周亞萍

（鹽城工學(xué)院大外部 江蘇 鹽城 224051）

Kate Chopin's “The Story of an Hour” is regarded as one of the masterpieces of feminist literature. The story presents a repressed wife's momentary discovery of what freedom from her husband might mean to her. She awakes to a new sense of herself when she learns of her husband's death, only to collapse of a heart attack when she sees that he is alive.

Feminist critics explore the patriarchal social forces that have impeded women's efforts to achieve full equality with men. They also explore women's consciousness of struggling against men's repression. However, such points of view are only one-sided. The significances implied in it are more profound and complex. Kate Chopin not only has sympathy with the heroine but also gives a poignant irony, which presents her contradictory attitude to independent freedom.

The title “The Story of an Hour” itself implies ironic meaning. It's more obvious to see this when it's first published with the title “The Dream of an Hour”. Life and death, freedom and repression, all included in Mrs. Mallard's experience within an hour, yet can be read by readers only in a couple of minutes.The freedom that Mrs. Mallard envisions is just a dream that can never come true, for she finally dies of such “Monstrous joy” or “joy that kills”.

Irony is implied from the beginning of the story. Richards and Josephine take it for granted that Mrs. Mallard loves her husband too deeply to accept the fact of his death. So “ great care was taken to break to her as gently as possible the news…”The story presents a striking contrast between Mrs. Mallard's real inner world and their cautiousness. It's ironic that Mrs.Mallard's ecstatic “self-assertion” is interpreted by Josephine as grief. Josephine implores “before the closed door with her lips with the keyhole”, not knowing that her sister actually has become a “goddess of victory”. Her sister Josephine and her husband's friend Richards take the greatest care of her. But such concerns are subjective, which lack hearty communication and close attention to individual life. Their invisible forces create a cage decorated with “l(fā)ove” in which Mrs. Mallard has to live and received everything from outside passively.

Relationship among the characters in the story is not complex, but is endowed with particular significance in expanding the theme, because Chopin strengthens the absurdity of the relationship, which seems perfect apparently.

In paragraph 13, the story describes Mr. Brently Mallard as this: He is a man who “has kind, tender hands”, and “he never looked save with love” upon his wife. Mrs. Mallard admits “yet she had loved him——sometimes”. Mr. Mallard's only “crime”is coming from work one day, and yet he is the one who is bereaved at the end of the story, for reasons he will never understand. He is the man most deserving of sympathy.

According to traditional normal concepts, the marriage of this couple is happy, as what the people around her have expected. They are so sure of this that they see nothing of her real living state. Nobody understands what marriage means to her,including her closed-associated husband. Kate Chopin offers Mrs. Mallard's bizarre story to reveal problems that are inherent in institution of marriage. Men and women in marriage help each other meanwhile become mutual spiritual shackles. Marriage itself means the end of the freedom of being single; also it means the mutual restriction of a couple. However, marriage has some advantages that the freedom of being single doesn't have.It is for such a reason that Kate Chopin expresses her deep love to her dead husband in its diary that “she would unhesitatingly give up everything ”if it were possible for her husband to come back to earth. “To do that, I would have to forget the past ten years of my growth——my real growth. But I would take back a little wisdom with me, it would be the spirit of perfect acquiescence.”

This passage of her diary raised provocative questions that how “the spirit of perfect acquiescence” relates to Mrs. Mallard's “self-assertion”. This diary was written only one month after Chopin wrote this story. If her diary reflected her true feeling of that period, there would be no difficulty in understanding her ironic attitude to the pursuit of freedom. Although Chopin's deep feelings toward her husband might not result in “the Story of an Hour”, reading her diary can still add to the possibilities of interpretation of it. The connection between a real author and a literary work can't be cut off completely.

It is ironic when Mrs. Mallard's life parallels the end of winter and the earth's renewal in spring. When she feels a surge of new life after grieving over her husband's death, her own sensibilities are closely aligned with the “new spring life”that is “all quiver” outside her windows. Although she initially tries to resist that renewal by “beating it back with her will”,she can't control life force that surges within her and all around her, she feels triumphant——like a “goddess of victory”. But this victory is short-lived when she learns that her husband is still alive and with him all the obligations that make her marriage feel like a wasteland. The surprising ending suggests Kate Chopin's satire to Mrs. Mallard in a clear way. Mrs. Mallard,who “was drinking in a very elixir of life” dies of “joy that kills”(the doctor's diagnose) only several minutes later. Readers can get the reason easily that she loses her life for the disillusionment of freedom, while all the other people believe in the doctor's diagnose. This produces a kind of dramatized irony. It is possible that she is so profoundly guilty about feeling “free”at her husband's expense that she has a heart attack. Whatever reason it is, her death is an ironic version of a rebirth ritual.The coming of spring is an ironic contrast to her own discovery that she can no longer live a repressed, circumscribed life with her husband. Death turns out to be preferable to the living death that her marriage actually means to her. Although spring will go on, this “goddess of victory” is defeated by a devastating social contract. The old corrupt social order continues, which is a cruel irony for Chopin.

Above all, Chopin's irony aims at “freedom” itself. The last phrase “joy that kills” works in concerns with “monstrous joy”, suggesting “monstrous joy” which stands for the spirit of freedom controls Mrs. Mallard successfully and leads to her sudden death. The crowning irony is the doctor's assumption that she dies of joy rather than of the shock of having to abandon her newly discovered self once she realizes her husband is still alive. In the course of an hour, Mrs. Mallard's life is irretrievably changed: her husband's assumed accidental death frees her but the fact that he lives and all the expectations imposed on her by his continued life kill her. She does, indeed,die of a broken heart. But only Chopin's readers know the real ironic meaning of it.

Critics always regard Kate Chopin as a pioneer of feminist literature. However, for varieties of reasons, the author may take different stands and share different opinions while producing distinct works. Therefore, we shouldn't analyze her works only from one aspect. In “The Story of an Hour”, we should see both the feminism and the poignant irony in it.

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