【Abstract】Kate Chopin is a famous feminist writer. A strong sense of feminine consciousness is embodied in her works. Her successful adoption of the psychological approach, specifically the stream of consciousness, adds grandeur to splendor of her literary creation. The successful employment of psychological approach in The Story of an Hour not only has achieved dramatic effects and intensified the themes but also has exposed the women’s anaclitic situation.
【Key wordst】The Story of an Hour; Psychological Analysis; Feminist Consciousness.
Kate Chopin was born in St. Louis, Missouri in 1851. She was raised by a strict Catholic mother and attended the Academy of Sacred Heart, where she was expected to learn all the social graces. Later she moved to New Orleans and there she married to Oscar Chopin. But it was after the death of her husband that she started her literary career. She has written many short stories and published two collections, Bayou Folk and A Night in Acadie, in succession and some famous novels such as Awakening, which is now regarded as one of the feminist masterpieces. However, when it was first published, attacks threw upon her and stunned her so much that she kept silent and wrote little else throughout the rest of her life because it has boldly touched upon and exposed some sensitive social problems. In her novels, we will find that she often repeated the same theme and related marriage to the cage of bars.
If we throw our eyes onto her Emancipation: the Life Fable, The Story of an Hour and Awakening, we will be assured of this. She has given us so much food to consider the significance of life and marriage and the embarrassing situation in which women lived that she is later labeled by the radical feminists in 1970s as one of the woman writers with a strong feminine consciousness, although surprisingly, she herself resolutely denied it. Actually it is understandable that she is taken as a progressive woman writer of feminine consciousness because in her times, the second women movement began to sweep over the whole country. And in her works the heroines were not merely contented with their family life. Instead, they tried every ways and means to break the fetters forced upon them. They wanted to pursue their inpidual freedom and spiritual independence and didn’t want to play a traditional role any longer. Most of the heroines under her pen, like Edna Pontellier and Mrs. Mallard, were more or less rebellious, although their resistance mostly ended in self-destruction and compromise. Maybe she was so radical that the public hadn’t yet prepared to accept her then. Just as Jane Bail Howard put, she uttered a voice ‘so far ahead of her times’.
When Kate Chopin lived, another influential trend that prevailed in the United States and the European Continent, namely the so-called psychoanalysis presented by the Austrian psychologist, Sigmund Freud. He pides human psyche roughly into three parts: conscious, preconscious and unconscious mind. In illuminating the mental processes he further distinguishes the three psyche areas of the mind as the Id, the ego, and the superego. To elucidate their interplay, he put forward the pleasure, reality and the morality principles. His theories have contributed a lot to modern psychology and also exerted a profound influence upon many social aspects, including literature. Many famous writers attribute their debts to him. Although there is no much evidence that Freud has directly influenced Kate Chopin, yet we can find that she has repeatedly adopted the psychological approach in her short stories, novellas and novels, among which The Story of an Hour is a typical example. And the successful employment of the psychological approach or stream of consciousness has achieved the dramatic effects and intensified the themes.
Mrs. Mallard, the heroine, lived a superficially happy life in other people’s eyes according to the conventional and secular criteria. Her husband was gentle and considerate, so they were deemed to be a perfect match. However, deep inside her heart she felt much inhibited. No one knew, including her husband, of her spiritual demands. Yet she had to make others believe that she was happy and lucky. She had to act the traditional role as a virtuous wife, not for herself, but for others. According to Peggy Skaggs, the heroines in the works of Kate Chopin often lived a two-faceted life. They lived in disguise to hide their real feelings and intentions. The women in the 19th century were required to learn all the social graces (The authoress herself was also required to do so in her puberty.) and encouraged to follow the rules and principles as men wanted them to do. In the American fiction Gone with the wind, we can see that Mummy has once and again threatened Scarlett that no man would take the risk to marry her if she insisted on doing as she liked. Most women were reduced to the victims of the then social and marital systems. Yet still they had to repress their own desires to cater to the patriarchal society. And no one would care about their real demands. Mrs. Mallard was just one of the victims.
Chopin is a good weaver of plots. When we read her short stories, we find there are so many mistakes and coincidences in them as if we were reading O’ Henry. At the beginning of the story she lays out suspense to the readers and immediately seizes their hearts. The news of her husband’s death evokes the readers’ deep sympathy for the heroine with heart disease. They worry about that she can’t survive the fatal blow. Like the other characters in the story, they all thought that she would be heart-broken and swooned on the spot like other women encountering the same situation. But she didn’t. Of course she wept too. However, she wept not because she felt sad, although her sister Josephine and other people believed that she did because she found it hard to face the music. But unexpectedly, as they read on, they find they have been deceived because what she (the heroine) rejoiced for is that she could be free from that moment on; and the repressed emotions can be at last released. Some intense psychological changes have undergone quickly in her body. The initial response to her husband’s death is that she felt free instead of feeling sad, which shows she must have been inhibited for ages. Thus she has a sense of emancipation as if a man were taken out of the suffocating dungeon where he had been imprisoned for ages and finally could breathe fresh air. At this moment, the lawless, asocial and amoral id has controlled her and the instinct to pursue pleasure temporarily got the upper hand of her reason. She became so excited and ecstatic that she couldn’t hold back happy tears trickling down her cheeks. But with her sister Josephine and her husband’s friend, Richards in her presence, she couldn’t reveal happiness to their faces because the conscious mind reminded her that she had to observe the reality principle. If they have discovered the secret and real reason of her sudden cry, she would be surely condemned. Here the superego, which yields to the morality principle, defeated the id, which is subject to the pleasure principle. As a lady who was asked to learn all the social graces since childhood, she must find it immoral and guilty to be happy at the news of her husband’s death, but meanwhile she found it irresistible to feel excited, so she decided to stay alone. However, Josephine and Richards misinterpreted her weeping and mistook that she wanted to stay alone because she was heart-broken. But neither of them knew that a violent conflict had occurred inside her. For the time being she retreated to a realm of freedom.
Once she entered into the room and was left alone, she did no longer need to wear a mask so that she could do what she just wanted. Now she was again conquered by the pleasure principle. She was so exhausted that she sank into the armchair and immediately returned to the unconscious state. She let herself follow the imagination like an unbridled horse. Here is the vivid description of her mind,
“There she stood, facing the open window, a comfortable, roomy armchair. Into this she sank, pressed down by a physical exhaustion that haunted her body and seemed to reach into her soul.
She could see in the open square before her house the tops of trees that were all aquiver with the new spring life. The delicious breath of rain was in the air. In the street below a peddler was crying his wares. The notes of a distant song which someone was singing reached her faintly, and countless sparrows were twittering in the eaves.”
She was so happy that everything in her eyes looked so lovely and sounded pleasant. An unspeakable anticipation took her by storm. Although she was a little bit fearful of it, she could hardly conceal her pleasure that she wanted to ‘drink in the very elixir of life through the open window’. She murmured to herself over and over, “Free, free, free!” “Free! Body and soul free!” Her seemingly inappropriate pleasure formed a striking yet discordant contrast with the death of her husband. All these show that she was no other than a beast in the cage and she had repressed herself for so long. But now, she could at last live a kind of life she wanted. Though sometimes she felt she had love for her husband, she often denied it. Maybe this kind of love was only out of her responsibility as a wife. So this was the so-called happy marriage! Here the authoress elaborated a vivid picture of the working mind of the heroine as if she were directing a movie. She faithfully presented a series of snapshots like montage to her readers. Though she never commented on it from the moral standpoint, we still can draw the conclusion that the superficially lucky and happy marriage is a castle in the air; that is, it might lack nothing but love. Perhaps Mr. Mallard did love her too, but he often ignored her existence as an inpidual. In another word, he loved and treated his wife as a pet. And then we can imagine that how many women of that day would suffer the fate of Mrs. Mallard!
While Mrs. Mallard was indulging herself in the sweet daydreams, her sister Josephine’s knock at the door took her back to the real world. Josephine had thought that her sister locked herself in the room to vent her grief. She worried about that her sister would drive crazy and probably commit suicide on impulse, so she insisted on her opening the door. However, ironically, Mrs. Mallard still wanted to taste the sweetness of freedom a little longer and even began to make a blueprint of her future carefree life, so she dragged on deliberately to open the door for her sister.
When she went out and descended the stairs with her sister, she refreshed herself and ‘she carried herself unwittingly like a goddess of victory’. But her sweet dream was doomed to be fulfilled because that the news of her husband’s death turned out to be a rumor. When she saw her husband came back safe and sound, she was so shocked, and maybe also so despaired that she couldn’t stand the blow brought by the trick God played with her. She was so psychologically weak that her heart disease suddenly attacked her and sent her directly to the no-return road. Interestingly, the doctor arbitrarily declared that she died because of exhilaration, and probably the cause of her death could only be rendered this way. Sadly, even until her death, no one could understand what Mrs. Mallard was thinking about.
The death of Mrs. Mallard is far from an inpidual tragedy. It is a true reflection of the common fate of women in the 19th century. Simultaneously it is also a eulogy dedicated to them. Although all Mrs. Mallard’s efforts and desires end in vain, she echoes the second women movement in full swing in the United States and provokes more people, especially women to think about their own destinies. Considering the fierce public response to the publication of her Awakening, Kate Chopin must feel much stressed so that she denied that she was a feminist. Sara Parton, one of her contemporaries and the most controversial American woman writer, didn’t admit either that she was a feminist. But they both have made great contribution to the elevation of the women’s social status.
Short as it is in length, the Story of an Hour affords us much for thought. Notably the author has wonderfully adopted the stream of consciousness in her novels and with her subtle description she has produced a ‘true-to-life’ effect. In this sense, we can decide that she is a good practitioner of it presented by William James. Thereby we can also see the pervasive influence of psychological analysis among the English writers.
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