One of my favorite short stories is Kate Chopin’s “The Story of an Hour”, which is probably one of the most tightly plotted narratives of all time. Barely two pages long, this story incorporates all three acts, plus the pivot points, midpoint, climax, and denouement. It doesn’t miss a single beat and it does all that in a mere two pages.
For the last few months, we’ve been doing three-act analyses of various books and films. Today I thought I’d do an analysis of this fantastic short story. If you’re not familiar with the three-act structure (or want a refresher on how it works), check out this article.
Spoiler Alert! Thankfully, this time around I don’t have to warn you of spoilers because the story is so short that before you read this email you can click the link at the top and read it for yourself. There is a fabulous surprise twist at the climax of the story, so if you don’t want the analysis to ruin the ending for you, read the story first.
Alright, let’s dive into our analysis of “The Story of an Hour.”
ACT 1: The first act of this story is no more than two and a half paragraphs long. It begins with a line that hooks the readers and draws us in. “Knowing that Mrs. Mallard was afflicted with a heart trouble, great care was taken to break to her as gently as possible the news of her husband’s death.” This opening line is essential to the story, as it makes the stakes very clear.
As with most stories, “The Story of an Hour” makes five promises to the reader. These promises are: character, voice, world, problem, and event. Let’s look closer.
CHARACTER: Mrs. Mallard is the main character. Notice how she doesn’t have a first name, at least not at the opening. Her entire identity is wrapped up in being her husband’s wife and she has no identity of her own. As the story progresses, we eventually learn her first name is Louise, but at the end of the story, she goes back to being “his wife.”
VOICE: The voice here is typical of stories written at this time. It’s a third person narrator, who starts off feeling rather distant and omniscient in Act 1, but the author plays with narrative distance and eventually moves closer to Mrs. Mallard’s point of view in Act 2. That closer perspective continues until we get to Act 3, where we shift back into a more distant, omniscient narrator.
WORLD: The world of this story is not very expansive. We are in Mrs. Mallard’s house and the story begins with us downstairs in a parlor or some other such room. In Act 2, Mrs. Mallard retreats upstairs to her room where she sits and contemplates. We come back downstairs in Act 3 where the climax occurs just as she has descended the stairs.
PROBLEM: This is the substance of the opening sentence. Mrs. Mallard has a heart condition, making her fragile. This means that great care must be taken to break the news of her husband’s death.
EVENT: The event that kicks off the story is that Mrs. Mallard’s husband has died in a train crash.
PIVOT POINT 1: After receiving the news from her sister (Josephine) and a family friend (Richards), Mrs. Mallard retreats upstairs to her room and she “would have no one follow her.” As with all pivot points, this one has both an external and internal component. The external factor is the breaking of the news; Josephine and Richards tell Mrs. Mallard that her husband has died.
The internal choice is how she reacts to the news. At first, she “wept at once, with sudden, wild abandonment.” The narrator makes a point of saying that she does not receive the news as many other women would “with a paralyzed inability to accept its significance.” She gives in to grief right away. Then, once she has composed herself, she chooses to go to her room alone.
ACT 2: Most of Act 2 is Louise Mallard sitting alone in her room. Now I don’t know about you, but writing a character alone in a room is just about the most challenging thing there is. There’s no one else in the scene for the character to interact with, and they are confined to a small space so there is little room for exploring the story’s world. Yet, the bulk of Act 2—and of this entire story, in fact—is Louise Mallard alone in her room, contemplating her future.
This second act starts with some ambiance. The window in her room is open, with an armchair in front of it. She sits down and looks out the window. Even though it’s a quiet moment, there is a fair amount of activity. There is a feeling of anticipation, like something big is brewing.
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.
As she sits alone in her room, a thought begins to materialize. She realizes that without her husband, she will have a greater degree of freedom. Even though she at first tries to fight this notion “striving to beat it back with her will,” when she finally lets go of her self-restraint she says again and again “free, free, free!” She looks ahead to her future and sees “a long procession of years to come that would belong to her absolutely.”
The narrator makes it clear that it’s not as though Louise Mallard dislikes her husband. She would likely cry again at his funeral and she had even loved him at times in the past. But what matters to her in this moment is the realization of her future freedom. As the narrator says: “There would be no one to live for during those coming years; she would live for herself.”
MIDPOINT: Interestingly enough, we can look at this story as one giant midpoint. The majority of the narrative takes place during Act 2, where Louise Mallard is up in her room. And the bulk of that second act is taken up with her coming to grips with her future freedom. The midpoint begins with the section:
There was something coming to her and she was waiting for it fearfully. What was it? She did not know; it was too subtle and elusive to name. But she felt it creeping out of the sky, reaching toward her through the sounds, the scents, the color that filled the air.
Later, when she says the words “free, free, free!” under her breath, the midpoint realization comes into focus. Remember, the midpoint is a moment of self-reflection, a place in the story where the character examines their own life and asks themselves do I like what I see? Eventually, she recognizes that her husband’s death means her freedom. The pinnacle of that realization is when she whispers: “Free! Body and soul free!”
The end of Act 2 is rather interesting because we get the only piece of true dialogue in the entire story. Louise’s sister, Josephine, comes to her door and begs to be let in. There’s a nice rule of three where she says “open the door” three times. The first time she simply says “Louise, open the door!” The second time is a little more forceful, where she brings up Louise’s health: “I beg, open the door—you will make yourself ill.” Finally, the third iteration is the most forceful of all: “What are you doing, Louise? For heaven’s sake open the door.”
Of course, to all of this, Louise tells her to go away, saying she is not making herself ill. In fact, as the narrator says “she was drinking the very elixir of life.” Louise looks ahead at her life, at all the days in front of her that would be her own and the midpoint culminates with: “She breathed a quick prayer that life might be long. It was only yesterday she thought with a shudder that life might be long.” In other words, now that she has her freedom before her, she wants to enjoy it for as long as possible, whereas before, when her husband was alive, she shuddered at the idea of a long life.
PIVOT POINT 2: The second pivot point is a mirror image of the first. In the first pivot point, Louise Mallard walks up the stairs to her room, now in the second pivot point, she opens the door and, together with her sister, walks back down the stairs. As she descends the staircase, she carries “herself unwittingly like a goddess of Victory.” In other words, she is a very changed woman from the one who ascended the staircase at the first pivot point.
ACT 3: At this stage of the story, the point of view telescopes back out to a more omniscient, distant perspective. In Act 2, we are deeply entrenched in Louise Mallard’s thoughts, but now we are back with a more bird’s-eye-view perspective of the scene. There’s someone at the door. We find out it’s Brently Mallard, Louise’s husband, and that he had been nowhere near the scene of the train crash when it happened. Josephine screams. Richards tries to intercept Brently and Louise. All of this action happens in a single paragraph.
A note about Richards: Aside from Louise, I find Richards to be the most fascinating character in this story. In Act 1, he takes it upon himself to be the one to deliver the news, and “had hastened to forestall any less careful, less tender friend in bearing the sad message.” He seems to take a certain level of pride in his relationship to the family, and I can’t help but wonder at his motives. Is he really just a friend, or does he want to be something more now that Brently Mallard is out of the picture?
Interestingly enough, at the end of Act 3, when Brently Mallard arrives back at home, what does Richards do? He steps between Louise and Brently, trying to “screen him from the view of his wife.” Notice how that’s phrased. Is he trying to screen Brently from seeing Louise or the other way around? It’s deliberately ambiguous. The only thing that’s not ambiguous is Richards’ choice to step between them. If his motivations were open to interpretation before, they now seem a bit more clear. He tries to appear as a dutiful friend, but there’s more to his true motivations than first meets the eye.
CLIMAX: The climax of the story is fascinating because it’s the only beat that doesn’t happen on the page. Every other moment (the pivot points, midpoint, denouement) all happen within the compressed scope of the story. The climax, on the other hand, is merely implied.
At this crucial point, Louise Mallard dies. We don’t actually see her die on the page, but we know it has happened because of the final sentence: “When the doctors came they said she had died of heart disease—of the joy that kills.”
The fact that Louise Mallard’s death happens off the page creates all sorts of ambiguities. Does she die from the “joy that kills” when she learned that her husband is still alive? Does she die from a sudden pang of grief at losing her freedom? Does she throw herself down the stairs in a moment of sheer desperation? We don’t know. We can infer—based on everything that has passed in Act 2—that the most likely cause of her death is her lost freedom, but we can’t be absolutely certain.
DENOUEMENT: The denouement, of course, is that final sentence when the doctors arrive on the scene. We don’t need much beyond that sentence because the story ends when Louise dies. After everything the reader has seen of Louise in Act 2, we don’t really need to know how the other characters carry on without her. All we need to know is that she is dead. That is all that matters.
Notice, also, how that closing sentence pulls back into a truly omniscient point of view, almost as though the narrator is telling us all of this after the fact, after the action has already happened. This final sentence, by necessity, has to be distant and omniscient. This is because with our primary, focal character dead, there is no other way for the point of view to work. It would be too jarring to jump suddenly into Brently’s head (or Richards’ or Josephine’s for that matter). The only option is to pull back into an omniscient point of view.
CONCLUSION: If you take only one thing away from this analysis, it’s that in only two pages, this story covers all components of the three-act structure. Sometimes, writers complain that they need more room to tell their story in full. And yet, this short piece manages to do it all in a compressed space. (In fact, the irony is not lost on me that this analysis is longer than the story itself.) So, when you struggle with word count and you need to keep your story tight, just think of “The Story of an Hour” and channel your inner Kate Chopin. If she could tell a full story in just two pages, you can do it, too.
Until next time, keep writing and keep being awesome!
P.S. For more info on Gabriela Pereira, the founder and instigator of DIY MFA, check out her profile page.
