Compareison of the Storm to the Story of an Hour

1825 Words8 Pages
Comparison Contrast Essay Kate Chopin was a female American author who lived in the late 1800’s to early 1900’s and used her stories to support women’s independence and sexuality. Kate Chopin herself grew up in a house of unconventional, intelligent women. “Her great-grandmother, Victoria Verdun Charleville over saw her education and taught her French, music and the gossip on St. Louis women of the past. Victoria’s own mother had been the first woman in St. Louis to obtain a legal separation from her husband, after which she raised her five children and ran a shipping business on the Mississippi” (Neal 1). Kate’s mother was a “woman of great beauty, intelligence and personal magnetism” (Skaggs 1). The deaths of her father, grandfather and great-grandfather did not give her to opportunity to experience women being dominated by men and perhaps this shaped her future writing. Kate Chopin published more than 100 short stories set in Louisiana and focused on the lives of intelligent women whose thoughts and actions were unconventional for the time. Her characters were vibrant and intelligent and were trying to “satisfy three basic but often conflicting human drives that Chopin believes go together to make up a person’s identity-the drive for a feeling of belonging, for love and for a sense of individual sovereignty” (Skaggs 1). Two such stories are “The Story of an Hour” and “The Storm.” Both stories take place in a time when women were still considered the legal property of their husbands. The “Story of an Hour” likens marriage to a clash of wills with one dominating the other. “The Storm” likens marriage to an acceptance of the roles of the women of the time. Both stories contain many similarities as well as differences. Both stories take place when the husbands are away from home, one on a trip and one at Friedheimer’s Store. Louise Mallard in “The
Open Document