What is clear from both “The Wife” by Emily Dickinson and “The Story of an Hour” by Kate Chopin is women of the 1800’s lived on the whims of their husbands. One could say that they weren’t truly alive when their husbands were around. They were merely extensions of their husbands not a whole person unto themselves. When Dickinson says “She rose to his requirement..” or “the gold in using wore away” speaks to all that a wife has to do for her husband and the standards that she has to keep for him slowly wearing away at her as a person until there is not much left of herself. Which makes the wife in Chopin’s story so happy in the way that she describes all of what she is experiencing right after hearing of her husband’s demise. Whether speaking of the tops of trees “springing to life” or the “patches of blue sky” it was as if the world around her was coming to life for the first time. Though no other line in Chopin’s story rings closer to how her main character felt than when she kept whispering “Free! Body and soul free!”.
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