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Foreshadowing In The Story Of An Hour

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Could it be possible for love to be so harsh that it causes you to die? ‘The story of an hour’ was written in 1894 in which Kate Chopin challenges the society of her times where married women had to obey their husbands and didn’t have real control on their own freedom. In this short story, Chopin’s message to the audience is to illustrate the suffocating influence that men had over women and how it affected the women’s emotional feelings trapped in their own life. The story has a third person omniscient narrator that depicts the protagonist’s feelings and surroundings with no bias.
She presents the protagonist to be a married woman, Louise Mallard, experiencing a ‘monstrous joy’ when she hears the tragic news about her dead husband and finishes …show more content…

When Louise is alone in the room, she begins to establish her new findings for her future by comparing it with her surroundings. The ‘open window’, ‘the new spring life’ and ‘delicious breath of rain’ illustrates the new life and freedom that she is going to be living. It could also suggest that she now looks out the window with a different perspective whereas she used to do when Bentley was still alive.

Foreshadowing is also used. The sentence ‘There were patches of blue sky showing here and there through the clouds that had met and piled one above the other in the west facing her window’ explores that the clouds were the burden that she had from her marriage are now shifting and changing and piling up to west meaning it is the end of her previous life.
After she observes the events from outside, an epiphany had come to her and starts to build up. First she tries to avoid the new idea ’this thing was approaching to possess her, and she was striving to beat it back’ because she perhaps felt hopeless in her marriage ‘there would be no one to live for’ explaining that she lived for her husband and not for herself. The climax of the story hits when she repeats whispering ‘free, free, free’ in addition to the change of feelings in her body ‘Her pulses beat fast, and the coursing blood warmed and relaxed every inch of her

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