Romanticism In The Children's Hour By Lillian Hellman

Want’s, and needs. Two words that have different interpretations. Two words at war with one another. When these simple, words are called into action they cause doubt in even the most steadfast individuals. Giving up the wants of one’s self for the needs of another, that causes the tipping of the scales. People have a tendency by nature to take what they want and forget about what they need. Balancing want’s and needs is, to put it in simple terms hard, but completely giving them up for someone else is close to impossible. Yet when an individual is put under compelling circumstances, there needs and wants intertwine giving them the ability to put their own interests aside and sacrifice themselves for others.

The time period, season, location, and surroundings of a character reveal a great deal about them. Kate Chopin's "The Story of An Hour" is an excellent example of how setting affects the reader's perception of the story. There is an enormous amount of symbolism expressed through the element of setting in this short story. So well, in fact, that words are hardly necessary to descriptively tell the story of Mrs. Mallard's hour of freedom. Analyzing the setting for "The Story of An Hour" will give a more complete understanding of the story itself. There are many individual parts that, when explained and pieced together, will both justify Mrs. Mallard's attitude and actions toward her husband's death and provide a visual expression of her

Written in 1894, “The Story of an Hour” is a story of a woman who, through the erroneously reported death of her husband, experienced true freedom. Both tragic and ironic, the story deals with the boundaries imposed on women by society in the nineteenth century. The author Kate Chopin, like the character in her story, had first-hand experience with the male-dominated society of that time and had experienced the death of her husband at a young age (Internet). The similarity between Kate Chopin and her heroine can only leave us to wonder how much of this story is fiction and how much is personal experience.

The friends of the narrator, however, do not hide in the imaginary world of childhood and are maturing into adolescents. Sally, “ screamed if she got her stockings muddy,” felt they were too old to “ the games” (paragraph 9). Sally stayed by the curb and talked to the boys (paragraph 10).

The setting and time period of this story supports the adventurous innocence of its youthful characters, as well as enriching the story’s momentous and climactic confrontation between the forward-looking Mona, and her more traditional mother, Helen.

  In Kate Chopin's "The Story of an Hour," the main character is a woman who has been controlled and conformed to the norms of society. Louise Mallard has apparently given her entire life to assuring her husband's happiness while forfeiting her own. This truth is also apparent in Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House. In this story, Nora Helmer has also given her life to a man who has very little concern for her feelings or beliefs. Both of these characters live very lonely lives, and both have a desire to find out who they really are and also what they are capable of becoming. Although the characters of Nora and Louise are very much alike in many ways, their personalities

Kate Chopin’s The Story of an Hour is a brilliant short story of irony and emotion. The story demonstrates conflicts that take us through the character’s emotions as she finds out about the death of her husband. Without the well written series of conflicts and events this story, the reader would not understand the depth of Mrs. Mallard’s inner conflict and the resolution at the end of the story. The conflict allows us to follow the emotions and unfold the irony of the situation in “The Story of an Hour.”

The roles of the women in the drama are significant because of the way they shape the story and help the reader understand the nature of one of the strangest events in human history. Throughout the novel, women are portrayed in many different ways. Some are shown as being good and moral people while others the complete opposite. Arthur Miller's treatment of women in this play show women as weak beings who give into their husbands. Each women in the drama plays a significant role in showing the different archetypes there were among women especially Mary Warren, Elizabeth Proctor, and Abigail Williams. In addition, Kohlberg’s Moral Stages are six developmental stages of human moral reasoning which can tie into the view in which we have of the women in the play.

Being on the verge of adulthood and having just left the simplicity of childhood, teenagers have always been particularly complex and enigmatic individuals. While most people struggle to see things from an adolescent perspective, Canadian playwright Joan MacLeod is well-known for her accurate portrayal of teenagers. In 2002, she published The Shape of a Girl, a play related to the dramatic story of a young girl named Reena Virk who was tragically affected by bullying, a characteristic behavior of adolescent development. Throughout The Shape of a Girl, MacLeod effectively exploits the Aristotelian dramatic elements and she uses Reena Virk’s story as well as the thoughts that it produces in the antagonist’s mind to portray both adolescent character traits and behavioral patterns.

Many authors explore gender roles in their writings. Kate Chopin's "The Story of an Hour" uses gender in describing a woman that feels socially oppressed in her marriage. Marge Piercy's "Barbie Doll" explores gender roles by describing a woman as she goes through life and her infatuation with becoming the perfect image of society. Each of these authors uses women and how these women deal with their situation. Kate Chopin uses nature and Mrs. Mallard inner feelings, while Marge Piercy uses societies assumptions and their effect.

The Children’s Hour shows the power of lie. Karen Wright and Martha Dobie, who are very close friends, and opened a private school for girls. Mary is one of those students who was studying at the school, but she would often get into trouble because she lied and made trouble. One that really standout is when she takes flowers from the garbage can and tells the teacher that she was picking the flowers for her from the garden. She was punished for making troubles like this. Mary being very spoiled by her grandma did not want to be in the school anymore and so she lied to her grandma saying Martha and Karen were having “unnatural” relationship. This lie by Mary affected many of the people, which included Martha, Karen, and Doctor Joseph Cardin.

`The Story of an Hour' was written in the nineteenth century and during this time highly restrictive gender roles forbade women to live as they saw fit. Kate Chopin presents in her story,

Have you ever loved someone so much that you would do anything in your power to help them in their time of need? In the short story “A Worn Path” by Eudora Welty, the reader witnesses the love and strength of a grandmother for her grandson. The protagonist, Phoenix Jackson, shows love, determination and self-sacrifice as she faces several obstacles while traveling by foot in the cold through the wilderness. She travels this path frequently, as the title suggests, to the city to get medicine needed for her grandson. Phoenix’s willpower to continue on her path through every hindrance that she faces is commendable.

In order to properly view a story from a feminist perspective, it is important that the reader fully understands what the feminist perspective entails. “There are many feminist perspectives, and each perspective uses different approaches to analyze and interpret texts. One is that gender is “socially constructed” and another is that power is distributed unequally on the basis of sex, race, and ethnicity, religion, national origin, age, ability, sexuality, and economic class status” (South University Online, 2011, para. 1). The story “Girl” is an outline of the things young girls

In her 1934 play The Children’s Hour, Lillian Hellman exemplifies the theme of power. The concept of power provides a person the ability to control things that are beyond him/her. This situation is well described by Tanfer Emin Tunc in Rumours, Gossip and Lies: Social Anxiety and the Evil Child in Lillian Hellman’s The Children’s Hour as “the psycho-social power of adolescent-driven gossip, rumors and slander, and the frightening outcomes that can emerge when people lose their ability to reason, question, analyze, and criticize the world around them” (Tunc 34). The young girl, Mary Tilford is unaware of the great damage and change that her lie will cause her teachers. Through the lie that Mary starts, Hellman shows just how much