The Story of an
Hour
Erin Fuller
• How does point of view help us understand the meaning
of the story better?
• How does the overall theme of the story reflect the rising
radical thoughts of the time?
• What effect does the final fate of Mrs. Mallard have on
the significance of the overall meaning of the story?
Essential Questions
• Turn to pg. 626 in your textbook
• Kate Chopin was born in 1850 in
St. Louis Missouri
• She was married to Oscar Chopin
who was a cotton trader
• Her husband died in 1882
• She was a Feminist and those
values she held appeared in her
writing
• Themes in her writing: The nature
of marriage, racial prejudice, and
women’s desire for equality
Kate Chopin
• Written during the Realist Period of Literature
• Women’s Rights laws did not exists yet
• Rejected by two magazines because the leading
female character was too independent and
unhappy
• Despite this, Chopin continued to write stories
about women growth and emancipation
Important History
Vocabulary
In Text Vocab…
• Forestall: Prevent by acting ahead of
time
• Repression: Restraint
• Elusive: hard to grasp
• Tumultuously: in an agitated way
• Elixir of Life: Imaginary substance
believed in medieval times to prolong
life indefinitely
• Irony: Contrast between what is stated and what is meant.
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Verbal Irony: word or phrase used to suggest opposite meaning
Dramatic Irony: Contradiction between what the character thinks and what the reader or
audience knows.
Situational Irony: Event that contradicts expectations
• Motif: Recurring symbol that appears repeatedly in a story,
usually has more than one meaning
• Point of View: the perspective, or vantage point, from which
the story is told
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First-person: narrator refers to himself as I or me
Omniscient Third-Person: the Narrator knows and tells what each character is feeling
and thinking
Limited Third-Person: Narrator relates the inner thoughts and feelings of only one
character
Literary Vocab..
• The Hourglass is the Motif
• The Hourglass represents: the
female form, point of view, time
The Hourglass
• Omniscient Third
Person:
• We know Mrs. Mallard
has heart trouble
• We now about Mr.
Richards
• At the end of the story
we know what the
characters all believe
about Mrs. Mallard
Point of View
• First Person Point of
View:
• When Mrs. Mallard
goes into the upstairs
room we only know
what she is thinking
• Dramatic Irony
• The readers know that Mrs. Mallard feels relived that her
husband has died and the reason she died is because of
her overwhelming disappointment
• The other characters in the story still believe that Mrs.
Mallard is devastated and she died because her frail mind
and body could not handle the shock
• Verbal Irony
• The Joy That Kills
Irony
• A few symbols in the story:
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Symbols
The open window
The birds
The paper boy on the street
The new Spring life
The smell of rain
The patches of blue sky
• http://conflictwebquest.weebly.com/literary-termsgame.html
Literary Terms Game
• Standard: Students will understand the literary elements
of the text and understand the theme of the story
• Objectives: Students will understand the history of the
American Feminist movement and what the Relist period
of literature history was
Standards and
Objectives
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http://sweetclipart.com/hourglass-design-873
http://www.angelfire.com/nv/English243/Chopin.html
http://richard-chin.deviantart.com/art/birds-in-the-sky-149164413
http://americaforbeginners.wordpress.com/
http://hardboiledpoker.blogspot.com/
http://www.docstoc.com/docs/75290956/Author-Point-of-View
http://annahutcheson.tripod.com/id8.html
http://dawnreader.blogspot.com/2012/04/vocab-jokes-part-ii.html
http://www2.maxwell.syr.edu/plegal/history/pattonwq2.htm
http://www.amazon.com/The-Story-of-an-Hour/dp/B0015KC9B2
URL’s