Cynthia Ozick's short story "The Shawl" connects the moods of the tale to particular natural settings and to particular types of days. Can you...

Cynthia Ozick’s short story “The Shawl” connects the tones
and moods of the story to particular types of days and particular types of natural
settings. Another story that uses similar techniques – although with entirely different
effects – is “The Story of an Hour,” by Kate
Chopin.

Ozick’s story describes a Jewish mother, eventually
imprisoned in a concentration camp after being forced to march there with her children,
who is desperate to save the lives of her infant daughter (Magda) and also of her
teenaged daughter (Stella). The settings in Ozick’s story are bleak and depressing,
except for a very brief passage in which she imagines how beautiful the landscape must
be beyond the confines of the camp. The mother in Ozick’s story is literally imprisoned
in horrific circumstances, and at the end of the tale she watches as her youngest
daughter is brutally killed.

Kate Chopin’s story also deals
with a woman who feels imprisoned, but the imprisonment in Chopin’s story is only
metaphorical. Louise Mallard feels imprisoned by her conventional lifestyle in general
and, in particular, by her conventional marriage. When she learns at the beginning of
the story that her husband has apparently died in a railway accident, she is at first
devastated but then, upon reflection, begins to feel freed by his
death.

Chopin emphasizes this sense of freedom by having
Louise sit in a roomy armchair and look out an upstairs
window:

She
could see in the open square before her house the tops of trees 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 sky showing here and
there through the clouds that had met and piled one above the other in the west facing
her window.

Here the imagery
is associated with vitality, springtime, sensual pleasure, appealing music, and “patches
of blue sky” that seem to symbolize the promise of Louise’s life now that she is no
longer married. Louise looks forward to “Spring days, and summer days, and all sorts of
days that would be her own.”

Of course, the meanings and
effects of the two stories are entirely different. Chopin’s tale is often read as a
celebration of liberation (a celebration ironically cut short when Louise herself dies
at the very end of the story). Ozick’s tale is an implied lament for a situation that
seems grim and hopeless. Nevertheless, both stories use imagery of times of day and
especially of landscape to help emphasize their very different tones, atmospheres, and
meanings.