Reader Response essay

A Sample

                                                           Reader-Response Essay

Kate Chopin’s “The Story of an Hour” appears merely to explore a woman’s unpredictable reaction to her husband’s assumed death and reappearance, but actually Chopin offers Mrs. Mallard’s bizarre story to reveal problems that are inherent in the institution of marriage.  By offering this depiction of a marriage that stifles the woman to the point that she celebrates the death of her kind and loving husband, Chopin challenges her readers to examine their own views of marriage and relationships between men and women. Each reader’s judgment of Mrs. Mallard and her behavior inevitably stems from his or her own personal feelings about marriage and the influences of societal expectations. Readers of differing genders, ages, and marital experiences are, therefore, likely to react differently to Chopin’s startling portrayal of the Mallards’ marriage, and that certainly is true of my response to the story compared to my father’s and grandmother’s responses.

Marriage often establishes boundaries between people that make them unable to communicate with each other. The Mallards’ marriage was evidently crippled by both their inability to talk to one another and Mrs. Mallard’s conviction that her marriage was defined by a “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.” yet she does not recognize that it is not just men who impose their will upon women and that the problems inherent in marriage affect men and women equally.  To me, Mrs. Mallard is a somewhat sympathetic character, and I appreciate her longing to live out the “years to come that would belong to her absolutely.” However, I also believe that she could have tried to improve her own situation somehow, either by reaching out to her husband or by abandoning the marriage altogether. Chopin uses Mrs. Mallard’s tragedy to illuminate elements of marriage that are harmful and, in this case, even deadly. Perhaps the Mallards’ relationship should be taken as a warning to others: sacrificing one’s own happiness in order to satisfy societal expectations can poison one’s life and even destroy entire families.

When my father read “The Story of an Hour,” his reaction to Mrs. Mallard was more antagonistic than my own. He sees Chopin’s story as a timeless “battle of the sexes,” serving as further proof that men will never really be able to understand what it is that women want. Mrs. Mallard endures an obviously unsatisfying marriage without even explaining to her husband that she feels trapped and unfulfilled. Mrs. Mallard dismisses the question of whether or not she is experiencing a “monstrous joy” as trivial, but my father does not think that this is a trivial question. He believes Mrs. Mallard is guilty of a monstrous joy because she selfishly celebrates the death of her husband without ever allowing him the opportunity to understand her feelings. He believes that, above all, Brently Mallard should be seen as the most victimized character in the story. Mr. Mallard is a good, kind man, with friends who care about him and a marriage that he thinks he can depend on. He “never looked save with love” upon his wife; his only “crime” was coming home from work one day, yet he is the one who is bereaved at the end of the story, for reasons he will never understand. Mrs. Mallard’s passion for her newly discovered freedom is perhaps understandable, but according to my father, Mr. Mallard is the character most deserving of sympathy.

Maybe not surprisingly, my grandmother’s interpretation of “The Story of an Hour” was radically different from both mine and my father’s. My grandmother was married in 1936 and widowed in 1959 and therefore can identify with Chopin’s characters, who live at the turn of the century. Her first reaction, aside from her unwavering support for Mrs. Mallard and her predicament, was that this story demonstrates the differences between the ways men and women related to each other a century ago and the way they relate today. Unlike my father, who thinks Mrs. Mallard is too passive, my grandmother believes that Mrs. Mallard doesn’t even know that she is feeling repressed until after she is told the Brently is dead. In 1894, divorce was so scandalous and stigmatized that is simply wouldn’t have been an option for Mrs. Mallard, and so her only way “out” of the marriage would have been one of their deaths. Being relatively young, Mrs. Mallard probably considered herself doomed to a long life in an unhappy marriage. My grandmother also feels that, in spite of all we know Mrs. Mallard’s feelings about her husband and her marriage, she still manages to live up to everyone’s expectations of her as a woman both in life and in death. She is a dutiful wife to Brently, as she is expected to be; she weeps “with sudden, wild abandonment” when she hears the news of his death; she locks herself in her room to cope with her new situation, and she has a fatal heart attack upon seeing her husband arrive home. Naturally the male doctors would think that she died of the “joy that kills”; nobody could have guessed that she was unhappy with her life, and she would never have wanted them to know.

Interpretations of “The Story of an Hour” seem to vary according to the gender, age, and experience of the reader. While both male and female readers can certainly sympathize with Mrs. Mallard’s plight, female readers seem to relate more easily to her predicament and are quicker to exonerate her of any responsibility for her unhappy situation. Conversely, male readers are more likely to feel compassion for Mr. Mallard, who loses his wife for reasons that will always remain entirely unknown to him. Older readers probably understand more readily the strength of social forces and the difficulty of trying to deny societal expectations concerning gender roles in general and marriage in particular. Younger readers seem to feel that Mrs. Mallard is too passive and that she could have improved her domestic life immeasurably if she had taken the initiative to either improve or to end her relationship with her husband. Ultimately, how each individual reader responds to Mrs. Mallard’s story reveals his or her own ideas about marriage, society, and how men and women communicate with each other.