The Story of An Hour

By
Kate Chopin

Kate Chopin: The Story of an Hour

Knowing

that Mrs. Mallard was afflicted

with a heart trouble, great care was
taken to break to her as gently as
possible the news of her husband's
death.

Kate Chopin: The Story of an Hour

It

was her sister Josephine who told her, in

broken sentences; veiled hints that revealed in
half concealing. Her husband's friend Richards
was there, too, near her. It was he who had
been in the newspaper office when intelligence
of the railroad disaster was received, with
Brently Mallard's name leading the list of
"killed." He had only taken the time to assure
himself of its truth by a second telegram, and
had hastened to forestall any less careful, less
tender friend in bearing the sad message.

Kate Chopin: The Story of an Hour

She

did not hear the story as many

women have heard the same, with a
paralyzed inability to accept its
significance. She wept at once, with
sudden, wild abandonment, in her
sister's arms. When the storm of grief
had spent itself she went away to her
room alone. She would have no one
follow her.

Kate Chopin: The Story of an Hour

There

stood, facing the open window,

a comfortable, roomy armchair. Into
this she sank, pressed down by a
physical exhaustion that haunted her
body and seemed to reach into her
soul.

Kate Chopin: The Story of an Hour

She

could see in the open square before

her house the tops of trees that were all
aquiver with the new spring life. The
delicious breath of rain was in the air. In
the street below a peddler was crying
his wares. The notes of a distant song
which some one was singing reached
her faintly, and countless sparrows
were twittering in the eaves.

Kate Chopin: The Story of an Hour

There

were patches of blue sky showing

here and there through the clouds that had
met and piled one above the other in the
west facing her window.
She sat with her head thrown back upon the
cushion of the chair, quite motionless,
except when a sob came up into her throat
and shook her, as a child who has cried itself
to sleep continues to sob in its dreams.

Kate Chopin: The Story of an Hour

She

was young, with a fair, calm face,

whose lines bespoke repression and
even a certain strength. But now there
was a dull stare in her eyes, whose
gaze was fixed away off yonder on one
of those patches of blue sky. It was not
a glance of reflection, but rather
indicated a suspension of intelligent
thought.

Kate Chopin: The Story of an Hour

There

was something coming to her

and she was waiting for it, fearfully.
What was it? She did not know; it was
too subtle and elusive to name. But
she felt it, creeping out of the sky,
reaching toward her through the
sounds, the scents, the color that filled
the air.

Kate Chopin: The Story of an Hour

Now

her bosom rose and fell

tumultuously. She was beginning to
recognize this thing that was
approaching to possess her, and she
was striving to beat it back with her
will--as powerless as her two white
slender hands would have been.

Kate Chopin: The Story of an Hour

When

she abandoned herself a little

whispered word escaped her slightly
parted lips. She said it over and over
under her breath: "free, free, free!" The
vacant stare and the look of terror that
had followed it went from her eyes. They
stayed keen and bright. Her pulses beat
fast, and the coursing blood warmed and
relaxed every inch of her body.

Kate Chopin: The Story of an Hour

She

did not stop to ask if it were or

were not a monstrous joy that held
her. A clear and exalted perception
enabled her to dismiss the suggestion
as trivial.

Kate Chopin: The Story of an Hour

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. But she saw beyond
that bitter moment a long procession of
years to come that would belong to her
absolutely. And she opened and spread
her arms out to them in welcome.

Kate Chopin: The Story of an Hour

There

would be no one to live for during

those coming years; she would live for
herself. 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. A kind intention
or a cruel intention made the act seem
no less a crime as she looked upon it in
that brief moment of illumination.

Kate Chopin: The Story of an Hour

And

yet she had loved him--sometimes.

Often she had not. What did it matter!
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!" she kept
whispering.

Kate Chopin: The Story of an Hour

Josephine

was kneeling before the

closed door with her lips to the keyhole,
imploring for admission. "Louise, open
the door! I beg, open the door--you will
make yourself ill. What are you doing
Louise? For heaven's sake open the
door."
"Go away. I am not making myself ill."
No; she was drinking in a very elixir of
life through that open window.

Kate Chopin: The Story of an Hour

Her

fancy was running riot along those

days ahead of her. Spring days, and
summer days, and all sorts of days
that would be her own. She breathed a
quick prayer that life might be long. It
was only yesterday she had thought
with a shudder that life might be long.

Kate Chopin: The Story of an Hour

She

arose at length and opened the

door to her sister's importunities.
There was a feverish triumph in her
eyes, and she carried herself
unwittingly like a goddess of Victory.
She clasped her sister's waist, and
together they descended the stairs.
Richards stood waiting for them at the
bottom.

Kate Chopin: The Story of an Hour

Some

one was opening the front door with

a latchkey. It was Brently Mallard who
entered, a little travel-stained, composedly
carrying his grip-sack and umbrella. He had
been far from the scene of accident, and
did not even know there had been one. He
stood amazed at Josephine's piercing cry;
at Richards' quick motion to screen him
from the view of his wife.

Kate Chopin: The Story of an Hour

But

Richards was too late.

When

the doctors came they said she

had died of heart disease-- of joy that
kills.

Kate Chopin: Biographical Notes

Kate

Chopin was a forgotten American

voice until her literary reputation was
resuscitated by critics in the 1950s.
Today her novel The Awakening (1899)
the story of a sensual, determined
woman who insists on her
independence, is widely read and
highly honored, a feminist work which
was decidedly ahead of its time.

Kate Chopin: Biographical Notes

Born

Katherine O'FIaherty into an uppermiddle-class family in St. Louis, she married

Oscar Chopin when she was twenty and
moved to her husband's home in Louisiana.
In the ten years that she resided in Louisiana
she was aware of and receptive to Creole,
Cajun, black, and Indian cultures, and when
she later came to write fiction, she would
incorporate people from these cultures in
her work, especially her short stories.

Kate Chopin: Biographical Notes

When her husband died as a young man,

Kate Chopin returned to St. Louis with her
six children. Financially secure, she began
writing fiction as best she could while
rearing her children. She is a good
example of an American realist, someone
trying to represent life the way it actually
is lived, and she acknowledged her debt to
the contemporary French naturalists Emile
Zola and Guy de Maupassant.

Follow Up Question
Does

the psychological ambivalence

dramatized in "The Story of an Hour"
ring true or uncomfortably real when
we consider honestly our own feelings?

Source: Reading About the World, Volume 2, edited

by Paul Brians, Mary Gallwey, Douglas Hughes,
Michael Myers, Michael Neville, Roger Schlesinger,
Alice Spitzer, and Susan Swan and published by
American Heritage Custom Books.