Ironies of Life in Kate Chopin's "The Story of an Hour"
Kate Chopin's "The Story of an Hour"--which takes only
a few minutes to read--has an ironic ending: Mrs. Mallard dies just when she is beginning to live. On first reading, the ending seems
almost too ironic for belief. On rereading the story, however, one sees that the ending is
believable partly because it is consistent with the other ironies in the story.
After we know how the story turns out, if we reread it, we
find irony at the very start.
Because Mrs. Mallard's friends and her sister assume, mistakenly, that
she is deeply in love with her husband, Brently Mallard, they take great care
to tell her gently of his death.
They mean well, and in fact they do well, bringing her an hour of life,
and hour of joyous freedom, but it is ironic that they think their news is
sad. True, Mrs. Mallard at first
expresses grief when she hears the news, but soon she finds joy. So Richards's "sad message" (12),
though sad in Richards's eyes, is in fact a happy message.
Among the small but significant ironic details is the
statement near the end of the story that when Mallard enters the house,
Richards tries to conceal him from Mrs. Mallard, but is "too late" (13). Almost at the start
of the story, in the second paragraph, Richards "hastened" (12) to bring his
sad news. But if Richards had
arrived "too late" at the start, Brently Mallard would have arrived at home
first, and Mrs. Mallard's life would not have ended an hour later but would
simply have gone on as it had
been. Yet
another irony at the end of the story is the diagnosis of the doctors. They say she died of "heart disease--of
joy that kills" (11). In one sense
they are right: Mrs. Mallard has for the last hour experienced a great joy. But of course the doctors totally
misunderstand the joy that kills her.
It is not joy at seeing her
husband alive, but her realization that the great joy she experienced during
the last hour is over.
All of these ironic details add richness to the story, but
the central irony resides not in the well-intentioned but ironic actions of
Richards, or in the unconsciously ironic words of the doctors, but in Mrs.
Mallard's own life. She
"sometimes" (13) loved her husband, but in a way she has been dead, a body
subjected to her husband's will.
Now his apparent death brings her new life. Appropriately this new life comes to her at the season of
the year when "the tops of trees [...] were all aquiver with the new spring life"
(12). But ironically, her new life will last only an hour. She is "Free, free, free" (12), but
only until her husband walks through the doorway. She looks forward to "summer days" (13), but she will not
see even the end of this spring day.
If her years of marriage were ironic, bringing her a sort of living
death instead of joy, her new life is ironic too, not only because it grows out
of her moment of grief for her supposedly dead husband, but also because her
vision of "a long procession of years" (12) is cut short within an hour on a
spring day.