Student Question
How does the third-person limited narration affect the reader's experience of "The Story of an Hour"?
Quick answer:
Kate Chopin's decision to employ the first-person limited perspective in "The Story of an Hour" allows the reader to experience some of the immediacy of first-person narration but also a versatility in narration that the first-person perspective lacks. This is especially the case given Mrs. Mallard's death, which would have added further constraints to a first-person narration and prevented the story's ironic ending.
The third-person limited perspective has a versatility to it that the first-person perspective lacks, allowing the narrator to adjust vantage point if necessary to achieve a desired effect. In first-person perspective, the narrator is always identified as one of the characters within the story and the reader experiences events entirely through that character's eyes. This provides an immediacy and psychological intensity that the third-person perspective cannot replicate, but it comes at a cost, as the narrative is essentially bound to said character's experiences. However, while the third-person limited perspective is not able to fully replicate the first-person perspective's immediacy, it can approximate that immediacy by focusing the narration on a single character. Thus, even if we are not transported directly into the mind and experience of Louise Mallard, we can still follow her experiences very closely.
For an example of the versatility in the third-person limited perspective, you might consider...
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a passage such as the following, when she receives news of her husband's death:
She did not hear the story as many women have heard the same, with a paralyzed inability to accept its significance. She wept at once, with sudden, wild abandonment, in her sister's arms.
Note that this kind of description would not work in first-person narration without it feeling unwieldy or unnatural. This is especially the case given the story's ending (with Mrs. Mallard's abrupt death): if this story was written in first-person narration, that grief and intensity would need to be expressed directly, given the very nature of the form. (That being said, a first-person narrator need not be the protagonist. To give an example, you can imagine these events being told from the perspective of Mrs. Mallard's sister, but, in that case, the entire tone and structure of the story would need to be changed in ways that would make it unrecognizable.) Furthermore, since Mrs. Mallard dies at the end of the story, any more distanced rumination and reflection on her part becomes impossible.
Given these limitations, Chopin's decision to utilize third-person narration makes sense, and she utilizes this versatility aptly, switching seamlessly between expositive description and more intense psychological ruminations on the part of Mrs. Mallard. Readers receive a window into Mrs. Mallard's mindset and experience, even as Kate Chopin is not bound entirely to her point of view.
Finally, as a side note, this story ends with a point of irony, after Mrs. Mallard's death, where the doctors attribute her death to "the joy that kills." This ironic ending would likewise become impossible under the constraints of a first-person narration, given that Mrs. Mallard has died by this point in the story.