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Emotions In Kate Chopin's The Story Of An Hour

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People’s attitudes and emotions are far more diverse and intricate than what we think. Every individual is prone to feel different emotions such as sadness, happiness, and even a mixture of both, as we are all unique in our own way. Because of these complicated emotions, we end up responding to these feelings negatively, which lead us into complicated positions in the long-run. In the short story, “The Story of an Hour” by Kate Chopin, we conflict with a similar type of situation- where the main character, Louise Mallard, ironically, in a timespan of an hour, undergoes several stages of mixed emotions after hearing the news of her husband’s death. The three key emotions expressed through Ms. Mallard’s character is grief, impending doom, and then an unexpected exhilaration, leading up to her unfortunate fatality due to an unexplained, “monstrous joy.” To start off with, Ms. Mallard deals with the first feeling of grief, when she is told by her sister Josephine, that her husband’s name has been the name that led the list of …show more content…

She can sense an unpleasant feeling coming her way, yet, she doesn’t exactly know what that feeling is. Like in the quote, as she “[stands], facing the open window” she now feels a “dull stare in her eyes” that is “not a glance of reflection, but rather [indicates] a suspension of intelligent thought”. This reveals that something is creeping up towards her from outside the window, but doesn’t know what exactly that “something” is. Ms. Mallard tries hard to reject this strange feeling of impending doom by “[striving] to beat it back with her will” as she “[begins] to recognize this thing that [is] approaching to possess her”, but she can’t seem to let go of this ominous feeling. Perhaps it is signifying that the presence of her reality and fate of her husband’s truth is approaching closer, as she feels “something coming to her and [is] waiting for it,

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