Project one: Feminism and the masculine
Research point
“The Story of an Hour” by Kate Chopin is told through a third person narrator who gets inside the main character’s head by using free indirect discourse. I’m researching this story in more detail to uncover the feminist viewpoint within Chopin’s story.
In “The Story of an Hour”we are introduced to Mrs Mallard, the main protagonist, who suffers from heart trouble and is gently told of her husband’s death. Mrs Mallard, we are told, weeps at once, with sudden wild abandonment and once the storm of grief had spent itself, she walks away to her room alone.
It is when she sinks into a roomy armchair, pressed down by a physical exhaustion that haunts her body, that we see the first glimpse of Chopin’s depiction into the confines of an unhappy marriage and within these marriage institutions the restraints put upon women during the late 19th century, by their over-powering husbands.
Within the course of an hour we see the protagonist start to evolve from a weak person into a stronger woman. From the window she could see the open square and Chopin shows us, the reader, that a sense of freedom and rebirth are imminent…”trees that were all aquiver with the new spring life…the delicious breath of rain in the air.”
In her description of Mrs Mallard, Chopin’s choice words describe a young, fair woman “whose lines bespoke, repression and even a certain strength. But now there was a dull stare in her eyes,” again suggests the constraints that young women bore in relation to the men that they married, some of whom were far older than their typically younger wives.
From this point of the story the protagonist starts to contemplate her new sense of freedom with the clever use of the word abandonment, and we can almost hear her words as she repeats under her breath: “Free, free, free!”
It hasn’t gone unnoticed that Chopin’s descriptive word choice to describe the protagonist’s character such as repression, dull stare, vacant stare, look of terror, could almost be how she felt in the company of her husband.
We know from the narrators point of view that Mrs Mallard’s husband may have been gentle “when she saw the kind, tender hands folded in death,” and like so often in marriages during the 19th century Chopin describes her protagonists feelings of how he felt about his wife “the face that had never looked save with love upon her.”
Marriage had lost her identity and imposed her with limitations and her sole purpose was a wife and nothing more. It is near the end of the story that she embraces her new found sense of freedom ‘in the years that would belong to her absolutely.’ “Free! Body and soul free!” she kept whispering.
Most importantly, she has a name! Louise. The name itself, seems young and vibrant, indeed its meaning “famous warrior” suggests she is to become just that. We hear her sister, Josephine, call her name at her bedroom door. She wonders if she is ill; so used is she to her sister’s nervous disposition but we know that Louise is planning her new life: “Spring days, and summer days, and all sorts of days that would be her own.”
Louise has a “feverish triumph in her eyes” when she opens the door to her sister “and she carried herself unwittingly like a goddess of Victory.”
How tragic, then, when her husband turns the front door with a latchkey, Louise’s piercing cry was the ‘joy that kills.’
Chopin reveals a deep rooted problem that women faced in marriage during the latter part of the 19th century. Longing for independence and feeling torn between ‘feminine duties’ of a married woman and the freedom associated with self reliance, women remained inferior to the men they married thus losing their sense of freedom and individuality.
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