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19 - Accidents, agency, and American literary naturalism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 September 2012

By
Jennifer Travis
Edited by
Dale M. Bauer
Jennifer Travis
Affiliation:
St. John’s University in New York
Dale M. Bauer
Affiliation:
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
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Summary

Kate Chopin's “The Story of an Hour” (1894) pivots on the report of a railroad accident. Concerned that Brently Mallard's wife may be critically wounded by the news of her husband's death, the victim's friend Richards rushes to Louise Mallard's home to protect her from accident reports by “less careful” acquaintances. Readers learn from the first sentence of the story that Mrs. Mallard is “afflicted with heart trouble.” Could news of the fatal accident inflict another mortal blow? At once, the story links physical vulnerability with a psychological counterpart, both corporal and emotional trauma can kill. Mrs. Mallard does not experience the deleterious shock that her friend and family fear, however, at least not initially. After a brief “storm of grief” over the loss, Louise Mallard is far from “paralyzed with inability”; in fact, her troubled heart awakens. The report of her husband's accidental death does, indeed, cause a shock. What overcomes and overwhelms Louise Mallard is not grief and loss but rather the startling recognition as she gazes out the window at the burgeoning spring that with her husband's death comes new life. Anticipating Chopin's most well-known heroine, Edna Pontellier, Louise realizes that for the first time “she would live for herself.” Aware too that this recognition and the joy that it brings might seem “monstrous” to some, she tries in vain to suppress this revelation, to “beat it back with her will,” but against its force she is “powerless.”

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The Cambridge History of American Women's Literature , pp. 387 - 403
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2012

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