The Story of an Hour Group

Topic: Help with theme of chauvisim in "The Story of an Hour"

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1

crayner1020

I am writing a historical term paper on Kate Chopin's "The Story of an Hour." Using chauvinist society influencing this story. Need help incorporating

I am not the best research writing when it comes to literature. I want to incorporate how society and her upbringing play a huge role in this particular story. Problem is incorporating everything together, while trying to use at least 4 secondary sources on this story also. Just looking for any additional guidance anyone can give me to help push me in the right direction. Thank you!

2

pmiranda2857

Kate Chopin wrote about the struggle for a woman to exercise her freedom to an individual identity in many of her works.  In "The Story of an Hour," Louise Mallard gets the tragic news of her husband's sudden death in a train accident.  Instead of reacting with the usual hysterics and tears that would be expected from a woman in this time period, 1894, the main character takes in the information and retires to her room.

Her sister thinks that she is upstairs behind closed doors making herself sick with grief over her husband's death.  When in fact, what Louise Mallard is doing is sitting in a chair, looking out the window and seeing the world with new eyes, the eyes of a free woman.  She is quietly contemplating the life she will now have, a life dictated by no one but her own choice.

She daydreams about all the choices she will have, all the interests she can pursue as a widow.  She can't wrap her arms around the depth of joy that she feels at being freed from the confines of marriage.  She tells us that she did love her husband, sometimes, but mostly, she felt confined by his domination of her life.  This control that Brently Mallard exercised over his wife was just the customary husband influence over wife in the late 19th century.  He was not an abusive husband, but typical of the society at the time.

Louise Mallard, like many women of her time, was secretly burning with a desire to break free from the male dominated society that kept women in the shadows of their husbands. Women did not want to be marginalized by society, but the effort to emerge as individuals with rights would be a long one.  Even after laws were changed, the prejudice of a patriarchal society would seek to keep women in their place, in the kitchen. 

The struggle had begun some 50 years before Kate Chopin wrote this story, but it still had a long way to go.

"Although women were not granted the right to vote until 1920, the struggle for their enfranchisement began in 1848 with the Seneca Falls Convention in New York state. The passage of the 15th Amendment to the United States Constitution, granting enfranchisement to black men, was passed in 1869."

Check the sources listed below for more information about the struggle of 19th century women.

  

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