Short-Story Critique - The Story of an Hour

     For Creative Writing at Rogers State. I was worn out by this point, and I hate Kate Chopin's writing, but was familiar with this story  So this critique is a little lame, but it was for speed, get it in by deadline.

            The story I chose to look for this week’s assignment is “The Story of an Hour”, by Kate Chopin, originally written in 1894, which I found on pages 83-86 of Penguin’s Fiction: A Pocket Anthology.

            There has been a railway accident and Brently Mallard has been reportedly killed. His repressed wife Louise is predictably hysterical at first, but then goes upstairs to grieve by herself. Instead of truly grieving she thinks about the future, thrilled that the shackles of marriage no longer bind her. Brently walks in from the office, he was far away from the scene of the accident. In dismay and shock, Louise dies of a heart attack.

            While I feel sorry for Chopin’s life, the struggle she endured to get published and raise her children at the same time, I don’t particularly care for Chopin’s writing, as I find her characters too feministic, violently angry and incredibly selfish. And the poetical abstractions sprinkled heavily throughout her prose are hard to follow. However, I do really like the sentence “…Josephine told her, in broken sentences, veiled hints that revealed in half concealing.” That says a lot about how language actually works, both in life and literature.

            The theme seems to be about freedom; how monstrous it can be by itself. Relationships bring restraints by necessity in order to function; and as humans we must have relationships in order to survive. Brently’s presumed death left Louise on her own, which was exhilarating and allowed her to fly like Icarus. The joy was too much.