Week 5 Assignment
Intro to Literature

January 23, 2011

So how does anyone try to tell a story of death or how can death be represented in a way that isn’t morbid or a way that a ready can understand what the writer is trying to portray? I thought that I knew what certain messages in the story or poem that I was reading meant, but only into doing further research on the author and the reason why they chose to write their particular story or poem did I realize that what I thought was wrong. I chose to tell you my opinions about a few different stories. “The Story of an Hour.” When I read this story and actually had to read it three times to make sure I had understood what the writer was trying to say about this woman named Mrs. Mallard. What intrigued me the most was the beginning of this story where the sister and the friend had tried to find a way to say gentle words to tell her that her husband had died. At first I thought as I read on that this was a weak woman cause of the description of her having a weak heart and after being told her husband was killed she “She wept at once, with sudden, wild abandonment, in her sister's arms. When the storm of grief had spent itself she went away to her room alone.
She would have no one follow.” In my mind this was a woman who had stayed with her
Husband through all their trials because of society and how society would of looked at her as a divorced woman. In my mind she was a woman who was “stuck” in a marriage she did not want to be in and her crying of a loss was not actually from the loss at all it was because she was happy to not have him come home. This to me was expressed when she whispered to herself
“Free! Body and soul free!" (Chopin, Kate) While in the story the title comes out as all of this happens in the hour. At the end of the hour
“Someone was opening the front door with a latchkey. It was Brently Mallard who entered, a little travel–stained, composedly carrying his grip–sack and umbrella. He had been far from the scene of accident, and did not even know that there had been one. He stood amazed at Josephine's piercing cry; at Richards' quick motion to screen himself from the view of his wife.
But Richards was too late. When the doctors came they said she had died of heart disease—of joy that kills.” (Chopin, Kate) I think that Mrs. Mallard didn’t die because of her “joy” of her husband returning but because of the sorrow of her husband returning and didn’t want to continue life as she had married to a person she had not been happy with for many years. So this with her disease she let herself die at that moment and let them assume it was the love and shock of the return of her husband that stopped her heart. In the short story Updike’s "Dog’s Death”, I think he was telling the story of his dog and the emotional bond one has for his dog. How she dies at a young age and they didn’t know the reason that led up to her death until the end. "She must have been kicked unseen or brushed by a car.” This I think is at the end when they found out why she was dying they assumed it must have been one of the reasons why.
“Too young to know much, she was beginning to learn to use the newspapers spread on the kitchen Floor” “Because of her injuries they assumed her “mistakes” were due to being a puppy.
And to win, wetting there, the words, "Good dog! Good dog!"
We thought her shy malaise was a shot reaction.
The autopsy disclosed a rupture in her liver.
As we teased her with play, blood was filling her skin
And her heart was learning to lie down forever."
Unknowingly while playing with their dog as any owners would do with a new dog, silently they were helping aid to her demise.
“Monday morning, as the children were noisily fed
And sent to school, she crawled beneath the youngest's bed.
We found her twisted and limp but still alive.
In the car to the vet's, on my lap, she tried
To bite my hand and