability to accept its significance” (Chopin 149). While many other women, subjected to the same societal expectations as Mrs. Mallard, could not even accept the news of their husbands’ deaths, Mrs. Mallard began looking ahead to her new life.

The tragedy of this story, beyond its heart-breaking plot, is that we readers know so little background information. We could construct much better opinions if we knew how Mr. Mallard treated his wife and the dynamics of their relationship, but without that information, I must express my distaste for Mrs. Mallard’s utter disregard for life and for love.