The natural reaction of a woman who has heard the sudden, entirely surprising news of her husband’s death is shock and sorrow. Chopin tells us that Mrs. Mallard does not have an altogether typical reaction. In fact, Mrs. Mallard, “did not hear the story as many women have heard the same, with a paralyzed inability to accept its significance.” However, “She wept at once, with sudden, wild abandonment, in her sister’s arms,” fulfilling at least half of the reader’s expectation.
In the short story, “The Story of an Hour”, Kate Chopin has written a very brief tale, and it seems straightforward. A woman with a weak heart receives two quick surprises that kill her from the shock. Her extreme emotions are too much for her heart, just as the first paragraph suggests, although in the end she supposedly dies from joy rather than from the sorrow everyone expected.
Yet, the story proceeds very differently. We are surprised to see how calmly she views the happy scene from her bedroom window of, “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.” Then we hear her first words, “free, free, free!” The reader has to be a bit confused to find that the newly made widow is not only not shocked but also not truly sad either. She is relieved, and her sadness seems to be as much about the life she had previously lead with her husband as it is that he has died.
The minor characters are confused just as we are. They think the news of his death will shock her, but it does not. The doctors think that she has died of sudden joy, but it is exactly the opposite. Josephine thinks Mrs. Mallard is making herself ill, but it seems that she is feeling healthy and alive for the first time in a long while.
This confusion in the characters and the reader is appropriate, because Mrs. Mallard is confused too. She feels her first words coming on, and she tries to repress them. That is why she whispers her words when it seems she wants to shout them. She knows that she should not feel that way, she reflects that there were moments that she loved her husband, she remembers that he never looked at her other than with love in his eyes, yet she is obviously very happy to be free of the barriers that life as a wife set up around her. She welcomes her future with open arms, guiltily joyful that, “she would live for herself.”
