Compare & Contrast “the Story of an Hour” & “a Respectable Woman” - the Awakening of Female Consciousness

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When he joins her on the bench, she becomes aware of her feelings as her “physical being was for the moment predominant”. She does not hear what he is saying, since she is “only drinking in the tones of his voice”, as she wants “to reach out her hand in the darkness and touch him with the sensitive tips of her fingers upon the face or the lips”. She wants to draw him close to her and whisper against his cheek, an impulse which forces her to walk away from him.

A sense of freedom is not the initial reaction of Mrs. Mallard in ’The Story of an Hour”. The news that her husband has been killed in a train accident makes her weep in her sister’s arms at first. However, when left alone she is overwhelmed by a fearful new feeling coming to her, “creeping out of the sky, reaching toward her through the sounds, the scents, the color that filled the air”. She whispers: “free, free, free!” with increasing pulse while “coursing blood warmed and relaxed every inch of her body”. Suddenly she sees a future where she can live for herself without oppression. She finds herself looking forward to her own spring and summer days, praying that life might be long. At the same time, she remembers how the day before she had dreaded having a long life ahead of her.

In both stories, the outcomes seem to pivot around more or less dramatic events leading to a clearer insight into the desires of the protagonists. Paradoxically, the resolution in ’A Respectable Woman’ can be interpreted as slightly less respectable. In actual fact, we are looking at an ending which is both more ambiguous and provocative, as Chopin addresses a woman’s desire for other man than her husband. Mrs. Baroda finds herself wanting to “draw close to Gouvernail and whisper against his cheek as she might have done if she had not been a respectable woman”. However, she is initially both respectable and sensible. Thus, she walks away, afraid of the temptation, she refrains from telling her friend and husband and she leaves the house for a few days, since “there are some battles in life which a human being must fight alone”. In this way she takes responsibility for her own actions and clearly can take care of herself. Mrs. Baroda recognizes her own desire and acts accordingly, like a respectable and conventional woman. When Mrs. Baroda’s husband suggests the visit be repeated the next summer, Mrs. Baroda is opposed to the idea. However, the ending has a provoking twist and the interest in the story lies in this ambiguity. Before the end of the year, Mrs. Baroda has changed her mind; she wants to invite Gouvernail again. Her husband is delighted that she has overcome her dislike. Chopin ends the story with Mrs. Baroda’s cheerful remark: “I have overcome everything! You will see. This time I shall be very nice to him”. This, of course, leaves us with a question: Has Mrs. Baroda overcome her infatuation with Gouvernail and is indifferent to his presence, whereby a visit would not present a problem any more, or is she going to be nice in another sense of the word and plans to commit adultery? Most critics argue that Mrs. Baroda is planning to be unfaithful to her husband. The fact that Mrs. Baroda tells Gaston that ‘I have overcome everything’ may be important as Chopin may be suggesting that Mrs. Baroda has not only changed her opinion towards Gouvernail but it is also possible that she is no longer confined (or restricted) to society’s perception of what a respectable woman is, and has found freedom outside of societal norms.

The outcome in ’The Story of an Hour’ is even more extreme. During the course of an hour Mrs. Mallard tastes the sweetness of freedom all alone in her room: “Free! Body and soul free!”. She finds herself looking forward to a lifetime that will “be her own”. Although “she had loved him - sometimes” she realizes that “love, the unsolved mystery” is nothing compared to the “possession of self-assertion the strongest impulse of her being”. In the new life she visualizes ahead of her, Mrs. Mallard will be her own master, making her own decisions and choices. According to Bender, Chopin suggests in ’The Story of an Hour’ that love is inconstant and ultimately of little importance compared to self-realization. Thus Chopin takes her provocation one step further. The solution for Mrs. Baroda might have been to take a lover in secret, to free herself of discontent and unfulfilled desire. However, for a woman like Mrs. Mallard, who strives for freedom as such and self-assertion, things look different. In fact, Chopin provides only one way out, when this desire for freedom can never be fulfilled. When Mr. Mallard appears, alive and well, death is the inevitable solution for this female protagonist. Mrs. Mallard dies a natural death from the shock, having a weak heart. In ’The Story of an Hour’, Chopin seems to point at female self-fulfilment as more valuable to women than anything else, and without it, clearly, life is not worth living. This is, of course, a strong provocation, even today.

As we have seen, Chopin provides us with two case studies in her short stories. The lives of Mrs. Baroda and Mrs. Mallard are initially similar. When exposed to different problems, things change in the lives of these women and their search for desire and freedom take different forms. Whereas the rather ironic ending for Mrs. mallard, Mrs. Baroda seems to have found a way to handle her desire for her husband’s friend. The most provocative ending is that of Mrs. Mallard, who actually dies when she finds out that she is not free after all. Although the outcomes depicted can be seen as increasingly provocative, Chopin never seems to pass judgment on any of the parties concerned. On the contrary, she remains the cool observer of womanhood at the end of the 19th century, letting her readers think and judge for themselves. Nevertheless, it is interesting to note that the importance of freedom, one of the main themes, seems to go hand in hand with increasing provocation: the more important the concept of freedom seems to be for the protagonist, the more extreme the outcome of the story.

When Chopin’s work was published in the 1890s, she was praised for her ability to depict the local and picturesque and criticized for the immoral ending of The Awakening. Since critical reappraisal of Chopin began in the 60s, the categorization of her work has changed to a recognition of wider perspectives. From a 2009 perspective, Elizabeth Nolan draws our attention to Chopin’s writing “in terms of its sophisticated engagements with romanticism, transcendentalism, literary realism, naturalism and New Woman fiction and as anticipating the concerns of feminism and literary modernism”, considering Chopin a “ground-breaking artist”. Although the 2 women studied in this essay move within the Creole