In Chopin’s quest to present Mrs. Mallard’s entrapment, despair, and (possible) suicide from her own point of view—a journey that leads eventually into a deeper sort of solitude in which Louise seems to be transcended or left behind. Around Louise, Chopin creates an environment that seems uncannily real in the fact that the oppression cannot be neatly sorted out. Why does Chopin in “The Story of an Hour” not allow Louise to rise up at any point and speak her own mind completely and clearly, to anyone else, or even to herself? Could this be the very heart of the oppression that she experiences, an oppression so complete as to deny the victim a full sense of her own predicament?
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