Kate Chopin — from The Awakening and "The Story of an Hour"

Kate Chopin was an early American woman writer (Wilhelm). Chopin wrote about women and their struggles and despairs of being house wives. Many people did not like what she wrote about, but that was because a lot of the readers were men who did not like their wives complaining about being at home all the time. Chopin's novel The Awakening describes the women who "awaken" from their confinements and find out that they can do other things in the world (Wilhelm).

This particular exert from Kate Chopin's The Awakening is about a woman, a house wife, who is crying (Chopin). She is crying in the middle of the night, and she does not really know why she is crying; she is just having a good cry (Chopin). "An indescribable oppression, which seemed to generate in some unfamiliar part of her consciousness, filled her whole being with a vague anguish. It was like a shadow, like a mist passing across her soul's summer day. It was strange and unfamiliar; it was a mood. She did not sit there inwardly upbraiding her husband, lamenting at Fate, which had directed her footsteps to the path which they had taken. She was just having a good cry all to herself" (Chopin). This woman, the main character, was most likely crying because she was unhappy with being a house wife. Like stated above, Chopin wrote about women who started to realize that they had other things they could do besides being house wives all their lives (Wilhelm).

This exert from The Awakening portrays Realism very well. It has a lot of descriptions of the surroundings- "It was then past midnight. The cottages were all dark. A single faint light gleamed out from the hallway of the house. There was no sound abroad except the hooting of an old owl in the top of a water-oak, and the everlasting voice of the sea, that was not uplifted at that soft hour. It broke like a mournful lullaby upon the night" (Chopin)- and everything seems very real. The underlying message in this exert is also very real. The woman in this particular part of the story is sad because she is unhappy with her life (Chopin). It is unknown why she is unhappy with her life, but the reader can predict that, from the given information of what Chopin writes about, she is unhappy being a house wife.


Another one of Chopin's short stories, "The Story of an Hour", is about a woman who finds out that her husband has died in a terrible train crash (Chopin). After crying for a little while, the woman starts to feel very joyous and extremely excited that he is dead. The woman starts to think of all the things she can now do as a widow, and she cannot wait for her life to begin again. At the end of the short story, the woman goes downstairs with her sister, the front door opens, and her "dead" husband walks in. The woman shrieks and dies of heart disease (Chopin). Although this short story is pretty comical and full of irony, it represents Realism very well. The story is a very "real" one because the woman is happy that her husband is dead (Chopin). The whole situation is very real and logical because at the beginning of the story Chopin says that the woman's sister has to break the news of her dead husband to her very gently because she suffers from a weak heart (Chopin). The woman then becomes very excited that her husband is gone, but when he shows up at her house, she freaks out in astonishment and ends up dying because of it (Chopin). This represents Realism because Realism is all about telling what really happened and what is real.

Both of these literary works represent society during their time periods because woman were finally starting to realize that they did not have to be house wives all the time. Women were starting to become unhappy with their husbands, with being married, and with their lives working in the house all day. These literary works somewhat have to do with psychology because, like in "The Story of an Hour", the main character becomes very excited that her husband is gone, but when he shows up she seems to go a little crazy and dies from a heart attack (Chopin).


Works Cited:

Chopin, Kate. "from The Awakening." Glencoe Literature. Ed. Jeffrey Wilhelm. American Literature ed. Colombus: McGraw-Hill, 2010. 491. Print.

Chopin, Kate. "The Story of an Hour." Glencoe Literature. Ed. Jeffrey Wilhelm. American Literature ed. Colombus: McGraw-Hill, 2010. 554-555. Print.

Wilhelm, Jeffrey. Kate Chopin and Women". Glencoe Literature. Ed. Jeffrey Wilhelm. American Literature ed. Colombus: McGraw-Hill, 2010. 490. Print.