21 pages • 42 minutes read
Kate ChopinThe Story of an Hour
Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1894A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Literary Devices
Situational Irony
Situational Irony refers to story events that unfold in the opposite way that a reader expects. In “The Story of an Hour,” Chopin uses situational irony to deliver a twist ending that emphasizes her themes. At the beginning of the story, Chopin leads the reader to expect that Louise is in danger because the news of her husband’s death may fatally aggravate her heart condition. Chopin also has Louise react initially with the grief that her readers and the other characters expect. Chopin then subverts expectations by having Louise experience happiness and freedom as a result of her husband’s death; the narrative momentum of the story becomes defined by the tension between Louise’s true feelings and societal expectations. Instead of damaging Louise’s heart, these feelings cause her heart to beat more strongly. Chopin delivers another twist when Brently unexpectedly returns home, very much alive. What should be a joyful occasion becomes a threatening one to Louise. The very situation that Richards and Josephine try to prevent at the beginning of the story—that Louise’s heart will fail due to extreme emotion—comes true after all. In the end, Louise does die of a broken heart—but because her husband lives, not because he dies.
Imagery
Because Chopin’s story is emotional, and because the story’s short form prevents expositional strategies such as flashback, Chopin uses poetic imagery to create a dynamic interior life for Louise. In literature, imagery refers to tactile, descriptive language that indicates mood, tone, and emotional significance for the reader.
Chopin opens the story with straightforward diction, providing a few sentences of exposition regarding Brently’s death and Louise’s heart condition. Once Louise’s emotional life begins to drive the story, Chopin layers in images with greater and greater frequency. Images such as the “trees […] aquiver with the new spring life” help the reader follow Louise’s shift from grief to joy (Paragraph 5). The increasingly poetic language also helps the reader transition from the external action of the story to the interiority of Louise’s self-discovery. Similarly, to emphasize Louise’s internal conflict and success in claiming ownership over herself, Chopin contrasts the image of Brently’s “kind, tender hands folded in death; the face […] fixed and grey and dead” with the spirited image of Louise with “feverish triumph in her eyes” (Paragraphs 13, 20). Throughout the story, Chopin’s descriptive diction creates evocative images that make Louise’s emotional journey more immediate and accessible to the reader.
Repetition
Chopin frequently uses repetition, the intentionally repeated use of specific words or phrases, to create a sense of rhythm and narrative momentum. Chopin employs repetition almost immediately, describing Richards’s intention to “forestall any less careful, less tender friend” from bringing Louise the bad news (Paragraph 2). Here, the repetition of “less” emphasizes the severity of the threat to Louise’s health. Chopin has Louise participate in the repetition, describing how “She said it over and over under her breath: ‘free, free, free!’” (Paragraph 11). In this instance, both the narration and the character repeat words, creating the sense that Louise says the word “free” many more times than it appears on the page, and giving the word even greater emotional significance. Louise imagines “[s]pring days, and summer days, and all sorts of days that would be her own” (Paragraph 19), hinting at the abundance and richness of experience that Louise’s future holds. Repetition can also imply insignificance, such as when Louise considers that neither “a kind intention [nor] a cruel intention” justifies the subjugation of one person to another (Paragraph 14); here, the repetition of “intention” paired with the antonyms “kind” and “cruel” indicates the irrelevance of intent to impact.
Related Titles
By Kate Chopin
