by Kate Chopin
This story was actually quite amusing to me. The change in tone and the dramatic irony at
the end of the story give it a very unexpected conclusion. The story starts out as two people trying to
tell this frail woman with heart disease about her husband’s sudden death in a
train accident. The tone here is of
anxiety and sadness. The reader knows
the wife will have to find out soon and I, personally, was sad for the wife in
addition to being anxious about her health.
The wife reacts with weeping, and the tone is grieving and still
sadness. She wishes to be alone and goes
into her room. Here, the change in
feeling and tone is foreshadowed by, “There was something coming
to her and she was waiting for it, fearfully. What was it? She did not know; it was too subtle and elusive to name” (Chopin, 326). She succumbs to the
approaching feeling, and the reader discovers that it is a feeling of freedom.
The tone drastically changes as the women is occupied with feelings of
joy and thoughts of finally being able to live her life for herself and no one
else. The woman has barely a hint of
sadness left and now looks forward to her life. "She breathed a quick prayer that life might be long. It was only yesterday she had thought with a shudder that life might be long" (Chopin, 327). The change in tone is drastic and not expected from a woman whose husband just died.
But the twist is that the husband didn’t actually die. The woman sees him walk through the door and
her frail heart gives out. The last line
of the story is where I find the irony-“She died of heart disease- of joy that
kills” (chopin, 327). The dramatic irony is that the
other characters believed that the overwhelming joy of seeing her husband alive is what
killed her, but the way I see it, she felt joy in freedom, and that being taken away
was what killed her.
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