Kate Chopin's most obvious musing takes place in "The Story of an Hour," written nearly forty years after the Gasconade. In Chopin's story, a Mrs. Louise Mallard, who has a heart condition, is told her husband has died in a train accident. At first she is consumed with grief, but soon other thoughts creep and slink into her mind. She will not have to live her life for anyone else; she will not have to submit to anyone's wishes but her own. She begins to feel a "monstrous joy" at the thought of her own freedom . . . whereupon the door opens and her husband walks in, having been nowhere near the crash. The wife's weak heart fails, and the doctors conclude that Louise Mallard died of "heart disease -- of joy that kills."
Kate Chopin often used the original names of people who inspired her stories, and she does so in "The Story of an Hour." "Louise" sounds like "Eleeza," the French pronunciation of Eliza's name; Louise, like Eliza, has a sister named Josephine. Even Louise's last name, Mallard, resembles Bullard, the name of a man who died at the Gasconade. "The Story of an Hour" can be read as the story of Eliza O'Flaherty's marriage, the submission of a young woman to someone else's will. It can also be read as a criticism of marriage itself, as an institution that traps women.
And yet, to make her story publishable, Kate Chopin had to disguise reality. She had to have her heroine die. A story in which an unhappy wife is suddenly widowed, becomes rich, and lives happily ever after -- Eliza O'Flaherty's story -- would have been much too radical, far too threatening, in the 1890s. There were limits to what editors would publish, and what audiences would accept.
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