All husbands and wives are expected to deeply love each other. It is because the people around her expect her to be deeply aggrieved. Everything happening around her appears comic. Outside it is an environment of grief for Mrs Mallard and inside it is
All husbands and wives are expected to deeply love each other. It is because the people around her expect her to be deeply aggrieved. Everything happening around her appears comic. Outside it is an environment of grief for Mrs Mallard and inside it is the celebration of a victory.
Check out one or more of the brief biographies on our course page of links. If you haven't yet bought our main text for the course, you can print off a copy of "The Story of an Hour" from the Web, as well, from another link on that page. Plan on reading the story three times before you undertake to write on it.
Devote your first reading just to finding out what happens. But as you do this, be asking yourself what you find yourself feeling as you discover what transpires. Do not read further in this Study Guide until you have completed your first reading of the story.
Before undertaking your second reading, quickly skim back over the whole to notice the shift in setting within the house. As you carry out your second reading, ask yourself how these shifts are significant: How would it be impossible for what happens with Mrs. Mallard in the middle part of the story to take place in the common regions of the house where the rest of the story transpires?
Why then do you think Chopin wanted to have happen there in the middle part of the story what she contrives to have happen? What would have to be different if Mrs.
Mallard's bedroom were located on the main floor of the house instead of upstairs? What is contributed to the story by this feature, in turn? Why might Chopin not want to forego it? You've just carried out a couple of thought modest but important "thought experiments": In order to get certain things done, writers have to arrange to do other things that make these possible or at least able to pass as plausible.
Or, put the other way round: She did it for a purpose. That is, the author's action here was a rational means to an end. And this end in turn may be functioning as a means to some other end, or a whole bunch of them.
Now to the extent that works of art have reasons for being, and reasons for being the way they are, it is appropriate for us to engage in reasoning about t