The Story of an Hour by Kate Chopin
UNDERSTATEMENT: a type of verbal irony takes place when what is stated says less than what is meant
ANTHROPOMORPHISM: attributing human characteristics to an animal or inanimate object
This short story had quite the twist at the end. I was unsure as to where it was headed at the beginning, but then realized that this lady is a huge jerk. At first I feel bad for her because her husband had just been killed in a horrific accident and she would be all alone, but then there is a shift at paragraph five. When the "storm of grief had spent itself" (Chopin), Josephine starts to recognize all the good things that are going on in the world around her. She notices the birds chirping and the blue skies and I start to get a sense of her not being so sad anymore. Finally, she has a revelation that she is finally free because her husband is dead. She does fight the feeling though. The emotion she didn't want to feel was joy and relief. She could feel it "creeping out of the sky, reaching toward her through the sounds, the scents, the color that filled the air" (Chopin). I don't feel bad at the end of the story when her death is abrupt and understated because I think it was just karma. She was happy her husband was dead and she never really loved him anyways, and then she even prayed for a longer life apart from him. So, I am happy that she was immediately killed. I do feel bad for her husband though. Hopefully he doesn't have the same reaction to his wife's death as she did to his "death".
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