In a marriage, a man and a woman make vows to eternal, never-ending love, no matter what occurs in their lives. This marriage shall continue until the end, or until someone dies. In The Story of an Hour, by Kate Chopin, Mrs. Mallard makes the reason for her marriage unclear as she states that she loved him, sometimes, but often didn’t. When a woman is repressed in a marriage, she leads an unhappy and short life, and is very sure of her true feelings, but no one can know about them. In the story, her true feelings toward her husband eventually led to her unfortunate death, because with her heart condition, she became too excited to be free of all her burdens and filled herself with false hope, and later come to …show more content…
Mallard is known to have a weak heart. The news of her husband’s death doesn’t cause her death, but the sight of her husband being alive is what does kill her. To anyone other than the reader or Mrs. Mallard herself, it would appear to be that she was overwhelmed with joy to see that her husband was actually alive. The doctor in the story says she “died of heart disease—of joy that kill,” but the reader can come to comprehend that she actually died from seeing that he was alive and that she would not be able to escape the unhappy life she lived with him. It was joy that kills because she was overjoyed with her husband’s death and seeing him was too much to process. It was evident that Mrs. Mallard was perfectly fine with the death of her husband, but her heart was too weak to face the fact that he was alive and that all her vivid thoughts would just be sitting in the back of her head once again. Seeing that her husband was alive gave her the absolute freedom from her husband and the unhappy marriage that she felt trapped in for so long. Her sadness and her husband’s power over her caused her to have a short life.
Louise Mallard was known to have a weak heart in The Story of an Hour. The many years of repression and unhappiness in her marriage led to her death after she discovered the truth that her husband was not dead, after all. When a couple is in a happy marriage, there is no reason to live a short, dreary life; life should be filled with love, care, and importance, not mere repression and sadness. The only way Mrs. Mallard would have lived, was if her husband did indeed pass away. Someone had to die in the marriage for her to get the freedom she