Historical Framework of The Story of an Hour
Historical Framework of The Story of an Hour
Mrs. Mallard’s heart attack was caused for the fear to return to a tormented live so she freed herself in death, although the doctors diagnosed that “she died of a heart disease-of joy that kills. She received an impact after believing her husband dead and later seeing him alive; but the cause of her heart attack was not for the joy to seeing him as it might be interpreted. In order to understand her conflict, the different states of emotions she went through after her husband’s death and the cause of her death; we must take in consideration the times this story was written as the lack of freedom for women in her times and to analyze her marriage with the hints we gathered from her story.
The Story of an Hour was written in the early 19th Centuries, when women were denied of equal rights. Women were allowed only limited roles in society. Many people beliefs that women natural roles were as mothers and housewives, as well as they were intellectually inferior to men. Their education was limited to domestic skills, as well as trained to serve, submit and obey their husbands. The lack of education would enable them to challenge this social order, so they would accept their inferior status as their only option.
Most marriages were arranged on convenience, and in some cases the age gap between them and their husband was abysmal. People did not marry for love so much as for the convenience of the families concerned; all marriages were in this sense "arranged”. Divorce or annulment, when they rarely occurred, took place at the pleasure of the husband, the wife having no recourse in the face of her husband's indifference, infidelity, or brutality.
Mrs. Mallard was a smart and strong lady for her times, although she was considered as fragile for her sickness. She had the strength to deal with her husband’s death alone in her room, “She would not allow no one to follow her” and the “ability to accept its significance”. She “was young, with fair and calm face, whose lines of bespoken repression and even a certain strength”; it shows a woman in her late thirties or mid forties, with repressed intelligent thoughts and resigned to her destiny. She was emotional, as “she wept, sudden and with abandonment” after knowing of her...