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Women's Roles In The Late Nineteenth Century

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Marriage and Women’s Roles in the Late Nineteenth Century: Kate Copin’s Commentary on Women’s Lives in the Late 1800s

Every human being deserves the right to choose how his or her own life is lived. As women in the late nineteenth century began to disassociate with cultural norms of the time period, writers began to reflect this historical shift. In Kate Chopin’s didactic short story, “The Story of an Hour,” the author demonstrates the way many women felt about their marriages during that time: trapped in a meaningless life. Chopin’s story works as a cautionary and informative commentary substantiating how women felt about divorce and marriage in the late nineteenth century, and the author attempts to educate her audience in order to show that women deserve better than a life of servitude to a husband. The circumstances surrounding Louise Mallard’s reaction to the death of her husband are at first predictable but then quickly shift to a surprising response: Louise is elated as she realizes that "there would be no one to live for during these coming years; she would live for herself" (Chopin 353). This realization deontes Chopin’s main argument in this …show more content…
Gary Mayer notes that throughout “the Story of an Hour,” the characters are drawing “observation-inference confusion” (94) repeatedly. Josephine represents that role of a woman who does not threaten that status-quo and believes her sister to be the same. When Josephine “mistakes Louise’s ecstatic behavior for sickness” (Mayer 94), she is propelling the plot by offering a clue of how a woman is expected by society to react to the death of her husband. Josephine is, of course, wrong in this observation, and the commentary becomes obvious as the story comes to a close. The expectation and the truth are constantly in contradiction to one another, showing that women in the time may seem happy in their role, but truly are

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