The Story of an Hour Essay

In the following portion of a chapter from a longer work, Papke interprets ['The Story of an Hour" as a story that warns against the consequences of what happens when "the individual changes and not the world."

....' "The Story of an Hour," for instance, details a very ordinary reality and conscientiously analyzes that moment in a woman's life when the boundaries of the accepted everyday world are suddenly shattered and the process of self-consciousness begins. Louise Mallard, dutiful wife and true woman, is gently told that her husband has been killed in a train accident. Her response is atypical, however, and that is the subject of the story: what Louise thinks and feels as she finds herself thrust into solitude and self-contemplation for the first time.

Louise appears in the opening as the frail, genteel, devoted wife of a prosperous businessman; she is at first only...