A nineteenth century woman’s perspectiveinChopin’s “The Story of an Hour”
...were still quite common place. Is it possible that Louise’ marriage was arranged? A possible clue is given to us in the line “And yet she had loved him – sometimes. Often she had not.”(p.158) I can see how a lack of love could harden one so. But a lack of love doesn’t seem to be the only thing repressing Louise. It seems that her husband was a bit of a task master, who ruled his household with an iron will. “There would be no powerful will bending hers in that blind persistence with which men and women believe they have a right to impose a private will upon a fellow-creature.”(p.158) With what’s been listed so far, one can see that Louise wasn’t happy with her marriage. But if you still have some doubt, there is one sentence that should close the discussion. “It was only yesterday she had thought with a shudder that life might be long.”(p.158) But Louise’ marriage wasn’t completely without love. There must have been some good times, otherwise why else would she have thought “She knew that she would weep again when she saw the kind, tender hands folded in death; the face that had never looked save with love upon her, fixed and gray and dead.”(p.158) The thing that strikes me is how clear of thought Louise is. “She wept once, with sudden, wild abandonment, in her sisters arms.”(p.157) Even then and there, she was over come more by joy than grief, and had the better sense to control herself. “When the storm of grief had spent itself she went away to her room alone.”(p.157) But overall is this sense of how much she truly felt constrained by her marriage. As if her marriage and the walls of her house where more akin to a prison, that with her husbands death, she gained a total release. “What could love, the unsolved mystery, count for in face of this possession of self-assertion which she suddenly recognized as the strongest impulse of her being! Free! Body and soul free!”(p.158) Once Louise had made the realization, that she was “free!”, she actually seemed to look forward to the possibility of life without her husband. She even seemed to find a great sense of joy at the prospect. ...