Readers of Kate Chopin’s short story, “The Story of an Hour,” may have strong opinions about Louise Mallard. Some may think she is a ruthless, evil witch who delights in the sudden death of her husband, but the evidence in the text does not support that reading. Others may say she is a woman so horribly oppressed by her husband that his death is a relief, but that is not supported by the textual evidence either. What readers know is that Louise is a woman who feels as if she is not free while her husband lives, and she wants to be free. She did not wish for his death, but when she hears news of it, she cannot help but feel some joy mixed with the sorrow that one expects a new widow to feel. The story is not about the oppression of wives by husbands or of women by men in general; it is about the oppression of society that judges a woman who does not conform to the standards that many expect. The surprise twist at the end illustrates how serious that oppression can be.

Louise learns of her husband, Brently’s, death and reacts as one would expect that she would. “She wept at once, with sudden, wild abandonment, in her sister's arms. When the storm of grief had spent itself she went away to her room alone” (Chopin). In the opening line of the story, readers learn Louise has heart trouble of an unspecified type. Some readers may assume that her “heart problems” are that she is not sufficiently saddened to learn of her husband’s death because after going to her room to be alone, she has an epiphany: “She was beginning to recognize this thing that was approaching to possess her, and she was striving to beat it back with her will--as powerless as her two white slender hands would have been. When she abandoned herself a little whispered word escaped her slightly parted lips. She said it over and over under her breath: "free, free, free!" (Chopin). Louise is not just a heartless woman and her heart trouble is not that she does not care for her husband. After all, she “strives to beat it back,” but she cannot. She knows that she may be judged by society for feeling this way, but she cannot help it.

This epiphany that she is free brings her joy. She is still mourning her husband, but the reality of a life without him is sinking in, and the main feature is that she will have enough money to live on and no one to control the way she lives. She will be completely autonomous, a rarity in the historical context of the story. Selina Jamil of The Explicator says, “Until her moment of illumination, Mrs. Mallard’s emotions have been stifled and suppressed to fit into the mold of hollow social conventions. As Chopin implies, Mrs. Mallard’s ‘heart trouble’ is not so much a physical ailment, as the other characters in the story think, as a sign of a woman who has unconsciously surrendered her heart (i.e., her identity as an individual) to the culture of paternalism” (Jamil 216). Jamil calls Louise’s epiphany, self-assertion. Because Louise realizes she has no one to answer to anymore, she can now assert herself without being corrected by the man who society believes should take responsibility for her.

Some would argue that readers cannot really assume anything about what it is that Louise sees and feels as she sits alone in her room on the day she believes her husband has died. All that is available are the meaning-packed sentences of the short story narrated by the omniscient narrator. Lawrence Berkove of American Literary Realism says the narrator cannot be trusted as reliable. “While the text enables us to make certain inferences about Louise, it does not supply us with any information about the truth of her life except her perceptions, and these, as I intend to show, are unreliable and, insofar as they are taken as the statements of the story's omniscient narrator, misleading and contradicted by other textual evidence” (Berkove 153). However, an omniscient narrator, by definition, knows all about everything that occurs in the story, so readers must take Louise’s perceptions as truth because the all-knowing narrator says they are: “She saw beyond that bitter moment a long procession of years to come that would belong to her absolutely. And she opened and spread her arms out to them in welcome” (Chopin). Louise feels that without her husband, there is no one to whom she must answer, ask permission of, or to bend her will to match his as she had to do while he was alive, just as the narrator says.

This is what brings such joy to a woman representative of the nineteenth century middle class wife. Today, perhaps a woman would not have such a moment of joy because if she were married, it would be by choice and not because she had limited options for survival as was the case in the nineteenth century. Louise saw h