Every Rose Has a Thorn

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Sometimes we all can feel trapped in the day to day monotony of life. In something as simple as an hour that can all change. In The Story of an Hour by Kate Chopin a young woman reflects on the information of her husband’s death symbolizing a surprisingly ironic mixture of misery and liberation. The basic idea of this story is the oppression a young woman faces in her marriage. This short but touching story is written about one hour in this young woman’s life, in the last decade of the nineteenth century, where her emotions are far from definite.

The story opens with the fact that Mrs. Mallard has been diagnosed with a heart condition before this story takes place. The heart condition plays a large role in this short story, almost as if it is another character. One would assume that Mrs. Mallard is old because of the preexisting heart problem, but not until the eighth paragraph dose the narrator tell you she is young. This heart condition in a young woman shows the amount of anxiety Mrs. Mallard deals with in everyday life.

A friend of Brently Mallard, Richards is the first to find out about the railroad disaster, so it must be assumed that Richards told Josephine who is Mrs. Mallard’s sister. Both Richards and Josephine went to break the news to Mrs. Mallard. Richards “had hastened to forestall any less careful, less tender friend in bearing the sad message,” (Chopin 293) which indicates Brently Mallard may not be well liked. The narrator hints about the ending when they surround the word killed with parenthesis, which indicates it had is said but may have not be a fact.

Mrs. Mallard reacts unlike many women do “with a paralyzed inability to accept its significance” (Chopin 293) instead she breaks down immediately in her si...

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...w open window slammed shut. Josephine screamed, showing the reader that Louise has collapsed. Brently Mallard enters the door amazed to find his friend trying to protect him from the sight of his wife’s passing. In the last sentence the doctors represent the undertaker, and the heart disease represents a broken heart due to the loss of her independent life. The irony is very clear “of joy that kills” everyone assumed it was the excitement of seeing her husband that strained her heart, but it was the sudden loss of her new life.

Works Cited

Chopin, Kate. “The Story of an Hour.” Literature: An Introduction to Reading and Writing. 5th Ed. Edgar V. Roberts and Henry E. Jacobs, editors. Up Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Prentice Hall, 2004. 293-295. Print.

SparkNotes Editors. “SparkNote on The Story of an Hour.” SparkNotes.com. SparkNotes LLC. 2007. Web. 23 Sept, 2011.

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