"The Story of an Hour"

"The notes of a distant song which someone was singing reached her faintly, and countless sparrows were twittering in the eaves."1 This paragraph is the realization that life is going to go on. Mrs. Mallard starts to lift her spirits from this point on in the story.

When the author, Mary Chopin describes Mrs. Mallard's appearance and feelings in paragraph seven, she says, "suspension of intelligent thought".1 Chopin is showing how Mrs. Mallard is just spacing out. She is not thinking of anything intelligent at the moment, she is just lost in her own train of thought. Later in the story there is a passage opposite of this. "She knew that she would weep again when she saw the kind, tender hands folded in death."1 Mrs. Mallard knows she will grieve when she sees her husband again, but for the time being she is excited that she can live the rest of her life as she pleases.

"Free, free, free! The vacant stare and the look of terror that had followed it went from her eyes. They stayed keen and bright. Her pulses beat fast, and the coursing blood warmed and relaxed every inch in her body."1 I picked this passage to show the story's significance. Even though Mrs. Mallard thinks at this moment that her husband is dead, she couldn't be happier about it. This proves to be true in the very end of the story when her husband turns up alive and she drops dead out of disappointment.