The Story of an Hour.

My Personal Response.

Chopin's "The Story of an Hour" is a one thousand-word story which tells about what happens to the Mallards in the last hour of Mrs. Mallard’s life. Mr. Richards finds a friend of his, Mr. Brently Mallard, dead of a train accident. Mr. Richard tells Mallard’s sister-in-law, Josephine, about Mr. Mallard’s death. Therefore, it is she who has to tell Mrs. Mallard about the death of Mr. Mallard. In order to prevent the risk of Mrs. Mallard’s heart troble, Josephine tells Mr. Mallard’s wife as gently as possible. Mrs. Mallard cries then goes upstairs. Suddenly, there is a strange thing coming into her thought. She begins to think that she will be free to live her life on her own. She seems to enjoy that confusing circumstance. After that, she goes downstairs and finds her husband alive. Mrs. Mallard is surprised at the fact that her husband is still there for her, so that she dies. Doctors say that her death is caused by the joy that kills.

I thought that  Mrs. Mallard was an old girl. It was due to the fact that she was described as a woman who was afflicted with a heart trouble. Having read some paragraphs, I began to realize that she was still a very young girl.

Frankly, I have until now been thinking about the reason why the author of the story describes Mrs. Mallard as a young girl afflicted with a kind of disease which is usually experienced by an old man. Some people say that it is because the author wants readers to reveal that women used to be the prisoners of their own husbands.

The story makes me want to ask some questions of my lectures and seniors, owing to the fact that some of the statements put me into a long stretch of cunfusion. For example, I do not find any sentences which show whether or not they have got a child. How can they not have a child? Is that because the wife is still very young, so that her husband doesn’t even invite her to have a sexual intercourse?  In addition, the story also reminds me of a case which has just happened in Indonesia, that is to say ‘Syekh Puji and his little wife’. Althought there are slightly different things between Mrs. Mallard’s case and Syeikh Puji’s, my mind still keeps thinking that both of them experience some similar problems.

All in all, it seems to me that the story is interesting, because it tells about many contradictory things which happen almost simultaneously.