this Question is for the memeber "me"?

Question

plz help me out cuz it seems to me dat u understand this story very well wat was the symbols and the evaluation in "THE STORY OF AN HOUR"?

Answer 1

It doesn't look like he can help at the moment so I'll try my best

Plot
Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.
The main character is Mrs. Mallard, who has a heart condition. One day, Mr. Mallard's friend, Richards, learns that Mr. Mallard has died in a railroad disaster. Mrs. Mallard's sister Josephine tries to break the news to Mrs. Mallard softly because of her heart condition.

Upon hearing the news, Mrs. Mallard begins weeping, a reaction that Chopin notes as different from most women, who would refuse to believe it. Mrs. Mallard soon locks herself in a room with a window, hurls herself into a large chair, and, sobbing, gazes out at the world bustling around her. Soon, her sobs turn to gasps. She approaches a climactic moment where "her bosom rose and fell tumultuously" as she embraces freedom and joy in the world.

She turns the word "free" over in her mouth, whispering it with zest. Josephine, her sister, arrives at the door, begging her sister to emerge. As Louise comes out, she carries herself like the "Goddess of Victory", and descends the stairs with her sister. As the two move to the bottom of the stairs, the door swings open to reveal Brently Mallard, Louise's supposedly dead husband.

Richards flings himself in the way to hide the apparition from Mrs. Mallard, but is too late. She sees her living husband, and her freedom is ripped from her arms. This sudden tragedy, the reader is led to believe, kills her. However, the doctors on the scene diagnose her as having collapsed from a "joy that kills", an overt jab at men's inability to understand women.

Spoilers end here.

[edit] Character development
In Kate Chopin's "The Story of an Hour", the protagonist, Mrs. Mallard is informed of her husband's apparent death. Simply described as "young, with a fair calm face, whose lines bespoke repression and even a certain strength", Mrs. Mallard had loved her husband -- "sometimes." As she ponders a life without him, she realizes how trapped she had felt under his "powerful will" and she opens herself to the expanded possibilities of such a life. At the story’s climax, she whispers "Free! Body and soul free!" By taking joy in the knowledge that her future days are to be hers alone, Chopin shows how her character had until then been completely overwhelmed by the role society forced her to play: a woman constantly overlooked by her husband (the superiority of men to women in those times)


[edit] Analysis
Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.
Chopin titled this piece "Story of an Hour" because the reader gets a very brief glimpse into the last hour of Mrs. Mallard's life. When the doctors conclude that Mrs. Mallard has died of heart disease, they are correct. However, in this instance of dramatic irony, the other characters believe she has died because she is so overjoyed that her husband is alive, while the reader knows that in truth she has died of disappointment. In a sense, even though Mrs. Mallard has died, she has escaped for good. Her death, however, has also been seen as an indicator she could never be free from patriachal oppresion. Even if her husband had died she still would have been subjected to oppressive male domination of the time, thus her death reinforces the idea that her soul could never truly be free.

Chopin contrasts budding spring of the world outside of Mrs. Mallard's home with the complacency inside of it. Upon hearing the news of her husband's (supposed) death, Mrs. Mallard retreats upstairs, sinks into a chair, and thinks her own thoughts for the first time...

"The delicious breath of rain was in the air. In the street below a peddler was crying his wares. The notes of a distant song which some one was singing reached her faintly, and countless sparrows were twittering in the eaves."

The window itself can be seen to take on a different perspective in the story. It is a window into a different realm, free of constraints, where new life is budding everywhere. As such, it contrasts strongly with Mrs. Mallard's judgement of her own life, as something that, up until now, has been restricted and limited. She died and we laughed.

Ending her story with the death of Mrs. Mallard. Along with her witty use of diction and syntax, Chopin creates a sense of desperation from the beginning that death is the only means to an absolution, whether it is the death of a person (Mrs. or Mr. Mallard) or the death of a concept (marriage).