Read the Passage She Knew That She Would Weep Again
"The Story of An Hour"
Kate Chopin (1894)
Knowing that Mrs. Mallard was afflicted with a heart trouble, bully intendance was taken to break to her as gently equally possible the news of her married man's death.It was her sister Josephine who told her, in cleaved sentences; veiled hints that revealed in half concealing. Her married man's friend Richards was there, too, nearly her. It was he who had been in the newspaper office when intelligence of the railroad disaster was received, with Brently Mallard'south name leading the list of "killed." He had only taken the time to clinch himself of its truth by a second telegram, and had hastened to forestall whatsoever less careful, less tender friend in bearing the distressing message.
She did non hear the story as many women take heard the same, with a paralyzed inability to accept its significance. She wept at in one case, with sudden, wild abandonment, in her sister's artillery. When the storm of grief had spent itself she went abroad to her room lone. She would take no one follow her.
There stood, facing the open window, a comfy, roomy armchair. Into this she sank, pressed down by a concrete exhaustion that haunted her body and seemed to reach into her soul.
She could run into in the open up square before her house the tops of copse that were all aquiver with the new spring life. The delicious breath of rain was in the air. In the street below a peddler was crying his wares. The notes of a distant song which some one was singing reached her faintly, and countless sparrows were twittering in the eaves.
There were patches of blue heaven showing here and there through the clouds that had met and piled ane above the other in the west facing her window.
She sabbatum with her head thrown back upon the absorber of the chair, quite motionless, except when a sob came upward into her throat and shook her, every bit a child who has cried itself to sleep continues to sob in its dreams.
She was young, with a fair, calm face, whose lines bespoke repression and even a certain force. But now at that place was a dull stare in her eyes, whose gaze was stock-still abroad off yonder on one of those patches of blue heaven. It was non a glance of reflection, but rather indicated a suspension of intelligent thought.
There was something coming to her and she was waiting for it, fearfully. What was it? She did not know; it was also subtle and elusive to name. But she felt it, creeping out of the sky, reaching toward her through the sounds, the scents, the color that filled the air.
At present her bosom rose and brutal tumultuously. She was offset to recognize this thing that was approaching to possess her, and she was striving to beat it back with her volition--equally powerless as her two white slender hands would have been. When she abased herself a footling whispered give-and-take escaped her slightly parted lips. She said it over and over nether hte breath: "free, free, free!" The vacant stare and the look of terror that had followed it went from her optics. They stayed keen and bright. Her pulses beat fast, and the coursing blood warmed and relaxed every inch of her body.
She did not cease to enquire if it were or were non a monstrous joy that held her. A clear and exalted perception enabled her to dismiss the suggestion equally little. She knew that she would cry over again when she saw the kind, tender hands folded in decease; the face that had never looked save with honey upon her, stock-still and greyness and expressionless. But she saw across that bitter moment a long procession of years to come that would belong to her absolutely. And she opened and spread her artillery out to them in welcome.
There would be no one to alive for during those coming years; she would alive for herself. At that place would be no powerful will bending hers in that blind persistence with which men and women believe they have a correct to impose a individual will upon a boyfriend-creature. A kind intention or a cruel intention made the human action seem no less a criminal offence as she looked upon it in that brief moment of illumination.
And still she had loved him--sometimes. Frequently she had not. What did information technology matter! What could love, the unsolved mystery, count for in the face of this possession of self-assertion which she all of a sudden recognized as the strongest impulse of her being!
"Free! Body and soul costless!" she kept whispering.
Josephine was kneeling before the closed door with her lips to the keyhold, imploring for admission. "Louise, open the door! I beg; open the door--you lot will brand yourself ill. What are you doing, Louise? For heaven's sake open the door."
"Go abroad. I am not making myself ill." No; she was drinking in a very elixir of life through that open window.
Her fancy was running riot forth those days ahead of her. Leap days, and summer days, and all sorts of days that would exist her own. She breathed a quick prayer that life might be long. Information technology was only yesterday she had thought with a shudder that life might exist long.
She arose at length and opened the door to her sis'south importunities. There was a feverish triumph in her optics, and she carried herself unwittingly like a goddess of Victory. She clasped her sister's waist, and together they descended the stairs. Richards stood waiting for them at the bottom.
Some one was opening the front door with a latchkey. It was Brently Mallard who entered, a petty travel-stained, composedly conveying his grip-sack and umbrella. He had been far from the scene of the accident, and did non even know there had been one. He stood amazed at Josephine's piercing cry; at Richards' quick move to screen him from the view of his wife.
When the doctors came they said she had died of middle disease--of the joy that kills.
Reading response:
Pick out at least five phrases which you think are especially important to the story (what yous might mark on a printed text.) Briefly describe why yous chose each.
What questions about grapheme or motivation or plot does this story go out in your mind?
Now become to the study text
Source: https://archive.vcu.edu/english/engweb/webtexts/hour/
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