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Story Of An Hour Irony Essay

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“The Story of an Hour” is a short story, written by Kate Chopin, which conveys the heavy use of irony and symbolism to express the feelings of the main character, Louise Mallard, as she deals with the sudden loss of her husband. Published in 1894, “The Story of an Hour” portrays a young woman who has learned of the death of her husband and is then overcome with a series of different emotions as the story progresses (Chopin). Evident in the story, the symbols portray a wide array of meaning as it describes the feeling of freedom that overcomes Louise as she begins to realize that the death of her husband is more of a blessing than a tragedy. Furthermore, the feelings that Louise begins to feel after she has come to her realization are apparent through the …show more content…
The story concludes with Louise dying and the doctors explaining it is “joy that kills,” yet no one around her was aware of her true feelings at the time of her death (Chopin). Situational irony is presented at this point of the story due to the plot twist where Mr. Mallard lives and Louise does not. The twist at the end of the story was not foreshadowed anywhere in the entirety of the story, however, as Gary Meyer stated, the narrator “warns the reader in the first sentence that the situation is not completely rosy because Louise ‘was afflicted with a heart trouble’” (95). The ending made many people criticize Kate Chopin for the decision to have Louise die, such as Toth, who argues that Chopin “had to have her heroin die” in order to be able to publish the story at the time of its publication due to its strong feminist roots and description of marriage as something evil (10). The irony of Louise’s death is in the title itself, the “story” is that of Louise’s life, who felt that she truly lived in freedom for the one hour that she believed her husband was

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