Kate Chopin's short story “The Story of an Hour” shows us in many ways that life without freedom is not life at all. In the story, a 19th century woman named Mrs. Mallard discovers that her husband has died. She suffers from a heart condition so Josephine, Mrs. Mallard's sister, tries to tell her the bad news as calmly as possible. After hearing the news, Mrs. Mallard's unpredictable reaction shocks us, the readers as well as the characters in the story. Instead of feeling the sorrow of her husband's death, she also feels the joy of being free from him. Freedom is something that we, as humans, take for granted, and this story shows the importance of it through the eyes of Mrs. Mallard. What is freedom? Is it being able to say what you want when you want? Is it the ability to worship any god and bear arms? Right now, maybe that’s how we define freedom. But in the late 1800s, things were different. During this time, a woman's job was to obey her husband, cook for her family, clean the house, and take care of her children. The women didn't know what freedom was or what it felt like because they had never experienced it before. This is why Mrs. Mallard doesn't know what to feel when she learns of her husband's death. This point is further proven when Chopin writes: “She immediately wept, with sudden and wild abandon, in her sister's arms. Once the storm of grief passed, she went to her room alone. She wouldn’t want anyone to follow her” (Chopin 443). This quote eloquently describes Mrs. Mallard's reaction to her husband's death that most of us would expect. She cries without holding anything back and cannot fully understand what has just been said to her. However, she quickly pulls herself together and enters middle of paper... away from her husband, but her emotions throughout the story show that she is happy to have her freedom given to her. Mrs. Mallard was just beginning to realize her new life was beginning and she exclaimed that she was finally free from her husband. We've never been put in the situation she's in, so it's harder to understand the importance of freedom. We take our freedom today for granted when we should cherish every moment we spend with it. Things in life come and go, but the only constant in our lives is our freedom. Until this freedom is taken away from us like Mrs. Mallard did, we will never know its true value and cherish it as we should. Works Cited 1) Chopin, Kate. “The story of an hour.” Literature, a world of writing: stories, poems, plays and essays. Ed. David L. Pike and Ana M. Acosta. Boston: Longman, 2011. 442-443. Print.