Talk About Irony!

″The Story of an Hour″

Question: Discuss how Chopin uses irony effectively throughout the story.

People don’t always react the way we expect them to. Knowing we sometimes enjoy this fact, authors often use techniques of language usage that leave us speechless during a story. In the short story ″The Story of an Hour″, Kate Chopin effectively uses irony in order to express the main character, Mrs. Mallard’s feelings.

Firstly, we will discover why Mrs. Mallard’s attitude may seem ironic. When a close family member passes away, let alone our own husband, people often go into a period of grief that may sometimes lead to depression. Well get ready for this. When Brently Mallard dies, all his wife seems to feel is joy for the new life that awaits her. Throughout paragraphs 11 to 20, the author uses many unexpected ways to describe Mrs. Mallard’s emotions. In paragraph 11, the protagonist mutters the words ″free, free, free! ″ over and over. She quickly starts processing the idea of years to come that would be hers absolutely in paragraph 12. Her reactions go so on and so forth during the main part of the story. Even if in the nineteen hundreds, women were not expected to question or express any concern about the quality of their lives, this attitude is much unintended.

Secondly, we will find out how irony is used once again at the resolution of the story. Knowing that a loved one is safe and alive should be great news, right? Wrong! According to Mrs. Mallard, the fact that her husband did not die in a railroad crash is awful news. It is written in the story that she had loved him at times, if so then why would she be horribly upset about his ″resurrection″? Of course, this is not based on a true story and once again, Kate Chopin uses the literary technique of irony in order to emphasise the opposite of what Mrs. Mallard should truthfully be going through.  In the 21^st paragraph, Josephine, Richards and Mrs. Mallard discover that Brently Mallard is in fact alive. By consequence, Mrs. Mallard dies from the shock that she will not go through her life on her very own and that she would not be able to live for herself.

 In conclusion, we may say that Mrs. Mallard is an ironic character because she seems to feel the exact opposite of normal and expected behaviour. It was very hard, see impossible, to anticipate her character. Irony makes a great story because most people look forward to being surprised and taken off guard.