No doubt it is a big grief for a loving spouse to lose his or her loved one. And if someone told me a story about a woman who bewailed her deceased husband and then died of overwhelming happiness after she saw him safe and sound, I would definitely believe in reliability of this story. Especially, if I was told that the women had heart problems. It is known that not only a sorrow but and an excessive joy can cause a fatal heart attack. However, after reading Kate Chopin’s The Story of an Hour, I felt puzzled about doctors’ conclusion that Mrs. Mallard died “of joy that kills.” So, was it really an overwhelming joy that Louise’s heart couldn’t bear?
In her fictional tale Chopin describes the experience of Louise Mallard, a young woman …show more content…

Though Mrs. Mallard came across a couple of moments indicated that she loved her husband and he was a kind man, but her love paled in comparison to “a monstrous joy” of her newfound freedom: “What could love, the unsolved mystery, count for in the face of this possession of self-assertion which she suddenly recognized as the strongest impulse of her being!”
Final details that strengthened my sense of the happy state of Louise’s soul were at the moment when she opened the door to her sister. Chopin writes that “there was a feverish triumph in her eyes, and she carried herself unwittingly like a goddess of Victory.” It seed to me clear that Louise felt as if the struggle of her life was over and she had won.
After all of the Chopin’s eloquent descriptions it was so easy to conceive what feelings and thoughts rushed past joyful Louise at the moment when she saw her husband entering the front door safe and sound. All of her hopes and dreams about her happy future destroyed due to the fact she would be still a wife. Just as Josephine was wrong about what Louise was going through in her bedroom, the doctors were wrong by concluding that Mrs. Mallard died of “a joy that kills.” It was actual joy that Louise felt when she realized her husband was dead, and pain so great that killed her when Louise saw him walking through the