• Corpus ID: 114472781

“Joy That Kills”: Female Jouissance in Kate Chopin’s “The Story of an Hour.”

@inproceedings{Tseng2016JoyTK,
  title={“Joy That Kills”: Female Jouissance in Kate Chopin’s “The Story of an Hour.”},
  author={Chia-chieh Tseng},
  year={2016}
}

• Chia-chieh Tseng
• Published 2016
• Art

Kate Chopin’s best-known short fiction “The Story of an Hour” is a tour de force portraying a woman’s tension and anxiety under patriarchal oppression. After hearing the news of her husband’s untimely passing, the protagonist, Mrs. Louise Mallard, is grief-stricken at first, but soon other thoughts creep into her mind. The text indicates that Louise’s life is extreme­ ly restricted because of her domestic confinement and also suggests that she must have been secretly yearning for a life of her own. As the story unfolds, we understand that she wants to liberate her long-repressed female identity more than anything else; thus, readers are unlikely to charge her with being unsympathetic or even perverse in rejoicing at her husband’s death. The most interesting part of the story depicts the heroine’s experience of ecstasy while contemplating her newfound life of freedom. The climax is reached when she suddenly dies of a heart attack while descending the stairs with her sister. Ironically, this also happens precisely at the moment when, unknown to her, her husband is entering the house. In about 1000 words capturing what hap­ pens in barely one hour, Kate Chopin reveals the ecstatic experience of free­ dom and independence from the domestic oppression of a lifetime, the most intense but short-lived “joy that kills.” The ending of this extremely short piece with astounding intensity does shed some light on the female repressed identity and sexuality. To borrow Per Seyersted’s words, it gives us the “most startling picture of female self-assertion” (60).