“She rose to his requirement, dropped
The playthings of her life
To take the honorable work
Of woman and of wife”
The first four lines relate to Mrs. Mallard’s emotional state in “The Story of an Hour” because she did not really love her husband. Mrs. Mallard probably had to be forced to be with this man because of how things were in the nineteenth century. She had to leave who she was before the marriage, her true self, to be with someone who had destroyed this.
If aught she missed in her new day
Of amplitude, or awe,
Or first prospective, or the gold
In using wore away,
Mrs. Mallard was not able to be herself during her marriage. She questions how her days are going to be freeing since her husband is dead now. She thinks of her spring and summer days and how those days will be her own. She repeats to herself that she is free. This is her “if”.
It lay unmentioned, as the sea
Develops pearl and weed,
But only to himself is known
The fathoms they abide.
From the end of the story, we can see that her husband never was in the train wreck. He walks through the door and Mrs. Mallard has died of “heart disease” once she sees him. Her emotions are locked forever because she is not able to say how she really felt about her relationship. She was not able to express that she was unhappy in her marriage and did not really love her husband. Now, her emotions had sunk in the sea and turned into pearls and weeds.
One thought on “Araceli Cortez Discussion 9”
Hi Araceli. I enjoyed reading how you connected Emily Dickinson’s “The Wife” to Kate Chopin’s “The Story of an Hour”. I made mostly the same connections as you, however I interpreted the last stanza of the poem a little differently. I feel that Dickinson was comparing a wife’s hidden ideas and emotions, both positive and negative, to pearls and weeds laying undiscovered in the depths of the sea. I appreciated reading your creative interpretation nonetheless.