1. Read the quick biographical overview of Kate Chopin: Biographical Overview (Links to an external site.)*** https://www.katechopin.org/
2. Read and annotate Kate Chopin’s short story “The Story of an Hour”: Story (Links to an external site.)*** https://www.katechopin.org/story-hour/
3. Watch this short video analysis (5 minutes, 5 seconds) that explains the uses of irony in the story and helps explain the story’s historical context: Video (Links to an external site.) *** https://youtu.be/47dx-d8xXS4
4. Choose one of the following excerpts from the story and explain why you think it is important to the impact of the story and/or how it relates to the writer’s use of irony in the story. As part of your contribution, I encourage you to bring up any ideas that came up in the short video analysis:
Excerpt 1:
“She did not hear the story as many women have heard the same, with a paralyzed inability to accept its significance. She wept at once, with sudden, wild abandonment, in her sisters arms. When the storm of grief had spent itself she went away to her room alone. She would have no one follow her.
There stood, facing the open window, a comfortable, roomy armchair. Into this she sank, pressed down by a physical exhaustion that haunted her body and seemed to reach into her soul.
She could see in the open square before her house the tops of trees that were all aquiver with the new spring life. The delicious breath of rain was in the air. In the street below a peddler was crying his wares. The notes of a distant song which some one was singing reached her faintly, and countless sparrows were twittering in the eaves.
There were patches of blue sky showing here and there through the clouds that had met and piled one above the other in the west facing her window.”
Excerpt 2:
“And yet she had loved himsometimes. Often she had not. What did it matter! What could love, the unsolved mystery, count for in face of this possession of self-assertion which she suddenly recognized as the strongest impulse of her being!
‘Free! Body and soul free!’ she kept whispering.”
Excerpt 3:
“Some one was opening the front door with a latchkey. It was Brently Mallard who entered, a little travel-stained, composedly carrying his grip-sack and umbrella. He had been far from the scene of accident, and did not even know there had been one. He stood amazed at Josephines piercing cry; at Richards quick motion to screen him from the view of his wife.
But Richards was too late.
When the doctors came they said she had died of heart diseaseof joy that kills.”