"The Story of an Hour" by Kate Chopin
.... The story is set during the season of spring. This season represents the beginning of life with the blooming of flowers and the revival of the leaves on the trees. When Louis Mallard hears the news of her husband’s death from her sister, Josephine, she begins to cry tears of joy. When alone in her room she whispers to herself, “free, free, free…” (Chopin, 327), which means that she felt held down by her husband and now her life had been renewed with her husband’s death. Another hidden meaning of the story involves the Mallard household itself. In the story all the mentioning of death and sorrowful emotions occurs on the first floor of the house. Louis first hears of her husband’s death on the first floor and she is filled with sorrow. When she gets upstairs, however, she is happy and feels relieved that she has been freed of her marriage. While upstairs she doesn’t even think of the negative aspects of her marriage, she focuses on the positives things of her husband that she will undoubtedly miss. She never reveals to the reader why she is happy about the news of her husband’s death, only telling us that she will miss her husband and remember the good things about him. After all of her positive emotions upstairs, she comes downstairs to the sight of her husband, Brently Mallard, and suffers a heart attack and dies. While Chopin may have indirectly done this, it is evident that ...