The Story of an Hour, Kate Chopin

In reading from Kennedy, it is said that Kate Chopin had the “ability to write short stories of compressed intensity” (pp. 326). After reading The Story of an Hour, I would say this is, at best, an understatement.
Okay – I must stop my reader and advise you that I’ve given then end of the story away in this posting. So, if you’re interested in reading it for yourself first – please take the opportunity to exit and come back after you’ve read it.
Mrs. Mallard is the main character in this short story who, upon hearing of her husband’s supposed death in an accident, is at first distraught and wants only to be alone. I think this is probably something that a lot of people can relate to and therefore, it’s easy to understand why Chopin would describe her immediate need for seclusion. Chopin makes sure the reader knows early on that Mrs. Mallard is “afflicted with a heart trouble” (Chopin 326) as this is quite useful to the way the story takes the reader on a path of possible outcomes.
As I read from sentence to sentence my assumptions about where this “hour” would end were many, but not once did I consider the turn that Chopin takes at the end, after all, Mrs. Mallard was obviously overjoyed at the reality of being widowed. Once it became apparent that she was through the initial shock of her husband’s death, and that she was beginning to feel a sort of liberation; I wondered what the significance of the heart affliction actually was.
As it turns out, she dies, and her husband is not dead. He arrives home within minutes of her dying, and he would never know what had transpired in her mind in the previous hour. I would be willing to bet that Alfred Hitchcock would have enjoyed this story, and probably did; it’s right up his alley.
I have to admit that I picked this story for my freestyle blog posting because, well, it’s really short and time right now is of a premium. But as the old saying goes, “good things come in small packages.”