"The Story of an Hour": A Review

Paper Summary:

This paper discusses and analyzes the short story, "The Story of an Hour", by Kate Chopin. The paper presents a biographical background of Chopin and includes references to the short story. The paper explains how Chopin wrote for women at a time when women were to be "seen and not heard." She wrote of their lives, their fears, and the secrets that they kept from everyone but themselves. The paper contends that her stories still touch women today because they bring out the underlying emotions so common in everyday events.

From the Paper:

"After being sent off to boarding school at the tender age of five, partly for her defiant and inquisitive attitude, Kate Chopin grew up in a house of strong women who were dominated by her equally strong and opinionated father, Thomas O'Flaherty. However, her father was killed in a train crash, just as Mrs. Mallard's husband's supposed fate in "The Story of an Hour." When her father died, she returned home. One biographer notes, in real life, the crash that killed Thomas O'Flaherty liberated his daughter to come home, to be raised among the powerful women of her family. Her father's death kept Kate O'Flaherty from growing up in the typical nineteenth-century patriarchal household, in which a powerful husband ruled the roost" (Toth 10-11). Thus, Chopin knew liberation and freedom by the age of six, and chose to write eloquently about it later in her short story, "The Story of an Hour.""

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