Joy that kills?
In Kate Chopin’s “Story of an Hour”, Mrs. Mallard is informed of her husband’s death delicately because of her heart trouble affliction. At first, when I was reading this story, I thought she would decline into grief about her husband’s untimely demise, and the rest of the story would be either on how the newly widow would cope with this or how she dies. Well I was right to an extent, but I was also wrong. The sentence “She was beginning to recognize this thing that was approaching to possess her, and she was striving to beat it back with her will,” is the one that had me wondering if I actually knew what this story centered on at all, and what she could possibly need to beat back with all her strength.
Freedom. This is what I believe the entire short story is centered around. To what extent can one human impose his will on another, despite the intentions, whether good or bad? Mrs. Mallard understood, when she was alone in her room, gazing out of her window, that whether the act was done with “a kind intention or a cruel intention” it was still a crime.
Another little lesson I picked up on in this story is how quickly we can change our minds about things when our circumstances change. Mrs. Mallard, with her “sometimes loved” husband now dead, “breathed a quick prayer that life might be long. It was only yesterday she had thought with a shudder that life might be long.” She now asserts that no one will live for her in the upcoming years, for she is now determined, with her newfound freedom, to live for herself. Not in a selfish way, but a life in which she can now make her own decisions. No wonder that there was a “feverish triumph” reflected in her eyes.
So after all she has this all figured out, something must upset this new balance, as is common in the way of short stories. The ‘upset’ to the new widow’s plans is her husband walking through the door, unharmed, and unknowing of any accident at all. (So much for ‘intelligence’ that had placed him dead at the scene, twice.) This is all to much for Mrs.allard to handle, and she dies of heart disease, “of joy that kills.” Which is the only way this story could have ended in the late 19th, early 20th centuries. We can’t have an unhappy wife become widowed and independent-that would be too radical!
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