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Summary COMPARE AND CONTRAST THE TWO WOMEN CHARACTERS AND THEIR CONCERNS AS SEEN IN THE SHORT STORIES, ‘THE STORY OF AN HOUR’ (KATE CHOPIN) AND ‘THE SINGING LESSON’ (KATHERINE MANSFIELD)$6.59
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Summary COMPARE AND CONTRAST THE TWO WOMEN CHARACTERS AND THEIR CONCERNS AS SEEN IN THE SHORT STORIES, ‘THE STORY OF AN HOUR’ (KATE CHOPIN) AND ‘THE SINGING LESSON’ (KATHERINE MANSFIELD)
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Course
English
Institution
"The Sory of An Hour" and "The Singing Lesson" have two women battling with dreams, appearance, and societal expectations. Mrs. Mallard from "Story of an Hour" by Kate Chopin envisions life without being burdened by the expectations that come with being someone's wife while Ms Meadows from "The Sin...
COMPARE AND CONTRAST THE TWO WOMEN CHARACTERS AND THEIR
CONCERNS AS SEEN IN THE SHORT STORIES, ‘THE STORY OF AN HOUR’
(KATE CHOPIN) AND ‘THE SINGING LESSON’ (KATHERINE MANSFIELD)
Our world has gone through waxing and waning for centuries, each century a new leaf
turned in amendment. One very specific change that grew over time taking baby steps of
courage and stumbling against taboos was women’s rights. A much avoided topic even now
at the twenty first century. Literary works by Maya Angelou, Simone de Beauvoir, Margaret
Atwood and other strong authors all shed light on the resistance of suppression by women
and the eventual failure when masks are worn to camouflage to the ways of the society. Not
their will but ‘their’ will. In the Victorian patriarchal society a woman was expected to live
under the canopy of a husband whose duty is to keep her in check and make significant
decisions on her behalf - what is portrayed in the stories ‘The Story of an Hour’ and ‘The
Singing Lesson’ is the lives of two Victorian women, one who chooses independence over
marriage and another who is willing to enter into a loveless wedlock to keep up
appearances.
Mrs Mallard (The Story of an Hour) is a woman tired of watching her husband travel places
while she awaits his return back home. In her times when working women were looked
down on Louis yearns to be set free so that she could live the way her heart desires. When
news of her husband’s death in a rail road accident reaches this pale young woman she does
feel the loss like any loving wife but the deeper darker corner of her consciousness also
whispers the hidden promise of freedom. She is excited at the prospect of getting to spend
the rest of her life bowing to no one’s command; she believes it is life reborn to dance to
her tunes and sing to her chores. This character is a sharp contrast to the protagonist of ‘The
Singing Lesson’, Ms Meadows. While Mrs Mallard is a Strelitzia, Ms Meadows is a
Chrysanthemum. Ignorance gifted to her from the world she gives it back with pinched
sentences and grimaces. When a letter from her fiancé, Basil, conveying the message that
their marriage was broken off reaches Ms Meadows she thinks of it as a knife stabbed to her
chest; the most painful stab. She is terrified of the news breaking out and the judgement
that would follow from the Science Mistress, her students and the entire school where she
works as a singing teacher. Ms Meadows is a victim of society’s prejudice to older unmarried
women but she does not see it that way but rather as pathetic fallacy; the world
sympathising to her wounds.
Mrs Mallard is almost afraid of the enlightenment that poked at her mind’s fringes while she
sat in the “comfortable, roomy armchair” in her room processing the events that occurred
in such a short span of time. Facing the window, the sight of the natural world through the
“open square” and the noises of the outside thrilled the woman with the possibilities of
tomorrow. No more did she have to give up her wishes to please her man. On the other
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