Story of an Hour

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English Language Teaching December, 2009 Kate Chopin’s View on Death and Freedom in The Story of an Hour Xuemei Wan School of Foreign Languages, Jiangsu University Zhenjiang 212013, China Tel: 86-511-8879-7843 E-mail: wanxuemei@ujs.edu.cn This research is supported by the Education Department of Jiangsu Province, China from 2008 to 2010, among the Directing Projects on Philosophy and Social Sciences in Universities of Jiangsu Province, whose code is 08SJD7500021. Abstract The Story of an Hour, written by the American woman writer, Kate Chopin (1851-1904) fully shows us the tremendous conflict between life and death among those women who had the more self-awareness, the less social living space according to the established social norms 100 years ago in a dramatic way. The heroine’s strong desire for freedom and sudden death remind us of the philosophical thought on life and death of Zhuangzi, ancient Chinese thinker and Martin Heideggar, which deconstruct and transcend the conflict between them. Keywords: Kate Chopin, self-awareness, death, freedom, The Story of an Hour In Aspects of the Novel, E. M. Forster (1974, p. 57) says, “The main facts in human life are five: birth, food, sleep, love and death” and “birth and death” are “the two strangest”, for “death is coming even as birth has come, but, similarly, we do not know what it is like. Our final experience, like our first, is conjectural. We move between two darknesses”. So it’s no wonder that many novelists often take birth and death as the themes of their novels. It is also reflected in Kate Chopin’s The Story of an Hour. On April 19, 1894, Kate Chopin wrote “The Story of an Hour,” a truly remarkable tale about a subdued wife’s vision of intending to live only for herself. Louise Mallard, who suffers from heart trouble, is gently told the news of her husband’s death in a railway-accident. She “wept at

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