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The Love that Kills
Ambrose Bierce, that famous American curmudgeon, said it best: “Marriage is a
community consisting of a master, a mistress, and two slaves, making in all, two” ( Beck 647).
In Kate Chopin’s succinct short story “The Story of an Hour” (Hour), marriage is revealed to be
just that--- the enslavement of one by another, an artificially contrived symbiosis in which one
spouse or the other gains temporary control in an ever-changing battle for influence. Kate
Chopin, herself a widow who had enjoyed a seemingly happy marriage (Rowe 133), knew the
vagaries of relationships and marriages, especially in light of the roles expected to be played by
women in Victorian America (Larsson 195). In Chopin’s day women were limited in what
avenues they could travel socially and economically--- they were relegated to the tasks of mother
and wife. Although there were strong suffrage movements and women who strove for
independence, both economically and artistically, “the prevailing attitude was still that woman’s
proper sphere was in the home and that her purpose in life should be to nurture and encourage
her husband and her children” (Magill 386).
Chopin’s short story “The Story of an Hour” begins innocently enough. The action begins
in media res, with news of a “railroad disaster” in which Louise Mallard’s husband Brently’s
name heads the “list of ‘killed’” (Hour 156). The reader is caught up in the unfolding drama,
assuming the ensuing tale will be rift with heavy Victorian histrionics and a melodramatic
denouement, perhaps something along the lines of O’Henry. Louise is grieved by the news: “She
--------wept at once, with sudden, wild abandonment, in her sister’s arms” (156). She flees to the
privacy of her upstairs room. Seated in a huge chair before an open window, Louise is
confronted by a beautiful spring day that seems to mock her grief: “. . . the tops of trees . . .
were all aquiver with the new spring life. The delicious breath of rain was in the air” (156).
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Louise appears lost in her bereavement; she is overwhelmed by her loss. “. . .there was a dull
stare in her eyes. . . . It was not a glance of reflection, but rather indicated a suspension of
intelligent thought” (157). The reader unconsciously and silently commiserates with Louise over
her tragic predicament: a young widow left rudderless by the premature death of her loving
husband. Louise, in a very short time, both literarily and literally, has gained the sympathy and
trust of the reader. Chopin, in very quick succession, has accomplished two goals: she has the
reader on her side, so to speak, and she has cleared Louise’s thoughts, allowing new discoveries
to enter. Chopin then places some unknown force just outside the window, just beyond Louise’s
and the reader’s perception. Neither has any idea of what is to come--- the discovery of a new
life, what Donald F. Larsson describes as Chopin’s “desire and hope for female independence”
(196). Louise resists at first. “She was beginning to recognize this thing that was approaching to
possess her, and she was striving to beat it back with her will. . . . “ (Hour 157). Louise is
struggling with her self, that part of her individuality subsumed by gender and by marriage. She
is no longer joined to another human being, expected to fulfill those obligations inherent in that
joining. She is no longer one of those “Victorian women in America trapped by the limits men
defined for them” (Ratner 198). She is, in a word, “free!” (Hour 157).
It is the enormity of the seemingly unnatural response of Louise Mallard that prevented
the immediate publication of Kate Chopin’s short story “The Story of an Hour.” It was refused
by “Richard Watson Gilder of the Century, no doubt because he felt it lacked ‘ethical value,’” a
term he used when rejecting another like-minded Chopin story (Wilson 25). More than likely, it
was due to the self-assertiveness demonstrated by Chopin’s female characters (25). Louise, like
many of Chopin’s women protagonists, is not rendered ultimately immobile in thought and
action by the lost of her male counterpart. Here lies the crux of the matter--- Chopin’s women do
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not mimic the supposedly proper attitude concerning relationships in 1890’s America and it is for
this she is condemned. Edmund Wilson expresses it thusly:
She was attempting to put on record the real inner emotions of women in relation to their
men . . . and it was this that made the hair stand on end of those genteel readers of the
nineties [1890’s] and that caused her to be blackballed when proposed for membership in
the St. Louis Fine Arts Club. (14)
Although the reader is taken aback by Louise’s almost gleeful realization that she is, in fact,
“free,” there is the expectation that some plausible explanation will be forthcoming--- possibly
Brently beat her; perhaps he was a lecherous man who strayed from the marital bed; or perhaps
he was an unloving and malevolent man who behaved in a cold and aloof manner. Unfortunately,
for the now emotionally-torn reader, there is no explanation forthcoming. On the contrary,
Brently evidently was a good husband, a man whose “face . . . had never looked save with love
upon her” (Hour 157). This, then, is why Chopin’s later short stories (of which “The Story of an
Hour” is one), and especially her novel The Awakening, were vehemently condemned and
dismissed by both the publishing establishment and its readers (Wilson 27): her female
protagonists did not know their “place,” and constantly “revolt[ed] against [their] socially
prescribed roles” (Taylor 136). She, along with Theodore Dreiser,
. . . introduced a belated freedom from all moral preconceptions into American literature.
Though they did not openly attack the codes of society, their supreme unconcern with the
sacredness of marriage and morals were considered so dangerous that they were forced
into silence. (Seyersted 199)
The moral dilemma is apparent--- how to cheer on a protagonist who does not stand on the moral
high ground? How to feel empathy for one who is set “free” by an innocent’s death?
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The ending causes consternation in the reader as well. After discovering that Brently
Mallard is in fact alive and well, Louise dies of what the doctor describes as the “joy that kills”
(Hour 158). The reader knows that this is a situational irony, that Louise is not a wife who dies
from the “joy” of seeing her husband alive, but “a wife who dies of grief when her husband is
NOT killed in a railroad accident” (Votteler 84). The reader is left with no indication from the
author as how to react. There is no anchor line upon which he or she may cling. Chopin has
purposely left us with no clear resolution of the problem: how to judge Mrs. Mallard. As a
translator of the famous and well-received French short story writer Guy de Maupassant, Kate
Chopin was exposed to the more modern European concepts concerning the writing of fiction,
concepts more advanced and forward-thinking then those of their Victorian American
counterparts. Her writing style matured from “a compromising critique of [contemporary mores
and traditions concerning women] to a more iconoclastic and overtly critical attack on patriarchal
values” (Taylor 183). There is no evaluation of the situation, no profound wisdom imparted on
which the reader can feel a sense of knowing and understanding; there is simply a “story
[written] with no waste motion or observable self-consciousness” (Spiller 859). The reader is
forced to deal with the implications and inherent questions left by Chopin. Daniel P. Deneau asks
the question all want to know: “is Louise a normal, understandable sympathetic woman, or is she
an egocentric, selfish monster or anomaly?” (210).
In order to understand Louise Mallard, one must understand, first, the position of women
in Victorian America, and second, the mind of Kate Chopin. In Kate Chopin’s day, women were
limited in the parts they could play on the larger stage of everyday life. The vast majority of
women were confined to being what Chopin in The Awakening called “a mother woman” (27),
in charge of the running of the household and the upbringing of the children.
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Accordingly,
Such definitions reveal the dependent, relational nature of woman’s existence in
nineteenth century America: With no individual identity, a woman was notable only
in relation to another---- a father, a husband, a child. These restrictions were not only
socially condoned but also legally enforced, since women in spite of suffrage movements,
did not have the right to vote and thus were allowed no effective voice in political or civil
matters. (Magill 386)
Women of the day were expected to be “social” engineers, so to speak, delegating tasks to
servants at home, appearing at all the required social functions, supporting and encouraging
their husbands in each and every endeavor those husbands thought lucid and worthy,
all the while burying their own wants and needs. Inevitably, each wife, knowingly or
unknowingly, would have to come to terms with “the conflict between personal desire and
societal obligations faced by married women during the Victorian era” (Kort 43).
Kate Chopin was brought up in a traditional Victorian home in St. Louis, Missouri, albeit
one with no males present (43). Although reared in a household “run by down-to-earth . . .
strong-willed women, all of whom were widows,” Kate was taught to be her own person (43).
According to Peggy Skaggs, young Kate “must have been taught [also] that she should become a
traditional wife and mother, subordinating herself to masculine authority,” yet she had few
examples of how that subordination manifested itself (2-3), lacking one in her own childhood
household. Perhaps this accounts for her “own apparently happy marriage” and her fictional
unhappily married protagonists (2-3). Vivian Gornick, in her book The End of the Novel of Love,
seems most attuned to this dichotomy inherent in marriage, especially the Victorian marriage.
Kate Chopin led a young life full of promise and possibility, void of any of those male
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limitations or preconceived restrictions placed upon the futures of young ladies, and for others it
was this incubation of youthful exuberance that created the most grief for emerging adult
females: “Women, more often than men, awakened from the long dream of adolescence to find
themselves bound in perpetuity into their lives without any realization of how they had gotten
there” (47). At the very time that an individual was forming a “self,” women were forced to
forego theirs, bending their own “wills” to conform to those of men, who archetypically had
more experience in the making of a “self” (47), and when these two “selves” struggled to make
sense of themselves and of one another, inevitably the woman acquiesced to the demands of the
man, not only in deference to the customs of the times, but also “because it was the woman who
came to married life the least experienced, untried and knowing”(46-47). Kate Chopin’s
writings, especially her later ones, are full of this “nature versus civilization” theme, and she
writes in earnest about the female need for “self-fulfillment” (Mainiero 359).
Is it any wonder, then, that Louise Mallard in “The Story of an Hour” feels “free” when
she learns of the supposed death of her husband? Regarding Daniel Deneau’s question, Louise is
neither “normal woman” nor “selfish monster”--- she is a typical Victorian woman caught up in
the “incongruity for women of attaining public and private happiness in a culture that did not
condone a woman’s sense of individuality” (Magill 387). Louise expresses the sentiment herself
when she thinks, “There would be no powerful will bending hers in that blind persistence with
which men and women believe they have a right to impose a private will upon a fellow-creature”
(Hour 157). Chopin does not seek to weaken men, but to strengthen women (Seyersted 183).
Nowhere in the story is Brently described in anything other than positive or neutral terms; he is
no villain, nor is marriage evil; it is simply an institution that sounds a spiritual and metaphysical
death knell for Victorian women. In Chopin’s eyes it was simply, according to Larzar Ziff in The
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American 1890’s: Life and Times of a Lost Generation, “yet another episode in the continuing
development of feminine self-awareness, no more terminal than a birthday party” (Dyer 179). In
Louise’s estimation, though, it is a life sentence, one which “she had thought with a shudder . . .
might be long” (Hour 158). Chopin likens the widowed Louise to “a goddess of Victory” (158),
heady with plans of “spring days, and summer days, and all sorts of days that would be her own”
(158). After the news of Brently Mallard’s death, “Louise Mallard . . . is in a sense awakened”
(Deneau 210), and she then fervently wishes for a “long life”(Hour 158). Kate’s protagonist has
been given an opportunity little offered to her peers--- a life full of “self,” a life void of
emotional and societal tug-of-wars. In Louise Mallard’s character, Kate Chopin’s “aim was to
describe--- unhampered by tradition and authority--- man’s, [ and in that historical sense, also
woman’s] immutable impulses” (Votteler 65). Chopin, much like her beloved de Maupassant,
creates a character that sees an opportunity to be self-determining, free of all historical and
societal constraints (Kort 9).
Louise’s sense of new-found freedom is not predicated on the destruction of men in
general, nor of her husband in particular; “She did not stop to ask if it were or were not a
monstrous joy that held her. A clear and exalted perception enabled her to dismiss the suggestion
as trivial” (Hour 157). Louise does not actively seek the death of Brently, but she is attuned to
the possibilities his very death has provided. There is no other avenue to these possibilities.
Brently has been assigned his role and Louise hers, and “[Chopin] seems to realize that in the
patriarchy, man would not willingly relinquish the role of the conqueror, nor woman the role of
the conquered” (Seyersted 148). Yet Chopin, in “The Story of an Hour,” makes no real
judgments concerning either role. Although clearly in favor of Louise’s “triumph”(Hour 158),
she offers no real polemic regarding marriage, nor lingers on the baser qualities of man’s
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relationship with woman; it is this “narrative stance of sympathetic detachment [that] make[s]
her . . . relevant to modern readers” (Larsson 200). As Per Seyersted notes, “she refrains from all
moralizing” (70). Chopin simply portrays “a woman’s awakening to her true nature, whether
traditional, emancipated, or a mixture of the two” (Wilson 27).
Unfortunately, Victorian America is not the time nor the place for such awakenings.
Perhaps this is why Chopin’s short story “The Story of an Hour” was originally titled “The
Dream of an Hour” ( Votteler 80). Louise, like most women of the day, has learned to place her
dream of “self” deep within her subconscious, and the train accident has caused it to rush
unimpeded to the surface of her consciousness. “There was something coming to her and she was
waiting for it . . . she felt it creeping out of the sky, reaching toward her. . . this thing that was
approaching to possess her. . . “ (Hour 157). It is her “individuality” coming to meld with her
conscious self “in spite of the confines of society” (Kort 44). Chopin realized that this was
unhallowed ground in Victorian America, yet she felt strong enough as an artist to risk a story
“dealing with female selfhood, love, and society” (Clark 123). Into a rather mawkish literary
situation, the death of a spouse, Chopin inserts a woman’s bid for independence. That she is able
to do this, and seamlessly so, is due to her maturity as a writer. “She was, after all, a woman with
a complex, ironic comprehension of the intellectual and emotional implications of ordinary
situations” (Wolff 202). Irony, so much a reality in both Chopin’s life and work (Skaggs 5),
ultimately places Louise Mallard among another “list of the ‘killed,” so to speak, for when her
husband Brently returns, alive and unscathed, Louise collapses fatally from “the joy that kills”
(Hour 158). Here, too, Kate Chopin pays tribute to Guy de Maupassant, in that she ends her
“Story of an Hour” with an “ironic denouement” (Bonner xii). Louise, in seeing Brently alive,
sees her own future die. She can not face the loss of her future, a future void of all Brentlys, void
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of all male dominance and restrictions upon who and what she shall become. Barbara Harlow, in
her article “From the Women’s Prison: Third World Women’s Narratives of Prison,” states that
“. . . Mrs. Mallard has lived an hour of liberation and dreamed an entire future of independence”
(501), and she can no more go back to that life than Brently can return to the dead. In the end,
Louise Mallard decides “Better Dead than Wed.”
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