The Story of an Hour

Through Louise’s exultant reaction to widowhood, Chopin portrays marriage as an inherently repressive institution, and posits that neither social norms nor love can justify gendered oppression.

Chopin is careful to indicate that Louise does not have a bad marriage. Louise initially experiences genuine grief over Brently’s death, and admits that she will grieve again when she sees Brently’s body. Louise even acknowledges that there was mutual love between her and her husband. Louise is not escaping from a terrible partner but from the concept of marriage. In late 19th-century America, women had few opportunities to achieve financial security or social acceptance outside of marriage; they were barred from many occupations, unable to vote, and in many cases unable to represent themselves legally or financially. True independence as an unmarried woman was both difficult to achieve and considered socially reprehensible. Widowhood provides Louise with a kind of loophole to reclaim agency over her own life without sacrificing social or financial capital. Young and childless, she is the sole inheritor of her husband’s wealth. Widowhood was more socially accepted than being a never-married woman in the 1890s, as it was indicative of prior participation in the expected, heteronormative social constructs. As a widow, Louise attains independence without social ostracization. The notion that Louise is free in both “body” and “soul” indicates her literal and emotional escape from the socially-reinforced control of her husband—whether he was benevolent or not.

Rather than blame husbands exclusively for the oppression of their wives, Chopin indicts men and women equally for their participation in patriarchal forms of marriage. Louise rejoices that, in the future, “[t]here would be no powerful will bending hers in that blind persistence with which men and women believe they have a right to impose a private will upon a fellow-creature” (Paragraph 14), suggesting that women play a role in their own subjugation, both by accepting unequal power within their domestic relationships and by perpetuating social expectations. Louise’s addendum—“What could love, the unsolved mystery, count for in face of this possession of self-assertion”—emphasizes Chopin’s claim that genuine affection does not mitigate the inherently oppressive nature of marriage; that Brently truly loves Louise does not provide her with equal power to his in determining the course of their life together. Louise experiences a more nuanced reaction to her husband’s death, which encompasses both grief for her husband and a sense of joyful liberation from their marriage. To Chopin, Louise’s simultaneous grief and joy are more compatible than marriage and a woman’s freedom.