The Story of an Hour: A Feminist Reading

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becomes “free! Body and soul free!” This denomination, as well as the change it embodies, promotes briefness. Louise’s status as “wife” reestablishes at once in the story’s language and in Louise’s life when Bradley comes in “view if his wife.”
Louise’s medical condition illustrates the narrative construct of a masculine world as well: The male-dominated medical profession identifies, yet fails to treat, her heart trouble. Her perceived frailty prompts Richards’ chivalric intercession. Even the narrator observes that Louise sobs “as a child who has cried itself to sleep.” Likewise, her marriage exemplifies the status of women in the early twentieth century in that the woman must act subject to the patriarch’s “powerful will bending hers.” Although Brently “had never looked save with love upon her,” he disregarded Louise’s happiness: The “lines [of her face] bespoke repression.”
Louise’s prospect before her becomes perceptible when she hears of Mr. Mallard’s death. Whereas before ...

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