Introduction
Kate Chopin was born in America to parents of French and Irish descent and was raised mainly by women, particularly by her great-grandmother. The stories about the first French settlers in Missouri subsequently influenced the colorful descriptions in Chopin’s stories. Chopin is considered one of the first feminist writers because the heroines of her stories are women seeking to get rid of the power of men. Her novels, At Fault and The Awakening, dwell on the controversial issues of divorce and adultery.
It is believed that her creative career ended with the publication of the novel Awakening, sharply condemned for the frank description of adultery and mixed marriage, which was the cause of the writer’s deep depression. However, later critics approved of the subtle portrayal of a woman’s search for individuality in the novel. These pre-text presuppositions shed light on the individual author’s perception of the main idea of The Story of an Hour. According to the author’s idea, marriage without love for a woman is a prison, and happiness is primarily connected with the concept of freedom.
Happiness and Freedom in Chopin’s The Story of an Hour
The keyword of the story nominating the concept is not placed in the position of the title, and the title rather emphasizes the fateful events in a person’s life. At the stage of analyzing the perception of the text, it is possible to identify a set of keywords that represent the main concept of this story. Among them are monstrous happiness and the joy of freedom, capable of killing a sick heart in a moment of feverish exultation. Happiness is a state of supreme satisfaction with life, which is usually accompanied by joy, contentment, pleasure, and satisfaction from something achieved or observed with luck. Usually, outwardly, this condition manifests itself in a smile, laughter, sparkle, and light of the eyes.
The peculiarity of the concept of the sphere of happiness in this story is that it lacks the main lexical predicates of happiness, such as happiness or happiness. Instead, the story contains nominations of a combined representation of happiness, i.e., the happiness of freedom, occurring only four times. This information has a subtext character and is present in the text in an obscure non-verbalized form in the description of gestures, behavior, details, and nature, conveying a feeling of happiness.
The analysis of all contexts, revealing individual, sometimes unique ideas of the writer about happiness, allows them to generalize and present the conceptual sphere of happiness as a field. Unexpectedly for the reader, a young woman, Louise Mallard, who turned out to be a widow due to the tragic death of her husband in a train accident, is presented as the subject of happiness. The position of the predicate of happiness is realized by the main carriers of the idea of happiness, which are the concepts of freedom and joy. The reason for happiness is the loss of a loved one – a husband (Chopin, 297). Contrary to stable ideas, the source of happiness is negatively evaluated emotions and events. The heroine realizes that she can barely hold back tears at the sight of the body of her husband, who, as it turns out, loved her. However, the most valuable things in her view are the following years, which belong only to her.
From the point of view of the manifestation of happiness, the analysis of the text reveals that Chopin depicts the dynamics of the manifestation of happiness. From the very first lines, it talks about the careful treatment of relatives and friends with Mrs. Mallard, who suffers from a heart ailment. After receiving a message about the tragedy, Louise behaves especially, unlike many women, as if stunned and unable to understand the significance of what happened (Muneba, 555). After a storm of tears and a short grief, Louise retires to her room. The writer focuses on the appearance of the heroine, on her eyes and face.
The most surprising thing awaits the reader in the narrative of Mrs. Mallard’s behavior. Very subtly and distantly, Chopin conveys her mood through a description of nature. Lyrical tonality flows into the room through a small window along with nature, which Louise contemplates while sitting in the roomy armchair. At first, she sits, leaning back in her chair motionless, but her gaze betrays intense mental activity. Gradually, the empty, unhappy look is replaced by a clean and clear one, the pulse beats faster, and the warm blood brings comfort to every cell of her body. The dynamics of happiness are represented by three phases: unhappiness – comprehension of the state – and confidence in feelings. The heroine has some doubts but dismisses them, considering them too banal.
The nearest periphery in this story is formed by the figurative nominations of happiness and freedom. For the author, happiness is something elusive, subtle, and not amenable to designation. It manifests itself in sounds, aromas, and colors that fill the air. The image of happiness is very unusual since happiness in the story is a monstrous phenomenon, energizing, difficult to resist, and capable of killing.
This is the image of the concept sphere of happiness in this story, expressing an atypical individual idea of happiness – a monstrous feeling devoid of compassion, hardly experienced in such circumstances (Chopin, 296). Nevertheless, it is experienced by the heroine because no one will impose their will on a person anymore. In the story, there is a dynamic development of the contradictory image of the happiness of freedom. It is an unexpected, subtle, elusive air filled with sounds, smells, and color that takes possession of a person, clarifies the gaze, quickens the pulse, relaxes a person, and energizes with energy that can kill.
Conclusion
Chopin masterfully describes the weak attempts of the agitated main character to resist an unknown feeling with a will as weak as her pale white hands. The exposition of the story tells about the sympathy of her sister and her husband’s friend for Louise Mallard, thereby exposing her immoral sense of happiness. The author uses an indirect way of depicting the emotions of the heroine, refraining from direct connotations, allowing her to express contradictory feelings in emotional inner speech, in which she confesses her dislike for her husband, considering this feeling less valuable and incomparable with the possession of her rights.
The culmination of the story is the sudden return of the deceased husband, Brantley Mallard, unharmed, at the sight of which the triumphant and victorious Louise suddenly died. In general, there is an ironic tone in the text, sometimes associated with sympathy, sometimes with alertness, emotional optimism, or restless triumph. The author does not take responsibility for Louise’s husband either because she is unhappy in her marriage. The author’s last words sound ominous and malevolent, like retribution and a warning.
Summing up the conceptual analysis of the concept of happiness in the story, it can be said that an individual author’s knowledge of the world forms a specific conceptual sphere. Chopin gives the concept of happiness emotional and evaluative meanings. Therefore, this story has unconventional figurative representations that allow it to be identified with the concept of freedom.
Works Cited
Chopin, Kate. “The Story of an Hour.” The World’s Best Short Stories: Anthology & Criticism, vol. 3: Famous Stories, Roth Publishing, 1990. The World’s Best Series. Gale Literature: LitFinder, l. Web.
Muneba, Khalaf. “Kate Chopin’s Portrait of a Wife as a Free Woman in The Story of an Hour.” Journal of Al-Farahidi’s Arts, vol. 14, no. 50, 2022, pp. 550–556.
Paudel, Kishor. “Existential Angst in Kate Chopin’s The Story of an Hour.” North Carolina Conference Journal, vol. 33, no. 3, 2019, pp. 97–99.