In "The story of an Hour", a short story by Kate Chopin, Louise Mallard is faced with the abrupt death of her husband. Mallard is then torn between her feelings of brief remorse and longing relief. Although Louise Mallard's reactions of relief and freedom after her husband's death make her seem like an unnatural, monstrous woman, she is not.
             Some may argue that because of Louise Mallard's uncontrolled whispers of "'Free, free, free!'" (445), she is an unnatural, monstrous woman, but she is the contrary. Even though she is not overwhelmed with grief at her loss, she still shows remorse. Chopin foreshadows this remorse by telling of Mallard's subconscious feelings, "She knew that she would weep again when she saw the kind, tender hands folded in death; the face that had never looked save with love upon her, fixed and gray and dead" (445). This shows Mallard's natural, feminine emotional traits of sensitivity and love. Louise Mallard was very much a natural, caring woman who at one time did love her husband. She had her moments of grief-stricken rage and then her moments of newfound freedom, but those moments do not make her an unnatural, monstrous woman; they make her an emotionally unstable woman that is in utter shock at the abrupt death of her husband.
             Louise Mallard, after hearing of her husband's death, is conflicted with a sudden array of emotions, as would any wife at the abrupt death of a husband. Because some of her emotions consist of feelings of relief and freedom does not make her incapable of being human. Mallard shows her humanity by "striving to beat it [feelings of relief] back with her will" (445). She knows that her husband was always kind and gentle to her, but over the years she had became in dire need of her lost self-assertion, "which she suddenly recognized as the strongest impulse of her being" (445). Mallard is not relieved that her husband is dead but at the thought of her newfound freedom. Wit...