Jennifer Hicks is director of the Academic Support and Writing Assessment program at Massachusetts Bay Community College. In the following essay, she discusses the theme of female self-assertion as it relates to "The Story of an Hour,"

In Donald F. Larsson's entry on Kate Chopin in Critical Survey of Short Fiction, we learn that "consistently ... strong-willed, independent heroines ... [who] cast a skeptical eye on the institution of marriage" are very characteristic of her stories. In "The Story of an Hour," we do not so much see as intuit Mrs. Mallard's skeptical eye. Certainly, we are told of the joy she feels with the freedom she finds in her husband's death, but we are not specifically told that she is skeptical of marriage in general. Indeed, if we take the last line of the story literally, we would understand that Mrs. Mallard was so enamored of her marriage...