Dennis Haritou: Kate Chopin‘s “The Story of an Hour” consists of three pages totaling 23 paragraphs. One paragraph, mainly exposition, is five sentences long. The rest range from four sentences to several paragraphs that are only one sentence long. One paragraph, a very telling one, consists of just five words.
This structure is gossamer, like a silk worm spinning out a thread. What it’s meant to catch is the extremity of a woman’s life. Mrs Mallard has just received the kind of tragic, out-of-the-blue, news that we all dread: a loved one has been in a horrific accident.
She withdraws into a comfortable chair in her room. This story needs to spin a delicate web: we are going to explore the movements of her mind at its most pivotal moment. It’s very Jamesian. But I mean William not Henry. William James had this utterly cool pre-Freudian idea of how the mind worked as process. It was like a series of perchings and flights, as if an elusive bird kept trying to secure its footing and keeps missing it, so it has to try again and again and this striving never stops until everything is over. Robinson Jeffers said that it’s a bitter earnestness that makes beauty. And he was talking about a flight of birds at the time.
Mrs Mallard, so named, has experienced traumatic loss. Loss can be a very equivocal thing sometimes…far more than we are willing to admit to ourselves or others. Doors close and doors open and the mind pivots and reels.
Please read the story.
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