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English III – American Literature
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The Story of an Hour
The Story of
an Hour
Kate
Chopin (1894)
Knowing that Mrs. Mallard was afflicted with a heart trouble,
great care was taken to break to her as gently as possible the news of her
husband's death.
It was her sister Josephine who
told her, in broken sentences; veiled hints that revealed in half concealing.
Her husband's friend Richards was there, too, near her. It was he who had been
in the newspaper office when intelligence of the railroad disaster was
received, with Brently Mallard's name leading the
list of "killed." He had only taken the time to assure himself of its
truth by a second telegram, and had hastened to forestall any less careful,
less tender friend in bearing the sad message.
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. When the storm of grief had spent itself she went away to her room alone.
She would have no one follow her.
There stood, facing the open
window, a comfortable, roomy armchair. Into this she sank, pressed down by a
physical exhaustion that haunted her body and seemed to reach into her soul.
She could see in the open
square before her house the tops of trees that were all aquiver with the new
spring life. The delicious breath of rain was in the air. In the street below a
peddler was crying his wares. The notes of a distant song which some one was
singing reached her faintly, and countless sparrows were twittering in the
eaves.
There were patches of blue sky
showing here and there through the clouds that had met and piled one above the
other in the west facing her window.
She sat with her head thrown
back upon the cushion of the chair, quite motionless, except when a sob came up
into her throat and shook her, as a child who has cried itself to sleep
continues to sob in its dreams.
She was young, with a fair,
calm face, whose lines bespoke repression and even a certain strength. But now
there was a dull stare in her eyes, whose gaze was fixed away off yonder on one
of those patches of blue sky. It was not a glance of reflection, but rather
indicated a suspension of intelligent thought.
There was something coming to
her and she was waiting for it, fearfully. What was it? She did not know; it
was too subtle and elusive to name. But she felt it, creeping out of the sky,
reaching toward her through the sounds, the scents, the
color that filled the air.
Now her bosom rose and fell
tumultuously. She was beginning to recognize this thing that was approaching to
possess her, and she was striving to beat it back with her will--as powerless
as her two white slender hands would have been. When she abandoned herself a
little whispered word escaped her slightly parted lips. She said it over and
over under her breath: "free, free, free!" The vacant stare and the
look of terror that had followed it went from her eyes. They stayed keen and
bright. Her pulses beat fast, and the coursing blood warmed and relaxed every
inch of her body.
She did not stop to ask if it were or were not a monstrous
joy that held her. A clear and exalted perception enabled her to dismiss the
suggestion as trivial. She knew that she would weep again when she saw the
kind, tender hands folded in death; the face that had never looked save with
love upon her, fixed and gray and dead. But she saw beyond that bitter moment a
long procession of years to come that would belong to her absolutely. And she
opened and spread her arms out to them in welcome.
There would be no one to live
for during those coming years; she would live for herself. There would be no
powerful will bending hers in that blind persistence with which men and women
believe they have a right to impose a private will upon a fellow-creature. A
kind intention or a cruel intention made the act seem no less a crime as she
looked upon it in that brief moment of illumination.
And yet she had loved
him--sometimes. Often she had not. What did it matter! What could love, the unsolved mystery, count for in the face of this
possession of self-assertion which she suddenly recognized as the strongest
impulse of her being!
"Free! Body and soul
free!" she kept whispering.
Josephine was kneeling before
the closed door with her lips to the keyhold,
imploring for admission. "Louise, open the door! I beg; open the door--you
will make yourself ill. What are you doing, Louise? For heaven's sake open the
door."
"Go away. I am not making
myself ill." No; she was drinking in a very elixir of life through that
open window.
Her fancy was running riot
along those days ahead of her. Spring days, and summer days,
and all sorts of days that would be her own. She breathed a quick prayer
that life might be long. It was only yesterday she had thought with a shudder
that life might be long.
She arose at length and opened
the door to her sister's importunities. There was a feverish triumph in her
eyes, and she carried herself unwittingly like a goddess of Victory. She
clasped her sister's waist, and together they descended the stairs. Richards
stood waiting for them at the bottom.
Someone was opening the front
door with a latchkey. It was Brently Mallard who
entered, a little travel-stained, composedly carrying his grip-sack and
umbrella. He had been far from the scene of the accident, and did not even know
there had been one. He stood amazed at Josephine's piercing cry; at Richards'
quick motion to screen him from the view of his wife.
When the doctors came they said she had died of heart disease--of
the joy that kills.
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