" The Story of an Hour"

When i first read this story i really did not understand it at all. I thought it was really confusing, but i was also reading it right before class started which probably didn't help. After i read through the story a couple of times and discussed it with my group I thought it was a good short story.
After re-reading i found out what "The Story of an Hour" was really about. When i first read the story i thought that the wife was really rude and mean. How could she have been happy to hear her husband had died? My first thoughts made me really dislike this story, and all i really had got from it was that a husband had died and the wife was happy! I also didn't really realise he was still alive until our group discussions inside of class. I liked the discussion in our groups because it made me look at the story in a total different way, this helped make the story more interesting for me. I also obviously had a better understanding and began to like this story more because you could look at it from many points of view. Was Mrs. Mallard happy her husband died because he was abusing her or just because she felt trapped in her marriage? Since divorce was not really accepted in these times maybe she felt some release to be out of a bad marriage? This was pointed out in my group discussion which made me re-think my view of the wife, and not really hate Mrs. Mallard so much. You never know what she was living through and why she felt the way she did about her husband. Another cool thing i thought we did in class was answer the questions on the board. About being in a long term relationship, being married, or the passing of someone close to you. Answering these questions made me see why people had different views of the story. Your life experiences can really effect how you view this short story.
I think the author Kate Chopin did a good job of writing this story it was full of small details that really make the story come together. Another thing that i thought was cool was the last line of the story when Mrs. Mallard dies. She wrote, " When she came they said she had died of heart disease-of joy that kills"(194) . You can look at this line in a couple different rays. One being that she had heart problems and died, or you could look at in another way. Maybe she was so hurt to find out that her husband had actually survived that she passed away, like dieing from a broken heart. Over all i do like the authors style and think she did a good job of writing this short story.