Joy as a Form of Social Separation in Chopin’s “The Story of an Hour”

Louise Mallard’s realization of self and self-assertion emerge from the unexpected death of her husband, seeming to arrive from a sub-conscious region of her psyche. It comes despite the fact that she fights against it. It comes despite the fact that she knows society will think her feelings are wrong.

Louise does not choose the joy that follows her husband’s death and this absence of choice seems to highlight one of the story’s most interesting themes which suggests a link between independence and happiness. But joy, in Kate Chopin’s “The Story of an Hour” is not a choice that one can make while also living in society, because it is the sister emotion to a profound individualism that is fundamentally at odds with a social world.

The story clearly connects joy to self-assertion as Louise moves rapidly from grief to great joy after hearing of the death of her husband. This movement from grief to joy is unexpected and even unwanted. Louise is described as “striving to beat it back with her will” (157). The emotion cannot be put off, however, and she is soon overcome. Louise refuses to consider whether or not it was “a monstrous joy that held her” (157) and begins a series of reflections on the end of her married life. Her thoughts are not focused on marriage directly, however.

Freedom becomes the refrain and while she is specifically comparing her new state of freedom to the constraints of marriage, Louise might also be responding to a sense that larger societal expectations have also fallen away with the death of her husband, Brently Mallard. Louise experiences the onrush of joyous self-assertion with her sister outside the room, locked out of the space where Louise achieves her epiphany (158). In a way, Josephine functions as the voice of social expectation, fully anticipating sorrow -and only sorrow — from her sister. Louise rejects the notion that she will make herself sick with sadness (158), but she also does not tell Josephine that she is actually feeling the greatest joy of her life. The joy, for Louise, exists in isolation from social customs — and perhaps exists as a form of separation. She is free from her marriage but critically also free from the eyes of society as symbolized in Josephine.

While critics have often interpreted “The Story of an Hour” as a statement on the confining and even sexist qualities of turn-of-the-century marriage, some scholars have pointed to reasons to refrain from seeing the story as a statement on marriage. In “Fatal Self-Assertion in Kate Chopin’s ‘The Story of an Hour’” Lawrence L. Berkove suggests that the story is best seen as a depiction of an unreasonable “manifestation of an extreme of self-love” (157). Berkove argues that Louise Mallard’s embrace of a radical self-love effectively negates the possibility for maintaining any sort of social life — married or otherwise (158). Figuratively and literally then, her self-love kills her. This argument is helpful, especially in the way it underscores a fundamental irony in the story.

Louise finds joy only in freedom. When the door is figuratively closed on her married life, she is released into a life of independence and individual possibility. Without the freedom of self-assertion, there is no chance at joy. The story is built around a realization of self but this joyous revelation is impossible to maintain within the confines of a social world. Chopin’s story seems to recognize that the social world is the only world available — even to a sudden individualist like Louise Mallard.

Chopin’s tragic protagonist illustrates a potentially troubling commentary on the disconnect between happiness and an adherence to social strictures and generic (or impersonal) codes of conduct. Succumbing to social pressures, Louise Mallard is stuck in a marriage that makes her “shudder that life might be long” (58). The joy she attains in the story is an “elixir of life” (158) set in direct contrast to the voice of her sister coming through the closed door. When she returns to that social world, it is not only her husband who she sees but also her sister and Brently’s friend Richards. We might also note that all three of these figures play a part in Louise’s death in one way or another. In these details we see that the narrative not only juxtaposes Louise Mallard’s self-revelation to her marriage but to the wider spectrum of generic social expectations. It’s not just the marriage that kills Louise. And it’s the society at large that demands she conform to its expectations on women.

Yet, as often as Chopin’s story has been interpreted as one woman’s commentary on the gender-specific inequities of marriage, there is room for a non-political reading of the text as well. Berkove wants to challenge the prevailing views of “The Story of an Hour” as a proto-feminist text and attach Louise Mallard’s self-love to a deep moral failure, one that is expressive of a profound egoism (156). While we can disagree with Berkove’s fatalistic reading of the story in terms of rampant egoism, his argument does fit nicely into an a-political reading of “The Story of an Hour.” As he acknowledges, the focus of the story is not on marriage, per se. The focus is on Louise achieving a profound individualism. Whether her self-love represents a moral failure or a moral achievement is debatable, but the story clearly establishes a set of binaries where joy is set against oppression, self-assertion is set against conformity.

Seen in this light, “The Story of an Hour” is not necessarily a feminist text, though there is good reason to identify Louise Mallard’s transformation as a movement toward the kind of assumption or reclamation of agency at the heart of early feminism. Leaving these political readings aside, we might view the “The Story of an Hour” as the expression of a psycho-social theory that sees individual self-assertion as being at odds with larger social forces that demand conformity. Joy is not something that Louise Mallard chooses, perhaps because she has been programmed to prefer conformity. Yet when this joy overtakes her, it is definitively a joy of independence and individualism. The trouble is that true individualism, with all its ebullience, doesn’t have a place in the only world available to Louise Mallard, the one that exists outside her bedroom door. We might say that, in addition to being a text ripe for feminist interpretations, “The Story of an Hour” also represents a perspective on the natural affinity between independence and joy. As a story, it is not a theory of happiness but it might be an examination the ways in which a lack of self-assertion is demanded by society and this demand keeps the sister states of joy and independence in abeyance.

Sources: Berkove, Lawrence L. “Fatal Self-Assertion in Kate Chopin’s ‘The Story of an Hour.’.” Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism, edited by Janet Witalec, vol. 127, Gale, 2002.

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