A Fresh Start “The Story of an Hour” by Kate Chopin explores a woman’s unexpected reaction to her husband’s assumed death and unpredictable reappearance. Upon the death of Mrs. Mallard’s husband, there is a strange satisfaction that comes to her, a satisfaction that can only be revealed with her feelings of freedom. Kate Chopin uses irony, imagery, and symbolism throughout the story to portray the inner feelings of her character, Louise, simultaneously with the reader so the reader is able to see the world through Louise’s eyes, a world full of a new and pure life. Chopin’s use of irony stands in direct contrast to the subtle manner in which she tells the story. She sets the reader up for the story’s basic discourse in the first two paragraphs by creating a situation that suggests Louise was sad to lose her husband but, in reality, she wasn’t. For example, the story begins by letting the reader know Mrs. Mallard has heart trouble and “great care was taken to break to her as gently as possible the news of her husband’s death”(Chopin 71) The reader immediately perceives the notion that Louise is going to be in shock because her sister, Josephine, and her husband’s friend, Richards, had to break the news to her so cautiously so she wouldn’t have a heart attack. Also, Louise heard the news of her husband’s death with “a paralyzed inability to accept its significance. She wept at once, with sudden, wild abandonment, in her sister’s arms”(71) Chopin makes it very clear to the reader that Mrs. Mallard is in a state of mourning and she does this because she is setting the reader up to reveal a reality different from what appears to be true. The reader thinks that Louise is going upstairs to be by herself and grieve but before another assumption can be made about Mrs. Mallard, Chopin uses symbolism and imagery to start another path.
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