‘The Story of an Hour’ by Kate Chopin

Lastly, a short story that my friend and work partner, Zoe Gilbert, brought to a creative writing session we taught together.

Zoe read this aloud in class and I closed my eyes and felt the liberation Mrs Mallard felt at the news of her husband’s death, her sudden freedom from the constraints of her life as his wife. I love how this realisation bursts forth as if it is a part of herself she had not really met before.

“There was something coming to her and she was waiting for it, fearfully. What was it? She did not know; it was too subtle and elusive to name. But she felt it, creeping out of the sky, reaching toward her through the sounds, the scents, the color that filled the air.”

The emotional truth of this feels profound and surprising for a story written and published in the 19th Century. I was disappointed with the ending, although I suspect this short story wouldn’t have been published at the time without her having to suffer for the rush of liberation she felt. We have made great strides in so many respects, but sometimes it feels as if there has been no progress at all.

First published in Vogue on Dec 6, 1894, as ‘The Dream of an Hour’, and widely collected, including in The Awakening and Selected Stories, Penguin Classics, 2003

‘Désirée’s Baby’ by Kate Chopin

Kate Chopin was born in St. Louis, Missouri in 1851.

At the end of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (which may or may not be a piece of Southern Literature (it is)), our hero Huck promises to “light out for the Territory ahead of the rest because Aunt Sally she’s going to adopt me and sivilize me, and I can’t stand it.” Huck’s dream of evading domestic responsibility (embodied in the maternal presence of Aunt Sally) is a signal theme of American literature, wrapped loosely in a transcendentalist garb that might help disguise all those Manifest Destiny urges seething underneath.

The freedom to light out for the Territory does not transcend all identities, as Kate Chopin’s short, dark, ironic story ‘Désirée’s Baby’ shows. Our Désirée is a foundling of uncertain parentage, discovered beneath the phallic “shadow of the big stone pillar” by her adoptive father Valmondé. Eighteen years later she’s transferred to another man, Armand Aubigny, who falls in love with Désirée, “as if struck by a pistol shot.” But when Désirée’s baby – also Aubigny’s baby – is born, something is a shade off. I won’t spoil the story for those who haven’t read it, but it’s part of a pattern Chopin develops of female heroes whom she frees (as in Edna Pontellier of The Awakening) but can’t quite save. Chopin frees her heroes, but there’s nowhere for them to go, no Territory to light out for. Other writers will come to imagine other freedoms though.

First published in Vogue, Jan., 1893, and collected in Bayou Folk, The Riverside Press, 1894 and available to read here

‘The Story of an Hour’ by Kate Chopin

I’ve taught this early feminist piece many times, mostly to adolescent boys, who appreciate all of the twists and the way Chopin manipulates the reader’s emotions as the tone shifts. The narrative drives to its pitch-perfect ending: “When the doctors came they said she had died of heart disease—of joy that kills.”

First published in Vogue, December 6, 1894. Widely collected, including in The Awakening and Other Stories, Oxford World’s Classics. Available to read online at katechopin.org