Elements of Fiction: Analysis of Kate Chopin's 'The Story of an Hour' and Edgar Allan Poe's 'The Black Cat'

Running head: ELEMENTS OF FICTION
Elements of fiction
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1ELEMENTS OF FICTION
1. In Kate Chopin’s short story, “The Story of an Hour”, the protagonist is Louise
Mallard, who had struggled with heart trouble all her life. At the start of the story, Louise
receives news of her husband’s death in a railroad accident. However, instead of being grief
stricken, she gets a taste of freedom and independence that had been denied to her due to the
shackles of married life. Just when she was about to embrace life as a liberated woman,
Louise finds out that her husband was indeed alive; seeing him walk through the door proved
to be too much for her fragile heart, and she died of shock (Chopin, 2018).
However, in this aspect, it is important to analyze the Louise Mallard’s exact cause of
death. At the end of the story, the physician ruled that Louise died of “joy that kills” –
implying that Mrs. Mallard had been so overjoyed with her husband’s return, that it had
overwhelmed her, causing a heart failure. On the contrary, it was the loss of her new found
freedom that killed her. After Mr. Mallard’s death, Louise felt that a massive burden had been
taken off her shoulders, and she was finally able to breathe. She felt a sense of freedom – a
feeling previously unknown to her. Like most married women in the nineteenth and twentieth
century, Louise too had been a prisoner in her own home. It was only after her husband’s
death that she got back her long lost sense of identity and free will (Kusuma, 2015). Thus,
when he returns, Mrs. Mallard is unable to come to terms with the fact that she would have to
go back to a life of restrictions and restraints imposed on her by marriage. She realizes that
the only way a woman could attain complete freedom in the contemporary society was
through death. It was not joy that killed her, but the realization that her “body and spirit”
could never be free in a traditional orthodox society, which led to her demise.
2. Extensive use of symbolism in the stories of Edgar Allan Poe calls for psychoanalytic
criticism of the same (Wright, 2013). In his short story, “The Black Cat” which was
published in 1843, the symbolism of the titular black cat is all pervasive, and must be
analyzed to understand the central theme of the story (Poe, 2014). In the story, the protagonist