Sunday, February 2, 2014

What are the internal and external conflicts in "The Story of an Hour" by Kate Chopin?

There is one primary external conflict in the story and
one internal conflict, but quite cleverly, each manifests itself in two opposite ways.
The external conflict is between husband and wife, while the internal conflict is one of
freedom versus the imprisonment of the marriage.  In fact, it would not be unreasonable
to say that the external and internal conflict are the
same.


As the story begins, the wife, Mrs. Mallard, hears of
the supposed death of her husband, which the reader is led to believe might be the
conflict in the story because the wife suffers from a heart condition, and the news
might kill her.  But as the story proceeds, we see the wife as a bird in a gilded cage,
someone for whom the husband's death would provide freedom from what we begin to see as
conflict between husband and wife.  The wife, we begin to understand, has been trapped
in a marriage in which her husband dominated her, which has created a conflict within
her, wanting freedom and being caught in the marriage, simultaneously internal and
external conflict.


But as the story ends, we learn that Mr.
Mallard is alive, and this is the external conflict that kills Mrs. Mallard, who saw,
for a brief moment, a vision of a solution to her internal conflict, the freedom that
Mr. Mallard's death would have brought her.  It is the cessation of that dream that is
responsible for her death, a conflict between the hopefulness and the sudden 
restoration of hopelessness.

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