Read the Passage She Knew That She Would Weep Again When She Saw the Kind
"The Story of An Hour"
Kate Chopin (1894)
Knowing that Mrs. Mallard was affected with a heart problem, corking care was taken to break to her as gently every bit possible the news of her husband's death.It was her sister Josephine who told her, in broken sentences; veiled hints that revealed in half concealing. Her husband'southward friend Richards was there, too, near her. Information technology was he who had been in the newspaper office when intelligence of the railroad disaster was received, with Brently Mallard'south proper name leading the list of "killed." He had only taken the fourth dimension to clinch himself of its truth by a second telegram, and had hastened to forestall any less careful, less tender friend in bearing the sad message.
She did not hear the story every bit many women have heard the same, with a paralyzed disability to accept its significance. She wept at once, with sudden, wild abandonment, in her sis'south artillery. When the storm of grief had spent itself she went away to her room lone. She would take no i follow her.
There stood, facing the open window, a comfortable, roomy armchair. Into this she sank, pressed down by a concrete burnout that haunted her torso and seemed to reach into her soul.
She could see in the open foursquare before her house the tops of copse that were all aquiver with the new jump life. The succulent breath of rain was in the air. In the street below a peddler was crying his wares. The notes of a distant song which some one was singing reached her faintly, and countless sparrows were twittering in the eaves.
There were patches of blue sky showing hither and there through the clouds that had met and piled one above the other in the west facing her window.
She sat with her head thrown dorsum upon the cushion of the chair, quite motionless, except when a sob came upwardly into her throat and shook her, as a child who has cried itself to sleep continues to sob in its dreams.
She was young, with a fair, calm face, whose lines bespoke repression and fifty-fifty a certain force. Simply at present at that place was a dull stare in her optics, whose gaze was fixed abroad off yonder on one of those patches of bluish sky. Information technology was not a glance of reflection, but rather indicated a suspension of intelligent thought.
In that location was something coming to her and she was waiting for information technology, fearfully. What was it? She did non know; it was too subtle and elusive to proper noun. But she felt information technology, creeping out of the sky, reaching toward her through the sounds, the scents, the colour that filled the air.
At present her bosom rose and roughshod tumultuously. She was beginning to recognize this affair that was budgeted to possess her, and she was striving to trounce information technology back with her volition--equally powerless as her two white slender hands would take been. When she abandoned herself a piffling whispered give-and-take escaped her slightly parted lips. She said it over and over under hte breath: "gratis, complimentary, complimentary!" The vacant stare and the look of terror that had followed it went from her eyes. They stayed keen and bright. Her pulses beat fast, and the coursing blood warmed and relaxed every inch of her body.
She did non stop to ask if information technology were or were not a monstrous joy that held her. A clear and exalted perception enabled her to dismiss the suggestion as little. She knew that she would weep over again when she saw the kind, tender easily folded in expiry; the face that had never looked salvage with love upon her, fixed and gray and dead. Just she saw across that biting moment a long procession of years to come up that would belong to her absolutely. And she opened and spread her arms out to them in welcome.
In that location would be no one to alive for during those coming years; she would live for herself. There would exist no powerful volition angle hers in that blind persistence with which men and women believe they have a right to impose a private will upon a fellow-beast. A kind intention or a cruel intention fabricated the act seem no less a criminal offense as she looked upon it in that brief moment of illumination.
And yet she had loved him--sometimes. Often she had non. What did information technology affair! What could love, the unsolved mystery, count for in the face of this possession of self-assertion which she suddenly recognized as the strongest impulse of her existence!
"Free! Body and soul free!" she kept whispering.
Josephine was kneeling before the closed door with her lips to the keyhold, imploring for admission. "Louise, open up the door! I beg; open the door--you will make yourself ill. What are you doing, Louise? For sky's sake open the door."
"Go away. I am not making myself ill." No; she was drinking in a very elixir of life through that open up window.
Her fancy was running riot along those days ahead of her. Spring days, and summer days, and all sorts of days that would exist her own. She breathed a quick prayer that life might be long. It was but yesterday she had thought with a shudder that life might be long.
She arose at length and opened the door to her sister's importunities. There was a feverish triumph in her eyes, and she carried herself unwittingly like a goddess of Victory. She clasped her sis's waist, and together they descended the stairs. Richards stood waiting for them at the lesser.
Some one was opening the front door with a latchkey. Information technology was Brently Mallard who entered, a fiddling travel-stained, composedly conveying his grip-sack and umbrella. He had been far from the scene of the accident, and did not even know there had been one. He stood amazed at Josephine's piercing cry; at Richards' quick motion to screen him from the view of his wife.
When the doctors came they said she had died of heart illness--of the joy that kills.
Reading response:
Pick out at least five phrases which you think are especially important to the story (what you might mark on a printed text.) Briefly describe why you chose each.
What questions about character or motivation or plot does this story get out in your mind?
Now get to the study text
Source: https://archive.vcu.edu/english/engweb/webtexts/hour/
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