Hello nibiko:
Thanks for the interesting question.
The famous Short Story "The Story of an Hour", which was written by
Kate Chopin in 1894, can be found online at:
Kate Chopin: The Story of an Hour (1894)
http://www.wsu.edu:8080/~wldciv/world_civ_reader/world_civ_reader_2/chopin.html
This extremely brief story is packed full of surprises, including
three pivotal ones near the end.
The biggest surprise of all, the one that most of the first half of
the story builds up to, is that Mrs. Mallard is actually overjoyed
that her husband Brently has been killed in a railroad accident.
Everyone else - her sister Josephine and her husband's friend Richards
- believes her to be overcome with grief. Instead she is so happy that
she "carried herself unwittingly like a goddess of Victory." Finally
she will be able to have a life of her own with "no powerful will
bending hers in...blind persistence." Perhaps, like the other
characters in the story Mrs. Mallard will actually come to once again
have a name all her own. The author does not reveal this surprising
twist until after she gives several hints that the opposite is true -
that Mrs. Mallard is deeply grieving the loss of her husband. Phrases
such as "pressed down by a physical exhaustion that haunted her body
and seemed to reach into her soul" and "a sob came up into her throat
and shook her, as a child who has cried itself to sleep continues to
sob in its dreams" certainly give this false impression.
The second major surprise at the end of this book is more transparent
- the "resurrection" of Brently Mallard. In fact "he had been far from
the scene of accident". This is very shocking and unexpected since it
is established in the very first sentence of the story that he is
dead. In fact, the entire premise of the story rests on that fact.
When he arrives home, quite alive, it throws the already twisting plot
into chaos.
The last surprise in this story is perhaps the "cutest" one - the
doctor's mistaken diagnosis that Mrs. Ballard "had died of heart
disease--of joy that kills." The fact that Mrs. Ballard had a heart
condition is also established in the first sentence and reinforced
with Josephine's concern that Mrs. Ballard is "making herself ill" in
her "grief". As well, Richards tries to screen Mrs. Ballard from
seeing her husband when he arrives home because he's afraid the shock
of seeing him alive will harm her. The surprise here is not that she
dies from heart failure, but from the fact that it from "grief" at
seeing her husband alive - the very same type of grief everyone
mistakenly believed she was feeling when she learned of his death.
All in all, these three plot twists make for an incredibly surprising
story.
More discussion on this story can be found online at:
"The Story of an Hour": Student Responses, 1996
http://www.vcu.edu/engweb/webtexts/hour/hourdis.html
Shocking Short Stories
http://cs.alfred.edu/~maurojc/papers/english/shocking.html
I hope that this information has been of help to you.
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Thank you.
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