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Analysis of Kate Chopin’s The Story of an Hour

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on July 28, 2021

Originally entitled “The Dream of an Hour” when it was first published in Vogue (December 1894), “The Story of an Hour” has since become one of Kate Chopin’s most frequently anthologized stories. Among her shortest and most daring works, “Story” examines issues of feminism, namely, a woman’s dissatisfaction in a conventional marriage and her desire for independence. It also features Chopin’s characteristic irony and ambiguity .

The story begins with Louise Mallard’s being told about her husband’s presumed death in a train accident. Louise initially weeps with wild abandon, then retires alone to her upstairs bedroom. As she sits facing the open window, observing the new spring life outside, she realizes with a “clear and exalted perception” that she is now free of her husband’s “powerful will bending hers” (353). She becomes delirious with the prospect that she can now live for herself and prays that her life may be long. Her newfound independence is short-lived, however. In a surprise ending, her husband walks through the front door, and Louise suffers a heart attack and dies. Her death may be considered a tragic defeat or a pyrrhic victory for a woman who would rather die than lose that “possession of self-assertion which she suddenly recognized as the strongest impulse of her being” (353). The doctors ironically attribute her death to the “joy that kills” (354).

BIBLIOGRAPHY Chopin, Kate. The Complete Works of Kate Chopin. Edited by Per Seyersted. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1969. Koloski, Bernard. Kate Chopin: A Study of the Short Fiction. New York: Twayne, 1996. Seyersted, Per. Kate Chopin: A Critical Biography. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1969. Toth, Emily. Kate Chopin. New York: Morrow, 1990

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Imagine a world where women are fighting for unprecedented rights, the economic climate is unpredictable, and new developments in technology are made every year. While this world might sound like the present day, it also describes America in the 1890s . 

It was in this world that author Kate Chopin wrote and lived, and many of the issues of the period are reflected in her short story, “The Story of an Hour.” Now, over a century later, the story remains one of Kate Chopin’s most well-known works and continues to shed light on the internal struggle of women who have been denied autonomy.

In this guide to Kate Chopin’s “The Story of an Hour,” we’ll discuss:

  • A brief history of Kate Chopin and America the 1890s
  • “The Story of an Hour” summary
  • Analysis of the key story elements in “The Story of an Hour,” including themes, characters, and symbols

By the end of this article, you’ll have an expert grasp on Kate Chopin’s “The Story of an Hour.” So let’s get started!

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“The Story of an Hour” Summary

If it’s been a little while since you’ve read Kate Chopin’s “The Story of an Hour,” it can be hard to remember the important details. This section includes a quick recap, but you can find “The Story of an Hour” PDF and full version here . We recommend you read it again before diving into our analyses in the next section! 

For those who just need a refresher, here’s “The Story of an Hour” summary: 

Mrs. Louise Mallard is at home when her sister, Josephine, and her husband’s friend, Richards, come to tell her that her husband, Brently Mallard, has been killed in a railroad accident . Richards had been at the newspaper office when the news broke, and he takes Josephine with him to break the news to Louise since they’re afraid of aggravating her heart condition. Upon hearing the news of her husband’s death, Louise is grief-stricken, locks herself in her room, and weeps.

From here, the story shifts in tone. As Louise processes the news of her husband’s death, she realizes something wonderful and terrible at the same time: she is free . At first she’s scared to admit it, but Louise quickly finds peace and joy in her admission. She realizes that, although she will be sad about her husband (“she had loved him—sometimes,” Chopin writes), Louise is excited for the opportunity to live for herself. She keeps repeating the word “free” as she comes to terms with what her husband’s death means for her life. 

In the meantime, Josephine sits at Louise’s door, coaxing her to come out because she is worried about Louise’s heart condition. After praying that her life is long-lived, Louise agrees to come out. However, as she comes downstairs, the front door opens to reveal her husband, who had not been killed by the accident at all. Although Richards tries to keep Louise’s heart from shock by shielding her husband from view, Louise dies suddenly, which the doctors later attribute to “heart disease—of the joy that kills .”

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Kate Chopin, the author of "The Story of an Hour," has become one of the most important American writers of the 19th century. 

The History of Kate Chopin and the 1890s

Before we move into “The Story of an Hour” analysis section, it’s helpful to know a little bit about Kate Chopin and the world she lived in. 

A Short Biography of Kate Chopin

Born in 1850 to wealthy Catholic parents in St. Louis, Missouri, Kate Chopin (originally Kate O’Flaherty) knew hardship from an early age. In 1855, Chopin lost her father, Thomas, when he passed away in a tragic and unexpected railroad accident. The events of this loss would stay with Kate for the rest of her life, eventually becoming the basis for “The Story of an Hour” nearly forty years later.

Chopin was well-educated throughout her childhood , reading voraciously and becoming fluent in French. Chopin was also very aware of the divide between the powerful and the oppressed in society at the time . She grew up during the U.S. Civil War, so she had first-hand knowledge of violence and slavery in the United States. 

Chopin was also exposed to non-traditional roles for women through her familial situation. Her mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother chose to remain widows (rather than remarry) after their husbands died. Consequently, Chopin learned how important women’s independence could be, and that idea would permeate much of her writing later on. 

As Chopin grew older, she became known for her beauty and congeniality by society in St. Louis. She was married at the age of nineteen to Oscar Chopin, who came from a wealthy cotton-growing family. The couple moved to New Orleans, where they would start both a general store and a large family. (Chopin would give birth to seven children over the next nine years!) 

While Oscar adored his wife, he was less capable of running a business. Financial trouble forced the family to move around rural Louisiana. Unfortunately, Oscar would die of swamp fever in 1882 , leaving Chopin in heavy debt and with the responsibility of managing the family’s struggling businesses. 

After trying her hand at managing the property for a year, Chopin conceded to her mother’s requests to return with her children to St. Louis. Chopin’s mother died the year after. In order to support herself and her children, Kate began to write to support her family. 

Luckily, Chopin found immediate success as a writer. Many of her short stories and novels—including her most famous novel, The Awakening— dealt with life in Louisiana . She was also known as a fast and prolific writer, and by the end of the 1900s she had written over 100 stories, articles, and essays. 

Unfortunately, Chopin would pass away from a suspected cerebral hemorrhage in 1904, at the age of 54 . But Kate Chopin’s “The Story of an Hour” and other writings have withstood the test of time. Her work has lived on, and she’s now recognized as one of the most important American writers of the 19th century. 

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American life was undergoing significant change in the 19th century. Technology, culture, and even leisure activities were changing. 

American Life in the 1890s

“The Story of an Hour” was written and published in 1894, right as the 1800s were coming to a close. As the world moved into the new century, American life was also changing rapidly. 

For instance, t he workplace was changing drastically in the 1890s . Gone were the days where most people were expected to work at a trade or on a farm. Factory jobs brought on by industrialization made work more efficient, and many of these factory owners gradually implemented more humane treatment of their workers, giving them more leisure time than ever.

Though the country was in an economic recession at this time, technological changes like electric lighting and the popularization of radios bettered the daily lives of many people and allowed for the creation of new jobs. Notably, however, work was different for women . Working women as a whole were looked down upon by society, no matter why they found themselves in need of a job. 

Women who worked while they were married or pregnant were judged even more harshly. Women of Kate Chopin’s social rank were expected to not work at all , sometimes even delegating the responsibility of managing the house or child-rearing to maids or nannies. In the 1890s, working was only for lower class women who could not afford a life of leisure .

In reaction to this, the National American Woman Suffrage Association was created in 1890, which fought for women’s social and political rights. While Kate Chopin was not a formal member of the suffragette movements, she did believe that women should have greater freedoms as individuals and often talked about these ideas in her works, including in “The Story of an Hour.” 

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Kate Chopin's "The Story of an Hour" a short exploration of marriage and repression in America.

“The Story of an Hour” Analysis

Now that you have some important background information, it’s time to start analyzing “The Story of an Hour.”

This short story is filled with opposing forces . The themes, characters, and even symbols in the story are often equal, but opposite, of one another. Within “The Story of an Hour,” analysis of all of these elements reveals a deeper meaning.

“The Story of an Hour” Themes

A theme is a message explored in a piece of literature. Most stories have multiple themes, which is certainly the case in “The Story of an Hour.” Even though Chopin’s story is short, it discusses the thematic ideas of freedom, repression, and marriage. 

Keep reading for a discussion of the importance of each theme! 

Freedom and Repression

The most prevalent theme in Chopin’s story is the battle between freedom and “repression.” Simply put , repression happens when a person’s thoughts, feelings, or desires are being subdued. Repression can happen internally and externally. For example, if a person goes through a traumatic accident, they may (consciously or subconsciously) choose to repress the memory of the accident itself. Likewise, if a person has wants or needs that society finds unacceptable, society can work to repress that individual. Women in the 19th century were often victims of repression. They were supposed to be demure, gentle, and passive—which often went against women’s personal desires. 

Given this, it becomes apparent that Louise Mallard is the victim of social repression. Until the moment of her husband’s supposed death, Louise does not feel free . In their marriage, Louise is repressed. Readers see this in the fact that Brently is moving around in the outside world, while Louise is confined to her home. Brently uses railroad transportation on his own, walks into his house of his own accord, and has individual possessions in the form of his briefcase and umbrella. Brently is even free from the knowledge of the train wreck upon his return home. Louise, on the other hand, is stuck at home by virtue of her position as a woman and her heart condition. 

Here, Chopin draws a strong contrast between what it means to be free for men and women. While freedom is just part of what it means to be a man in America, freedom for women looks markedly different. Louise’s life is shaped by what society believes a woman should be and how a wife should behave. Once Louise’s husband “dies,” however, she sees a way where she can start claiming some of the more “masculine” freedoms for herself. Chopin shows how deeply important freedom is to the life of a woman when, in the end, it’s not the shock of her husband’s return of her husband that kills Louise, but rather the thought of losing her freedom again.

Marriage as a “The Story of an Hour” theme is more than just an idyllic life spent with a significant other. The Mallard’s marriage shows a reality of 1890s life that was familiar to many people. Marriage was a means of social control —that is to say, marriage helped keep women in check and secure men’s social and political power. While husbands were usually free to wander the world on their own, hold jobs, and make important family decisions, wives (at least those of the upper class) were expected to stay at home and be domestic. 

Marriage in Louise Mallard’s case has very little love. She sees her marriage as a life-long bond in which she feels trapped, which readers see when she confesses that she loved her husband only “sometimes.” More to the point, she describes her marriage as a “powerful will bending hers in that blind persistence with which men and women believe they have a right to impose a private will upon a fellow-creature.” In other words, Louise Mallard feels injustice in the expectation that her life is dictated by the will of her husband.

Like the story, the marriages Kate witnessed often ended in an early or unexpected death. The women of her family, including Kate herself, all survived their husbands and didn’t remarry. While history tells us that Kate Chopin was happy in her marriage, she was aware that many women weren’t. By showing a marriage that had been built on control and society’s expectations, Chopin’s “The Story of an Hour” highlights the need for a world that respected women as valuable partners in marriage as well as capable individuals.

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While this painting by Johann Georg Meyer wasn't specifically of Louise Mallard, "Young Woman Looking Through a Window" is a depiction of what Louise might have looked like as she realized her freedom.

"The Story of an Hour" Characters

The best stories have developed characters, which is the case in “The Story of an Hour,” too. Five characters make up the cast of “The Story of an Hour”:

Louise Mallard

Brently mallard.

  • The doctor(s)

By exploring the details of each character, we can better understand their motivations, societal role, and purpose to the story.

From the opening sentence alone, we learn a lot about Louise Mallard. Chopin writes, “Knowing that Mrs. Mallard was afflicted with a heart trouble, great care was taken to break to her as gently as possible the news of her husband’s death.”

From that statement alone, we know that she is married, has a heart condition, and is likely to react strongly to bad news . We also know that the person who is sharing the bad news views Louise as delicate and sensitive. Throughout the next few paragraphs, we also learn that Louise is a housewife, which indicates that she would be part of the middle-to-upper class in the 1890s. Chopin also describes Louise’s appearance as “young,” “fair, calm face,” with lines of “strength.” These characteristics are not purely physical, but also bleed into her character throughout the story.

Louise’s personality is described as different from other women . While many women would be struck with the news in disbelief, Louise cries with “wild abandonment”—which shows how powerful her emotions are. Additionally, while other women would be content to mourn for longer, Louise quickly transitions from grief to joy about her husband’s passing.  

Ultimately, Chopin uses Louise’s character to show readers what a woman’s typical experience within marriage was in the 1890s. She uses Louise to criticize the oppressive and repressive nature of marriage, especially when Louise rejoices in her newfound freedom. 

Josephine is Louise’s sister . We never hear of Josephine’s last name or whether she is married or not. We do know that she has come with Richards, a friend of Brently’s, to break the news of his death to her sister. 

When Josephine tells Louise the bad news, she’s only able to tell Louise of Brently’s death in “veiled hints,” rather than telling her outright. Readers can interpret this as Josephine’s attempt at sparing Louise’s feelings. Josephine is especially worried about her sister’s heart condition, which we see in greater detail later as she warns Louise, “You will make yourself ill.” When Louise locks herself in her room, Josephine is desperate to make sure her sister is okay and begs Louise to let her in. 

Josephine is the key supporting character for Louise, helping her mourn, though she never knows that Louise found new freedom from her husband’s supposed death . But from Josephine’s actions and interactions with Louise, readers can accurately surmise that she cares for her sister (even if she’s unaware of how miserable Louise finds her life). 

Richards is another supporting character, though he is described as Brently’s friend, not Louise’s friend. It is Richards who finds out about Brently Mallard’s supposed death while at the newspaper office—he sees Brently’s name “leading the list of ‘killed.’” Richards’ main role in “The Story of an Hour” is to kick off the story’s plot. 

Additionally, Richard’s presence at the newspaper office suggests he’s a writer, editor, or otherwise employee of the newspaper (although Chopin leaves this to readers’ inferences). Richards takes enough care to double-check the news and to make sure that Brently’s likely dead. He also enlists Josephine’s help to break the news to Louise. He tries to get to Louise before a “less careful, less tender friend” can break the sad news to her, which suggests that he’s a thoughtful person in his own right. 

It’s also important to note is that Richards is aware of Louise’s heart condition, meaning that he knows Louise Mallard well enough to know of her health and how she is likely to bear grief. He appears again in the story at the very end, when he tries (and fails) to shield Brently from his wife’s view to prevent her heart from reacting badly. While Richards is a background character in the narrative, he demonstrates a high level of friendship, consideration, and care for Louise. 

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Brently Mallard would have been riding in a train like this one when the accident supposedly occurred.

  Mr. Brently Mallard is the husband of the main character, Louise. We get few details about him, though readers do know he’s been on a train that has met with a serious accident. For the majority of the story, readers believe Brently Mallard is dead—though the end of “The Story of an Hour” reveals that he’s been alive all along. In fact, Brently doesn’t even know of the railroad tragedy when he arrives home “travel-stained.”

  Immediately after Louise hears the news of his death, she remembers him fondly. She remarks on his “kind, tender hands” and says that Brently “never looked save with love” upon her . It’s not so much Brently as it’s her marriage to him which oppresses Louise. While he apparently always loved Louise, Louise only “sometimes” loved Brently. She constantly felt that he “impose[d] a private will” upon her, as most husbands do their wives. And while she realizes that Brently likely did so without malice, she also realized that “a kind intention or a cruel intention” makes the repression “no less a crime.” 

Brently’s absence in the story does two things. First, it contrasts starkly with Louise’s life of illness and confinement. Second, Brently’s absence allows Louise to imagine a life of freedom outside of the confines of marriage , which gives her hope. In fact, when he appears alive and well (and dashes Louise’s hopes of freedom), she passes away. 

The Doctor(s)

Though the mention of them is brief, the final sentence of the story is striking. Chopin writes, “When the doctors came they said she had died of heart disease—of the joy that kills.” Just as she had no freedom in life, her liberation from the death of her husband is told as a joy that killed her.

In life as in death, the truth of Louise Mallard is never known. Everything the readers know about her delight in her newfound freedom happens in Louise’s own mind; she never gets the chance to share her secret joy with anyone else.

Consequently, the ending of the story is double-sided. If the doctors are to be believed, Louise Mallard was happy to see her husband, and her heart betrayed her. And outwardly, no one has any reason to suspect otherwise. Her reaction is that of a dutiful, delicate wife who couldn’t bear the shock of her husband returned from the grave. 

But readers can infer that Louise Mallard died of the grief of a freedom she never had , then found, then lost once more. Readers can interpret Louise’s death as her experience of true grief in the story—that for her ideal life, briefly realized then snatched away. 

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In "The Story of an Hour," the appearance of hearts symbolize both repression and hope.

“The Story of an Hour” Symbolism and Motifs

  Symbols are any object, word, or other element that appear in the story and have additional meanings beyond. Motifs are elements from a story that gain meaning from being repeated throughout the narrative. The line between symbols and motifs is often hazy, but authors use both to help communicate their ideas and themes. 

  In “The Story of an Hour,” symbolism is everywhere, but the three major symbols present in the story are: 

  •   The heart
  • The house and the outdoors
  • Joy and sorrow

Heart disease, referred to as a “heart condition” within the text, opens and closes the text. The disease is the initial cause for everyone’s concern, since Louise’s condition makes her delicate. Later, heart disease causes Louise’s death upon Brently’s safe return. In this case, Louise’s ailing heart has symbolic value because it suggests to readers that her life has left her heartbroken. When she believes she’s finally found freedom, Louise prays for a long life...when just the day before, she’d “had thought with a shudder that life might be long.”

As Louise realizes her freedom, it’s almost as if her heart sparks back to life. Chopin writes, “Now her bosom rose and fell tumultuously...she was striving to beat it back...Her pulses beat fast, and the coursing blood warmed and relaxed every inch of her body.” These words suggest that, with her newfound freedom, the symptoms of her heart disease have lifted. Readers can surmise that Louise’s diseased heart is the result of being repressed, and hope brings her heart back to life. 

  Unfortunately, when Brently comes back, so does Louise’s heart disease. And, although her death is attributed to joy, the return of her (both symbolic and literal) heart disease kills her in the end. 

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The House and the Outdoors

The second set of symbols are Louise’s house and the world she can see outside of her window. Chopin contrasts these two symbolic images to help readers better understand how marriage and repression have affected Louise. 

First of all, Louise is confined to the home—both within the story and in general. For her, however, her home isn’t a place to relax and feel comfortable. It’s more like a prison cell. All of the descriptions of the house reinforce the idea that it’s closed off and inescapable . For instance, the front door is locked when Mr. Mallard returns home. When Mrs. Mallard is overcome with grief, she goes deeper inside her house and locks herself in her room.

In that room, however, Mrs. Mallard takes note of the outdoors by looking out of her window.  Even in her momentary grief, she describes the “open square before her house” and “the new spring life.” The outdoors symbolize freedom in the story, so it’s no surprise that she realizes her newfound freedom as she looks out her window. Everything about the outside is free, beautiful, open, inviting, and pleasant...a stark contrast from the sadness inside the house . 

The house and its differences from outdoors serve as one of many symbols for how Louise feels about her marriage: barred from a world of independence.

Joy and Sorrow

  Finally, joy and sorrow are motifs that come at unexpected times throughout “The Story of an Hour.” Chopin juxtaposes joy and sorrow to highlight how tragedy releases Louise from her sorrow and gives her a joyous hope for the future. 

At first, sorrow appears as Louise mourns the death of her husband. Yet, in just a few paragraphs, she finds joy in the event as she discovers a life of her own. Though Louise is able to see that feeling joy at such an event is “monstrous,” she continues to revel in her happiness. 

  It is later that, when others expect her to be joyful, Josephine lets out a “piercing cry,” and Louise dies. Doctors interpret this as “the joy that kills,” but more likely it’s a sorrow that kills. The reversal of the “appropriate” feelings at each event reveals how counterintuitive the “self-assertion which she suddenly recognized as the strongest impulse of her being” is to the surrounding culture. This paradox reveals something staggering about Louise’s married life: she is so unhappy with her situation that grief gives her hope...and she dies when that hope is taken away. 

Key Takeaways: Kate Chopin's “The Story of an Hour” 

Analyzing Chopin’s “The Story of an Hour” takes time and careful thought despite the shortness of the story. The story is open to multiple interpretations and has a lot to reveal about women in the 1890s, and many of the story’s themes, characters, and symbols critique women’s marriage roles during the period .

There’s a lot to dig through when it comes to “The Story of an Hour” analysis. If you’re feeling overwhelmed, just remember a few things :

  • Events from Kate Chopin’s life and from social changes in the 1890s provided a strong basis for the story.
  • Mrs. Louise Mallard’s heart condition, house, and feelings represent deeper meanings in the narrative.
  • Louise goes from a state of repression, to freedom, and then back to repression, and the thought alone is enough to kill her.

Remembering the key plot points, themes, characters, and symbols will help you write any essay or participate in any discussion. Kate Chopin’s “The Story of an Hour” has much more to uncover, so read it again, ask questions, and start exploring the story beyond the page!

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What’s Next? 

You may have found your way to this article because analyzing literature can be tricky to master. But like any skill, you can improve with practice! First, make sure you have the right tools for the job by learning about literary elements. Start by mastering the 9 elements in every piece of literature , then dig into our element-specific guides (like this one on imagery and this one on personification .)

Another good way to start practicing your analytical skills is to read through additional expert guides like this one. Literary guides can help show you what to look for and explain why certain details are important. You can start with our analysis of Dylan Thomas’ poem, “Do not go gentle into that good night.” We also have longer guides on other words like The Great Gatsby and The Crucible , too.

If you’re preparing to take the AP Literature exam, it’s even more important that you’re able to quickly and accurately analyze a text . Don’t worry, though: we’ve got tons of helpful material for you. First, check out this overview of the AP Literature exam . Once you have a handle on the test, you can start practicing the multiple choice questions , and even take a few full-length practice tests . Oh, and make sure you’re ready for the essay portion of the test by checking out our AP Literature reading list!

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Ashley Sufflé Robinson has a Ph.D. in 19th Century English Literature. As a content writer for PrepScholar, Ashley is passionate about giving college-bound students the in-depth information they need to get into the school of their dreams.

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The Story of an Hour Analysis & Summary – Essay Example

This sample will help you write a The Story of an Hour analysis essay! Here you’ll find a The Story of an Hour summary. Essay also contains a plot and character analysis.

Introduction

The story of an hour introduction, the story of an hour main plot, the story of an hour conclusion, the story of an hour analysis.

The Story of an Hour is a short story written by Kate Chopin in 1894. This famous piece of literature was controversial for its time, as the story mentioned a female protagonist who felt relieved after her husband’s death. The conclusion of The Story of an Hour is ironic, which makes the ending memorable.

The following The Story of an Hour literary analysis essay will summarize the plot and present an extensive character analysis of Mrs. Mallard. It will be helpful for those writing a The Story of an Hour critical analysis.

Kate Chopin (born Catherine O’Flaherty) was an American writer. She is best known for her narratives of delicate and brave women’s inner lives. Her novel “The Awakening” and her short stories, among them The Story of an Hour, are being read in countries all over the world today. She is widely recognized as one of the most important authors in America.

In 1984, Kate Chopin wrote The Story of an Hour. It portrays a woman, Louise Mallard, who lost her husband in an accident. However, she later discovers that the husband survived. Mrs. Mallard goes through many emotions and feelings, reevaluating her life. That ultimately kills her when she meets her presumably dead husband at the door. The following The Story of an Hour essay will focus on the plot and the protagonist’s self-development.

The Story of an Hour Summary

Louise Mallard, the main character, had always had a heart problem. It was not a secret for her friends and relatives, so everyone tried to protect her from worries.

One day her husband, Brently Mallard, was mistaken for having died in a horrible railroad accident. Richard, Mr. Mallard’s friend, was the one who learned about this death while in the office. Josephine, Louise’s sister, broke the news to her.

Josephine was very cautious because of Mrs. Mallard’s health issue. She feared such a tragedy would cause a heart attack. Bit by bit, she strategized how to tell everything to her sister, aher plan went perfectly well. Mrs. Mallard wept only once. She did not receive the story like many women would, with a helpless incapacity to acknowledge its meaning. She only cried in her sister’s arms with a feeling of a sudden, wild abandonment (Woodlief 2).

Immediately Mrs. Mallard found herself wondering how she could survive without her husband. She went to a room and locked herself to contemplate the consequences of his death. She was devastated, and this sadness was only natural. This man had been close to her, even though only for a short time. Her sister Josephine and Mr. Richard also mourned the loss (Taibah 1).

Mrs. Mallard was alone in that room, thinking about the future. As she was contemplating her fate, instead of grief, she began realizing that this was the beginning of a better part of her life. Louise saw independence and plenty of possibilities to do what her heart desired. Now, she had only to think about herself.

Later, Josephine comes to Louise’s room, crying with a joyous smile. They descend the house’s stairs, where Mr. Mallard appears at the door. He was not involved in the accident and did not understand why Josephine was crying. At the shock of seeing her husband again, Mrs. Mallard collapses. The doctors declare that she died because of the problems with her heart.

Health issues of the central character play a significant role in the story. The author managed to bring suspense in the way she described telling the bad news to a person with a heart problem. Josephine, Louise’s sister, tries her best to be careful and attentive, expecting a painful response. However, Mrs. Mallard reacts better than anticipated.

The story focuses mostly on femininity and the institution of marriage. The analysis of The Story of an Hour has to speculate on it to reveal the core message.

The author was able to illustrate that men entirely dominate the institution of marriage. Mr. Mallard, for instance, treated his wife the way she wanted only from time to time. For years, Louise has done many things to please her husband without looking after her well-being. So, having received the disturbing news, she is quite happy. It seemed that she had never cared for her husband at all.

Or did she? Mrs. Mallard’s reaction to the death of a spouse is complicated. She cannot escape the loneliness and grief that came with the loss. But the possibility of happiness prevails. Louise knew that marriage had made her a subject for him against her will. She only felt sorrow for the loss of his life but not for living without him. She felt deep inside that she had been freed from the chains of living for another person.

Mr. Mallard’s apparent death saddened Louise at first. She was devastated about his fate but regained strength quickly. Louise was well aware of the fact that she could not bring her husband back. So, she came to terms with it, which wasn’t difficult. Mrs. Mallard saw beyond the painful moment, anticipating freedom for the rest of her life.

The room and environment around Mrs. Mallard symbolize her desire for freedom. For example, Mrs. Mallard could see the tops of trees through the window. They were all aquiver with the new spring life on the open square before her house. There was a delicious breath of rain in the air. A peddler was weeping his wares in the street below. There were spots of blue sky showing up here and there through the clouds in the west facing her window, which had met and piled up one above the other (Woodlief 1).

An open window could be interpreted as a metaphor. It reflects new possibilities and resources that Mrs. Mallard now had in her sights without anybody stopping her. She referred to it as the late spring of life.

The story reveals how women were secretly marginalized. At the time, society expected them to pursue wealth and safety, which came with a husband. Liberty should be neither their worry nor their goal. When Louise felt freedom after Mr. Mallard’s death, she kept it secret for obvious reasons. But then, her sister arrived.

Mrs. Mallard was shocked by the sight of her husband alive. All of her newfound liberty and dreams came crashing down at that moment. This shattering experience even goes to the extreme of destroying her life. Whereas she was to be happy to see her husband alive, Louise died from a heart attack.

Situational irony is presented in the author’s stylistic use of words: “She had died of heart disease…of the joy that kills.” People around anticipated this tragedy from the news about Mr. Mallard’s death, not miraculous survival.

The author explored the character of Mrs. Mallard throughout this story. The reader can’t be surprised by her sudden death or miss its irony. Louise is a woman with a great desire for independence, which a man has deprived her of through marriage. Mr. Mallard represents the absence of her liberty that restores after his death. When Mrs. Mallard sees her husband at the door once again, she collapses and never wakes up.

Based on this The Story of an Hour literary analysis, we can draw several important conclusions. Mrs. Mallard couldn’t control her emotions when they concerned the most vital matters. The lack of liberty and independence may have caused her heart problems in the first place. And they cost her life in the end.

Her husband, Mr. Mallard, took Louise’s freedom when he married her. However, as it became apparent from the story, he never valued her. When she died, he had finally faced the consequences of always taking her existence for granted.

Therefore, the oppressor faced even worse tragedy than the oppressed. The dramatic irony of Mr. Mallard’s unawareness of his wife’s true feelings towards him is a big part of the story. So, in the end, it was Mr. Mallard’s presence that killed his wife.

  • Chopin, Kate. The Story of an hour . The Kate Chopin International Society. Web.
  • Woodlief, Ann. The Story of an Hour . 2011, Virginia Commonwealth University. Web.

What is the symbolism in The Story of an Hour?

Through The Story of an Hour, the author presents us with the inner feelings and thoughts of a woman using various symbols. Mrs. Mallard’s heart problem symbolizes her dissatisfaction with the marriage, while the open window illustrates her aspirations towards a better, independent life.

What is the meaning behind The Story of an Hour?

Kate Chopin’s The Story of an Hour analysis illustrates that the author wanted to tell us how the society of that time was unfair towards women. It also shows the delicate and complicated inner world of a woman.

What does The Story of an Hour critique?

The Story of an Hour criticizes the typical experience of marriage in the 1890s. For women, such marriage was repressive and meant their loss of personal freedoms. Therefore, the story criticizes the society of that time dominated by men.

How do you start a critical analysis of The Story of an Hour?

Start your analysis of The Story of an Hour with a short introduction. Remember to say a few words about its author and her life. Next, talk about the story and let the reader know what it is about.

What are the two main themes in The Story of an Hour?

Firstly, the theme of a female search for self-identity is featured strongly in the story. The second theme is that of repressive marriage. The reader sees it in the way Mrs. Mallard’s reaction toward her husband’s death shifts.

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108 The Story of an Hour Essay Topics & Examples

Need to write an analysis, argumentative essay, or discussion paper on The Story of an Hour? Looking for interesting The Story of an Hour essay topics? We’ve got you covered!

✍️ The Story of an Hour Essay Prompt Ideas

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Kate Chopin’s The Story of an Hour is an excellent short story with feminist themes. You can explore Mrs Mallard’s journey by writing a paper with the help of our The Story of an Hour essay prompt ideas and samples. Check them out!

  • House symbolism in The Story of an Hour. Kate Chopin’s short story is rich with symbolism. For example, Mrs. Mallard’s house serves as a representation of her entrapment in marriage. You can compare this symbol with the room from The Yellow Wallpaper.
  • Repression vs. freedom in The Story of an Hour. Many scholars have studied the story from the Freudian perspective. According to this reading, one of the main reasons behind Mrs. Mallard’s actions was psychological repression. Do you agree?
  • The Story of an Hour as an early feminist story. In your essay, you can study feminist aspects of Chopin’s story. For instance, you may look into female liberation, marriage as a trap, and other similar themes.
  • Mrs. Mallard’s death as liberation. The main character of the story, Mrs. Mallard, longs to be free. She thinks that she’s finally liberated when her husband dies. However, he turns out to be alive, and the realization kills Mrs. Mallard. Can we say that death finally brought her desired freedom?
  • What is “the joy that kills”?
  • Was Mrs. Mallard a good wife?
  • How do Mrs. Mallard’s emotions change?
  • What really killed Mrs. Mallard?
  • What’s the role of sarcasm in The Story of an Hour ?
  • What are tragedy tropes in The Story of an Hour ?
  • What does marriage mean for Mrs. Mallard?
  • What’s the symbolism of Mrs. Mallard’s “heart trouble”?
  • What’s the importance of time in The Story of an Hour ?
  • What was marriage like in the 19th century according to Kate Chopin?
  • The Story of an Hour Critical Analysis Essay Instead, she knew that though the husband was important to her, marriage had made her a subject to him. Mallard was not able to handle the swings in her emotions and this cost her life.Mr.
  • “The Story of an Hour” by Kate Chopin: Reading Response Thus, Louise’s feelings are pretty explainable by the fact that she can devote her life to herself with the death of her husband. The realization of this leads her to delight and a feeling of […]
  • Point of View in Chopin’s “The Story of an Hour” The climax of the story is Brently Mallard’s return home and the situation when Mrs. The point of view in the story is categorized as the third person limited omniscient as the story-teller is not […]
  • The Story of an Hour by Kate Chopin It should be mentioned that the story is the discussion of the reaction to the event and the characteristics of one hour in the life of Louise Mallard.
  • The Use of Feminism in Chopin’s “The Story of an Hour” Kate Chopin was one of the first writers to expose the struggles of women in the specified environment of inequality in her “The Story of an Hour”.
  • Imagery and Symbolism in “Story of an Hour” by Kate Chopin The essay concludes with the viewpoint that the use of symbolism and imagery with a natural background enhances the intensity and aptness of the scenes and core story.
  • Theme of Gender in «The Story of an Hour» by Kate Chopin and «A Room of One’s Own» by Virginia Woolf On the other hand, the unknown narrator; the main character in the novel A Room of One’s Own addresses and criticizes the issue of gender inequality in her society.
  • The Feminist Impact of “The Story of an Hour” by Kate Chopin Her biography slightly resembles the story of Louise Mallard, who was also processing the alleged death of a husband. To begin with, in The Story of an Hour, the protagonist Mrs.
  • Comparing ‘The Story of an Hour’ and ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ Essay The first similarity between the ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ and ‘The story of an Hour is that the main characters in the stories are looking for freedom in vain.
  • “The Story of an Hour” a Story by Kate Chopin As the reader goes through the story, one can clearly see the images of what is happening because of the detailed imagery depicted by the author in the story; it is these imageries that triggers […]
  • “The Story of an Hour” by Kate Chopin: The Main Goals and Themes The main goal that Kate Chopin wanted to convey in The Story of an Hour is the liberation of a woman from the limited marital role and gender persuasion of the women’s place in the […]
  • Chopin’s “The Story of an Hour”: Feminine Roles in the 19th Century Thus, in the course of analyzing the powerful imagery in Chopin’s work, the paper will also focus on the concepts of feminine roles and gender relations as they were perceived in the dominant culture of […]
  • Literary Analysis: The Story of an Hour by Kate Chopin Mallard having a heart complication, and how the sister Josephine and the husband’s friend Richard found it difficult to break the news of the demise of her husband.Mrs.
  • Women’s Status in Chopin’s “The Story of an Hour” The story is a critique of control in marriages and dominant attitudes towards women in the society of the 19th century.
  • “The Story of an Hour” and “The Storm” – Women in Literature The Storm and The Story of an Hour illustrate the viewpoints of women’s restriction in marriage. Through the two women’s experiences, the author illustrate on the theme of restriction in marriage.
  • Kate Chopin: The Setting in “The Story of an Hour” The conflict in the story is brought about by the reaction of the main character towards the news of the death.
  • Kate Chopin’s The Story of an Hour This thought is said to be a central one for the story, and it is represented in the title. In addition to that, it is impossible to ignore the fact that The Story of an […]
  • “The Birthmark” and “The Story of an Hour”: Theme, Tone, and Point of View “The Birthmark” tells the story of a scientist Aylmer who was obsessed with the idea to remove his wife’s stain.”The Story of an Hour” is the psychological description of a young woman’s feelings when she […]
  • The Novel “The Story of an Hour” by Kate Chopin Speaking more precisely, the renovation of the soul and the renovation of nature go together in stressing the significance of the change. Mallard’s life and the story in general.
  • Louise Mallard in “The Story of an Hour” by Kate Chopin Because of her delicate heart condition, her sister – Josephine- and her husband’s friend – Richard- both believe that they must break the news of her husband’s death in a very careful manner.
  • Trifles and The Story of an Hour Comparison To illustrate, the theme of female subordination plays out in The Story of an Hour through Louise’s confession that Brently’s supposed death indicates freedom for the wife.
  • Marriage in “The Story of an Hour” by Kate Chopin News about the death of her husband arises and owing to her heart problem, carefulness is vital for the one to deliver the news to her.
  • Joy That Kills: “The Story of an Hour” by Chopin She had to prove the right of a woman to decide something in the society contemporary to her and, besides, was influenced by her parents.
  • “Everyday Use” by Alice Walker and “The Story of an Hour” by Chopin Dee, although she is not the only main character, is the drive that pushes the story forward, and the narrative unfolds with her arrival.
  • Character Arc in Chopin’s “The Story of an Hour” It is also critical to take into account the presence or absence of a person in a situation of the death of a loved one, and the very personality of the survivor.
  • Analysis of “The Story of an Hour” by Kate Chopin The essence of the latter is in the opposition of a person to society and its norms. Further, the second conflict in “The Story of an Hour” is the internal struggle and confusion of Louise.
  • Kate Chopin’s “The Story of an Hour” Criticism To illustrate, The Story of an Hour narrative is based on the supposed death of Brentley Mallard – the husband to Louise Mallard – thus reflecting a number of real life deaths that characterized Chopin’s […]
  • “The Story of an Hour” Plot by Kate Chopin In this case, the duty of the person breaking the news was to appear gentle while transmitting the sensitive news. It was quite unnoticed that a sob was to hit her hard since she was […]
  • Chopin’s “The Story of an Hour”, Harris’s “Mississippi Solo”, and Blanco’s “One Today” The expression of one’s desire for independence and the following impact of that element on one’s identity development can be clearly traced in Kate Chopin’s The Story of an Hour.
  • “The Story of an Hour” by Chopin vs. “Volar” by Cofer This, in turn, leads to the formation of the identity that is ready to face all the world’s challenges as a superhero.
  • Kincaid’s “The Girl” vs. Chopin’s “The Story of an Hour” The mother gives a lot of advice on what to do, including what to prepare, what to do in the house, and what to do outside the house.
  • Solitude in “The Story of an Hour” by Kate Chopin For centuries, the idea of human isolation and solitude has been considered a phenomenon that poisons a human being, as the sense of belonging to a community and family is frequently considered a pillar of […]
  • Feminism in “The Story of an Hour” In conclusion, The Story of an Hour shows that the feeling of freedom that Louise did not have was an impediment to a happy life.
  • Freedom of Choices for Women in Marriage in “The Story of an Hour” The story describes the sentiments and feelings of Louisa Mallard when she learns the news about her husband. The readers can see the sudden reaction of the person to the demise of her significant other.
  • Fiction Elements in The Story of an Hour by Kate Chopin The way the author, Kate Chopin, creates the element of surprise throughout the whole story plays a pivotal role in the strong impression of the piece’s ending.
  • Theme and Characters of Chopin’s “The Story of an Hour” Concentrating on the heroine’s thoughts and describing sounds and the atmosphere, the author conveys the sophisticated and multifaceted female issue relating to women’s rights and feelings.
  • Does Marriage Bring Happiness?: Based on “The Story of an Hour” In this case, marriage is not a union of the loved ones but is a social obligation where a wife is a subject of a husband.Mr. Millard’s family seemed a perfect example of the social […]
  • Women in Relationships: Chopin’s “The Story of an Hour” & Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants” They explore the topic of the position of women in a relationship at the beginning of the twentieth century from a different point of view, which adds value to their joint analysis.
  • Realism: “The Trials of Girlhood” and “The Story of an Hour” The authors of “The Trials of Girlhood” and “The Story of an Hour” use a variety of devices to transmit the message in compliance with the purpose of their writings.
  • Kate Chopin’s “The Story of an Hour” Mallard, the protagonist of the story, learns that her husband died as a result of a train accident. Mallard understands that the rest of the life she has will be spent the way she wants.
  • Chopin’s “The Story of an Hour”, Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper”, and Walker’s “Everyday Use” It is remarkable that the language of The Story of An Hour speaks for the feelings of protagonist and the plot uncovering.
  • “The Story of an Hour” and “The Sorrowful Woman” This essay seeks to explain that in order to have a successful marriage, the husband and wife should work together as a single unit in which the husband and wife play their respective roles without […]
  • Intensions in “The Storm” and “The Story of an Hour” Her two stories, “The Storm” and “The Story of an Hour” are discussed in this paper to see how well Kate achieves her creative intention.”The Storm” is a short story, but it is packed with […]
  • Kate Chopin’s “The Storm” and “The Story of an Hour” In “The Storm”, the major part of the story is the activities of Calixta and Alcee, the main protagonist, and one of her neighbors who was caught out when the storm arrived, which are described […]
  • Kate Chopin’s Work “The Story of a Hour” This is the main conflict of the story and it is my belief that she chose to be happy at her newfound freedom while grieving for her husband a little.
  • ”The Story of an Hour” by Kate Chopin & ”The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Gilman: Comparing The characters of Louise Mallard in “The Story of an Hour” and the storyteller for “The Yellow Wallpaper” are representative of what the authors want to express about themselves and their current situation.
  • Analysis of Kate Chopin’s “The Storm” and “The Story of an Hour” She is struck by the sound of the words and repeats the realization that she is “free! In one instant, the realization that she is not free enters her mind, and she wails a “piercing […]
  • Kate Chopin’s “The Story of an Hour”: Feminist Statement Thus, specific feminist ideas in “The Story of an Hour” can be discussed from the point of the woman’s inequality in marriage and the point of the woman’s freedom.Mrs.
  • The Story of an Hour by Kate Chopin: Novel Analysis The key purpose of the story is to bring awareness to an issue that a human being is born to be free.
  • “The Story of an Hour” and “The Birthmark” The “punishment” of the character, however, does not necessarily testify to the narrator’s support of the expected behavior standards pointing out a conflict between the author and the society in regards to ethical, moral, and […]
  • Trifles by Susan Glaspell and The Story of an Hour by Kate Chopin’s This is one of the aspects that can be distinguished. This is one of the points that can be made.
  • Women and Freedom in “The Story of an Hour” by Kate Chopin She is best known for her recurrent theme on the status of women in societal affairs, the challenges and problems facing them as well as repression and gender bias.”The story of an hour” is rhetorically […]
  • The Motifs of Life and Death in the Short Stories Hills Like White Elephants and The Story of an Hour One of the most notable aspects of how the motif of death reemerges throughout the entirety of Chopin’s story, is the fact that the story’s main character Mrs.
  • Feminist Criticism in “The Story of an Hour” and “The Yellow Wallpaper” This is because she is the only one who knew the suffering she was undergoing in that marriage and that she did not always love her husband.
  • Protagonists in Literature Both her sister and her husband’s friend are worried on the best means to pass this message to her because of her health condition.
  • Authorial Voice in Kate Chopin’s “The Story of an Hour” and William Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily”
  • Women’s Roles in Silko’s “Yellow Woman” and Chopin’s “The Story of an Hour”
  • The Use of Dual Symbolism in “The Story of an Hour” by Kate Chopin
  • The Arguments of Lawrence Berkove in Fatal Self-Assertion in Kate Chopin’s “The Story of an Hour”
  • How Negative Discoveries Can Lead To Positive Outcomes in “The Story of an Hour” by Kate Chopin and “Life of Pi” by Ang Lee
  • The Modern Society’s Women in “The Story of an Hour” by Kate Chopin
  • Women’s Rights in the 1940’s Illustrated in Kate Chopin’s “The Story of an Hour”
  • The Symbolism in “The Story of an Hour” by Kate Chopin and “A Rose for Emily” by William Faulkner
  • The Themes of Female Independence and Marriage in Kate Chopin’s “The Storm” and “The Story of an Hour”
  • Biographical Approach to Kate Chopin’s “The Story of an Hour”
  • Two Contrasting Views of Marriage in “The Story of an Hour” by Kate Chopin
  • The Marriage of Yesterday and Today in “The Story of an Hour” by Kate Chopin
  • The Powerful Influence of Community on the Idea of Identity in “The Story of an Hour” by Kate Chopin
  • Symbolisms and Irony in “The Story of an Hour” by Kate Chopin
  • Appearance vs. Reality: Relief or Release in Kate Chopin’s “The Story of an Hour”
  • The Emotional Effects in “The Story of an Hour,” “The Lottery,” and “The Yellow Wallpaper”
  • The Demise and Overwhelming Sense of Freedom of the Husband’s Death in “The Story of an Hour” by Kate Chopin
  • The Risk Kate Chopin Took in Writing “The Story of an Hour”
  • The Stereotyping of Women in the Novels “The Storm” and “The Story of an Hour” by Kate Chopin
  • An Interpretation of the Death of the Husband in Kate Chopin’s “The Story of an Hour”
  • The Use of Literary Devices to Illustrate the Oppression of Women in “The Story of an Hour” by Kate Chopin
  • The Importance of Freedom in Chopin’s “The Story of an Hour”
  • The Relationship Between Men and Women Presented in “The Story of an Hour”
  • The Developing Voice of Feminism in Kate Chopin’s “The Story of an Hour,” “The Awakening,” and Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper”
  • The Prevalence of Irony in “The Story of an Hour” and “Desiree’s Baby” by Kate Chopin
  • Gender Roles and the Struggles of Women in “The Story of an Hour” by Kate Chopin
  • The Oppressive Nature of Marriage in “The Story of an Hour” by Kate Chopin
  • “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” vs. “The Story of an Hour”
  • Women’s Independence in the 19th Century: “The Story of an Hour” by Kate Chopin
  • The Similarities and Differences Between the Two Stories “The Storm” and “The Story of an Hour”
  • The Ugly Truth of Marriage in Kate Chopin’s “The Story of an Hour”
  • The Confinement of Women in “The Story of an Hour,” “The Yellow Wallpaper,” “A Sorrowful Woman,” and “Hills Like White Elephants”
  • The Thematic Struggle Between Man and Woman in “The Story of an Hour” by Kate Chopin
  • The Significance of Love in the Mortgaged Heart and “The Story of an Hour”
  • Whether It Was a Joy That Killed Louise: Analysis of Kate Chopin’s “The Story of an Hour”
  • The Idea of Freedom and Oppression in “The Story of an Hour”
  • The Use of Symbolism to Foreshadow the Future in Kate Chopin’s “The Story of an Hour” and Toni Cade Bambara’s “The Lesson”
  • Consequences of Freedom in “The Story of an Hour” and “A Pair of Silk Stocking” by Chopin
  • The Differences in Josephine and Mrs. Mallard of Kate Chopin’s “The Story of an Hour”
  • The Dramatic Irony in “The Story of an Hour” by Kate Chopin
  • The Protagonist Character Louise Mallard in Kate Chopin’s “The Story of an Hour”
  • The Literary Approach to Women’s Rights in “The Yellow Wallpaper” and “The Story of an Hour”
  • External and Internal Focalisation in “The Story of an Hour”
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The Story of an Hour Introduction

Kate Chopin 's short piece " The Story of an Hour " is about a sickly wife who briefly believes her husband is dead and imagines a whole new life of freedom for herself. And then ….well, we're not going to spoil the ending for you here.

Chopin's stories have been read more and more over the years – and this piece is no exception – although her most famous work, The Awakening , remains the standard against which her other works are measured. Yet, contemporary audiences would have read "The Story of an Hour," published in Vogue magazine in1894 ( source ), a full five years before they would've gotten their hands on The Awakening .

Looking back, it's pretty interesting to think about Chopin's works appearing in Vogue . Here's what it said about Chopin:

"MRS. KATE CHOPIN—A beautiful woman, whose portrait fails to convey a tithe of the charm of her expressively lovely face, has been an honored contributor to Vogue almost from its first number. . . . Mrs. Chopin is daring in her choice of themes, but exquisitely refined in the treatment of them, and her literary style is a model of terse and finished diction." ( source )

Can you imagine Chopin's story being published in Vogue magazine today? The Vogue Shmoop's familiar with has stuff like André Leon Talley's ruminations about current Paris fashions, or articles about what Gwyneth Paltrow likes to cook. No offense to Vogue , but we don't think it's publishing the great short stories of our own time any more. Yet in 1894, it actually was. Which we think is kind of cool.

thesis on the story of an hour

What is The Story of an Hour About and Why Should I Care?

Ever visited Disneyland with your family? Let's take it as a given that you love your family, whatever their flaws, and find Disneyland exciting. But by the end of a day there, you're not so sure. Your parents won't let you ride on Space Mountain because it's too dangerous, your little brother just wants to keep going through the Haunted Mansion , and your older sister only wants to scope out the hot guys working at the soda fountain. Meanwhile, your wants and needs get lost in the shuffle. Maybe you start fantasizing about getting lost or separated from the rest, just for a couple hours, so you can check out the Indiana Jones ride, or the French Quarter, on your own time.

Well, Mrs. Mallard's marriage is kind of like that family trip to Disneyland – she's lost in the shuffle. She's lost herself. That's why, even in the midst of her grief over her husband's death, she can't stop thinking about the potential such a sad event has to change her life in a positive way. It's not even the idea that her husband was mean to her, because he sounds nice; it's the concept that being tied to another person, no matter how great or awful he is, keeps you from being yourself.

So what are we supposed to think? Does "The Story of an Hour" suggest that it's impossible to be tied down, or that we can't really be ourselves for long? Getting back to Disneyland – sure, it's awesome to go on the rides you choose, in the order you decide. But if you're not attached to anyone, there's nobody to share your experience with. So what's more important, attachment or freedom? Is it ever possible to have both?

thesis on the story of an hour

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The Oral History of Pitchfork

The inside story of the magazine everyone loved to hate..

In January,  Condé Nast announced  that it was folding Pitchfork into GQ, laying off much of the staff of the influential, independent-minded music publication. The outcry was immediate . Why was one album-review website, founded nearly three decades ago in a suburban Minnesota bedroom, loved by so many music fans—and hated by so many others? Pitchfork transformed indie rock, but did pop transform Pitchfork? And does the Condé news really mean that Pitchfork is dead?

Over the past two months, Slate spoke to more than 30 Pitchfork writers, editors, and executives, past and present—as well as critics, industry luminaries, and some of the musicians whose careers Pitchfork made and destroyed—to tell the story behind the raves, the pans, the festivals, the fights, the indie spirit, the corporate takeover, and, of course, the scores. This is the complete oral history of  Pitchfork .

1996–2000 “I’m in a Laundry Room, Man”

Ryan Schreiber (Pitchfork founder and CEO, 1996–2019): It started in my bedroom. I had just graduated from high school and was living at home. This was in a little town called Victoria, Minnesota, about 5 miles down the road from Prince’s studio, Paisley Park. I’d been reading tons of music magazines and was obsessed with music and music journalism. A friend of mine, he was super tech savvy, he introduced me to the web. I would go over to his place and he’d pull up the internet. He’d prompt me for search queries, and I started rattling off every band I could think of.

Brian Howe (contributor, 2003–23): The internet was this emerging uncharted frontier. It seemed natural that people were going to look for places to congregate on it. But someone has to make a bonfire for it all to come together.

Adam Krefman (director of business development and festivals, 2015–21): The internet was just a completely different place. It was almost like a solar system with large amounts of space between planetary bodies.

Schreiber: Those searches would bring back fan sites dedicated to specific artists, but I thought, There’s no reason this can’t be a music magazine .

Kim Deal set out to record a different kind of record and came out with one that’s so terrific, it won’t leave my discman for at least three days. Well, that’s kind of a long time, I guess. —Ryan Schreiber’s 8.2 review of the Amps’ Pacer , the first review on what would become Pitchfork, 1996

Howe: Pitchfork was made by people who had grown up idolizing legacy magazines. They had the impulse to dethrone them, while also wanting to emulate them.

Schreiber: I never reached out to any of the publications that I read. I thought they’d never accept me. From Day 1, I was like, If I’m going to do this, I’m going to do it for me and this community of writers and contributors. Let’s make our own thing.

Al Shipley (contributor, 2000): Back then, everyone was just buying magazines if they cared about music. Anytime you saw something covering more than just the big eight albums that Rolling Stone reviewed in an issue was cool.

Brent DiCrescenzo (contributor, 1998–2006): I found an interview Ryan did with the Revs. It might’ve been pre-Pitchfork. I want to say the site was called Turntable.

Schreiber: I got a cease-and-desist letter from another digital media company that had trademarked the name Turntable for a CD-ROM magazine, during that ultra-brief period in the mid-’90s when that was a thing. Ironically, we both wanted this very analog name that made no real sense for either of us. So, for about a month, I tried to think of a new name, but nothing fitting was coming to mind. Then I watched Scarface , and in one of the first scenes, Tony Montana is being interrogated by customs officials, and they notice this prison tat on his forearm. It’s a pitchfork, and a cop goes, “ It means ‘assassin.’ ” That locked it up for me.

Chris Kaskie (president and co-owner, 2004–17): At the time, Pitchfork was clearly just one dude’s thing, even though Ryan had a lot of people contributing to it.

DiCrescenzo: I just reached out to Ryan and was like, “Hey, I’m writing reviews. You’re kind of doing the same thing.” I still have the first CD he sent me, which is Pave the Rocket, a band no one will remember. And yeah, I just wrote some shit, then started to talk to him on the phone. He was working out of his girlfriend’s parents’ laundry room or something. He was like, “Yeah, I’m in a laundry room, man.”

Schreiber: There was no way to get the contact information for anybody online. I had to call the public library, and they would start searching for what I wanted. I’d be sitting on hold for 45 minutes, then finally the clerk would come back with the address for, like, Matador Records.

DiCrescenzo: I don’t think that Ryan and I ever thought of ourselves as indie dudes. Because when I first met Ryan, his favorite artist was Tori Amos. In high school, my favorite band was Primus. So it wasn’t like we were ride-or-die.

Schreiber: We were early enough that our SEO was really strong. If you searched for these bands we were covering, there would be nothing online yet. We got a lot of traffic from that.

Mark Richardson (contributor, 1998–2023; managing editor, 2007–11; editor in chief, 2011–15; executive editor, 2015–18): Before Google, there was no surefire way to find anything about anything. But I followed a link to a Luna interview on Pitchfork.

Howe: When I got online looking for information about indie labels and this whole other world of music, Pitchfork was what you found.

Shipley: I started reading the site in 1998, when I was in high school. I was looking up some obscure album, and Pitchfork had a review for it. I was like, Oh, these guys have reviews every day .

Amy Phillips (news director, 2005–19; managing editor, 2019–23; executive editor, 2023–24): What made Pitchfork stick is that it was consistent. There was always something new on the site.

Eric Harvey (contributor, 2007–23): It was five reviews every day, 25 reviews a week. They were vastly outpacing Rolling Stone and Spin.

Schreiber: We probably had 1,000 reviews published by 1999.

Harvey: One of my students was an indie rock fan. One day, he was in my office hours and said, “Have you ever heard of this site called Pitchfork?” I [ finger quotes ] “bookmarked it” to my “RSS feed.” Another student had introduced me to peer-to-peer file sharing.

Richardson: I always felt that was a really overlooked part of Pitchfork’s rise.

Harvey: You’re reading about an album, and you’re literally downloading it to your hard drive and listening to it at the same time.

Richardson: Historically, it took a lot of time to become immersed in a music scene. It took resources. It took money. And even if you might trade tapes with your friends, it took 90 minutes to make a 90-minute tape. With file sharing, the immediate consumption, and the idea of a daily-updating website, you can follow along with what’s happening.

Jayson Greene (contributing editor, 2008–present): I was a person who worked at a radio station. I was like a caricature of the character from the Nick Hornby book High Fidelity . It was clear to me that these were my people, love them or hate them, and that I had found a place that I would go whenever I didn’t know what else to do and wanted to visit a website.

Richardson: I spent a lot of time on a message board called I Love Music, and I noticed early on just how much ire Pitchfork inspired. It felt like having an opinion on one of Pitchfork’s opinions was an important part of keeping track of what was going on in music.

David Drake (contributor, 2008–17): Pitchfork seemed to often have an attitude or an affect or a sense of humor to which you could react like, This guy thinks he’s cooler than me , and also, Is this guy cooler than me?

Cat Zhang (associate editor, 2019–23): I think a lot of women who worked for Pitchfork generally have a less zealous history with the site than a lot of the men who worked for the site did.

Julianne Escobedo Shepherd (contributor, 2003–07 and 2016–present) : My boyfriend was really into Pitchfork. I didn’t read it all the time, because they were doing a lot of stuff that I wasn’t that into.

Schreiber: I was definitely looking at this new decade ahead and going, Man, we’re going to need a whole new canon . And I felt like that was on Pitchfork’s shoulders.

Carl Wilson ( Slate music critic ): When I started reading it, my main impression was that it was pretty juvenile.

Howe: It was made by a lot of really young, really immature men.

Greene: Those early years were what they were on purpose. It was a bunch of people writing to entertain each other and being somewhat delighted when they finally provoked a reaction from random strangers.

Shipley: They were one of the only places that would say, “We’ll cover anything.” Sometimes that would blow up in their faces. But still, there was a spirit of “anything goes.”

Schreiber: “If it’s not going to be sparkling copy, let’s just make it ridiculous and outlandish. Have a great time with it.”

David Turner (contributor, 2012–17): Everything from before 2001 is kind of dog shit. Those reviews are just bad. But that’s fine.

Shipley: There are things that were genuinely embarrassing that people now pass around as a party favor. You ever see the John Coltrane review?

’Trane takes it to heaven and back with some style, man. Some richness, daddy. It’s a sad thing his life was cut short by them jaws o’ death. Shit, cat. It don’t make a difference. —Ryan Schreiber’s 8.5 review of John Coltrane’s Live at the Village Vanguard: The Master Takes , 1998

Shipley: It makes sense that they eventually deleted a lot of the early stuff.

Howe: This stuff was all being written by boys who were into David Foster Wallace. I was obsessed with Infinite Jest in my 20s. I literally read it all the way through three or four times, probably.

Richardson: There was definitely a trend towards absurdity in some of the literature at the time. Another inspiration was an author named Mark Leyner. He was someone that Brent DiCrescenzo liked a lot.

DiCrescenzo: Mark Leyner has this weird hyper-ego first-person voice, this obviously comical, inflated sense of self that was so over the top that of course it’s not real. I just thought it was funny to be sitting in my childhood bedroom, writing, “I’m stepping off a private jet …”

Shipley: Brent was one of the big personalities at the site.

Schreiber: DiCrescenzo’s pieces were really divisive, understandably, because they were so conceptual. He would go really off the rails.

So, you pony-tailed Jeep-drivers and terrier-walkers, I’m crawling inside your minds like “Reeling in the Years” did so many decades ago. … I know that this review might hurt your feelings. Here, play with this shiny silver Nokia while I chat with somebody else. —Brent DiCrescenzo’s 1.6 review of Steely Dan’s Two Against Nature , 2000

DiCrescenzo: The bulk of music reviews are just unbearable to me. I was just trying to take the piss out of or lighten the mood and be like, This doesn’t need to be serious . I think, when people look back, they’re like, Well, these guys were bad journalists . It’s like, Well, we weren’t trying to be . I was just trying to write something funny.

Richardson: His reviews got a lot of attention. Anybody would say he was the star writer of early Pitchfork.

DiCrescenzo: I remember dissing Rammstein and someone sent a letter to my house that just said, “Your God is dead.”

Schreiber: Brent and I were probably more in contact about everything than most of the other writers, especially because we moved to Chicago at the same time. We used to hang out every day. And in 2000, we were on Napster as Kid A was leaking in real time.

DiCrescenzo: I definitely recall sitting there in my apartment with the futon, probably watching the video channel that had Juvenile and the Hot Boys on. You would download a song and it would take 45 minutes. You see that bar filling, filling, filling. You’re like, Come on, come on, come on and then like, OK, bam, I got Track 4! And then you would play that track over and over and over and over and over. And then you get “ Treefingers .” You’re like, Wait, what the fuck is this?

Schreiber: We agreed from pretty early on that it was going to be a 10. He wanted to write a review that was going to be sort of as ambitious as the album—his version of the album.

DiCrescenzo: I always wrote with the music in my headphones. And I know this is going to sound so pretentious, but I was trying to write in a way that, as a reader, you would somehow feel how I felt listening to it.

Schreiber: It was really late. I’m just hounding him for it. “Where the fuck is this review?” And he’s like, “I’m just tweaking it. I’m getting it right.” So, probably around an hour later, this thing arrives in my inbox. He logs on to Instant Messenger and is like, “Don’t change a word.”

The experience and emotions tied to listening to Kid A are like witnessing the stillborn birth of a child while simultaneously having the opportunity to see her play in the afterlife on Imax. It’s an album of sparking paradox. It’s cacophonous yet tranquil, experimental yet familiar, foreign yet womb-like, spacious yet visceral, textured yet vaporous, awakening yet dreamlike, infinite yet 48 minutes. —Brent DiCrescenzo’s 10.0 review of Radiohead’s Kid A , 2000

Schreiber: I was editing it really heavily for a while, and at a certain point I stopped. Even though I had qualms with the review, I also knew that it was going to definitely get us all kinds of attention.

Shipley: The review was so ridiculous. Like, yeah, a British band with guitars did some electronic stuff. This is not actually something completely never-done-before. This is Achtung Baby .

Shipley: That was Ryan.

Schreiber: A lot of people who logged on to Pitchfork that day were seeing the site for the very first time. A lot of them also were young enough to just feel like, Hey, these are my peers writing about music .

DiCrescenzo: I don’t remember the exact numbers. I remember our normal reviews were probably in the thousands. Five thousand or something like that. And then it was like, Holy shit, we got into the tens of thousands , and then it was the hundreds of thousands.

Schreiber: Kid A was the first record where we were like, OK, it’s 2000—we’ve been doing this for a couple years as goofballs. Now we’re really ready to step it up .

2001–06 “The Pitchfork Effect”

Chris Kaskie: I was working for the Onion in the early 2000s. I read Pitchfork, I liked Pitchfork, but I was frustrated by the lack of consistency. Ryan needed someone to apply skills he didn’t have, whether it be business or advertising. I’m like, I’m just going to hit this dude up. This could be an actual magazine.

Ryan Schreiber: Chris could literally be called a co-founder of Pitchfork, even though he came on seven years into the site’s history. He registered the trademarks and turned us into an actual business.

Kaskie: It wasn’t incorporated. We set up payroll and set up health insurance. There’s checks that people weren’t getting paid. We had to go into Ryan’s email to see if anyone had ever written to him interested in learning about Pitchfork. I think the New York Observer was the first place to hit us back.

Hillary Frey (Slate editor in chief; author of that 2004 Observer story about Pitchfork): My central question was: Who are these unknown dudes in Chicago telling us in New York what’s good and bad in indie music?

Julianne Escobedo Shepherd: As I recall, there were only a couple other women writing there at that time, one of whom was Amanda Petrusich .

Frey: Their earnestness and wide-eyedness was pretty winning, as was their dumpy basement workspace. It wasn’t just that they were green, but they were true disrupters who had no idea what they were disrupting. It was both infuriating and inspiring that they were having an impact without setting out with that intention.

Schreiber: The readership was spiking like crazy, beyond anything I ever anticipated. Pitchfork was starting to turn into a business.

Brian Howe: Scott Plagenhoef was the first professional editor brought in to Pitchfork, and really changed things for the better in a lot of ways.

Scott Plagenhoef (editor in chief, 2004–11): I had a job in sports journalism in Evanston. I was friends with Brent, and I’m sure he introduced me to Ryan. I started getting into his ear about records and eventually started to contribute freelance copy editing, usually preparing reviews that would be published the next day. At the end of 2004, Ryan first hired Kaskie to operationalize and professionalize the business side of things. A month later, he brought me in to do the same to the editorial side.

Shepherd: Scott was a really good editor—I think he signified the professionalization of Pitchfork, because I got real edits back.

Howe: God, I imagine now what it was like for the poor guy managing this cattle pen of a bunch of slightly younger writers.

Amy Phillips: The office was, like, three small rooms. It kind of looked like a film noir detective agency.

Kaskie: Like a private investigator’s office in Logan Square.

Phillips: I was the fifth employee there. Schreiber called me, out of the blue, and was like, “Hey, do you want to be our news editor and move to Chicago?” I was 23, about to be 24.

Kaskie: It was me, Amy, and maybe two or three other editorial people.

Phillips: I remember having my first employee review in a closet.

Kaskie: We used to call that closet Burger Town. The office was right above this diner called Johnny’s Grill. It smelled like burger grease. It was gross. I’m pretty sure the ventilation was right behind the wall.

Phillips: The office was just chock-full of records, promo CDs stacked up to the ceilings, and posters and everything. I just felt like I was living, and breathing, music everywhere.

Howe: The news section was nothing like what it is now. There weren’t any reporters. I think it was an unpaid position. We basically just rewrote stories from NME but with jokes in them.

Phillips: There wasn’t a churn of places to get information, so it was very laid-back. You got your four stories up on Friday and took the rest of the day off and didn’t think about it till Monday.

Howe: The Strokes had gone on tour in Europe and they’d taken a piss in a river behind a stage, but it was some kind of really holy or sacred river. And it caused this big uproar. I can’t remember the details. This could probably be looked up . So, I did a whole “The Strokes: ‘Monumental Desecration’ Tour” post with the band defacing all these monuments all over Europe. That was kind of the temper of Pitchfork news at the time.

Plagenhoef: When I was hired, there was no publishing platform.

Phillips: Building those stories took a really long time.

Plagenhoef: I would wake up early every morning and copy and paste reviews and news items into the HTML code of the site in order to update it.

Tom Breihan (contributor, 2004–11): We all had big opinions. We all liked making fun of each other, and we all liked drinking. I remember that as being a great time, even though nobody was making any money. And I’m sure the site was exploiting all of us, to one extent or another.

Brent DiCrescenzo: Scott, Kaskie, Ryan, and I met in a diner in Logan Square in 2004. I was like, “This is bullshit. I know that my reviews are what’s driving most of the traffic to the site. You either give me money for my reviews or take them off the website.” So I technically sold them the reviews. Probably for not nearly what I should have charged them. But I was struggling to make rent. I needed fucking money. I had put in six years of daily labor on it. For Ryan, it was his entire life and being. But for all the rest of us, it was just a side hustle—or not even a hustle, just a hobby. It was a way to hang out with people and get CDs and meet some awesome people.

Kaskie: We needed to build a semblance of a plan to make sure every writer that writes for us is getting paid, at minimum. Whether or not that’s fair pay, we have to figure that out next.

Breihan: When I started freelancing in 2004, they didn’t pay critics.

Shepherd: I did get paid, but not at first, though. I was doing it out of the kindness of my heart.

David Moore (contributor, 2004–05): You had to write for free for six months before you could get on the payroll. The way it worked was you came on as a reviewer in a preliminary role, and you had to write five reviews that didn’t suck.

Plagenhoef: It was important to establish that writers weren’t going to chase us for payments, and we weren’t requiring them to invoice us, which was possible because everyone was paid the same for the same work.

David Turner: The first review I did got me paid $65. It took me four months to get paid. I had to bother multiple editors.

Andrew Nosnitsky (contributor, 2012–18): Pitchfork is one of the few publications I can say this about: I never had a problem with getting them to pay me.

David Drake: The reviews were somewhere in the area of $110 to $125.

Howe: The number that comes to my head is $50.   Shepherd: It wasn’t much, like $15. I wrote one track review and got a check for $2.50. I felt like it was more effort to walk to my bank than to just pin it on my fucking bulletin board.

Eric Harvey: I want to say, when I started, an A-block review was maybe $100, maybe $150. I might be overstating that. It wasn’t a lot. And then I think it was $50 or $75 for the lower-tier ones.

Shepherd: They didn’t have money for a long time. It must have been just ad revenue, and it was probably, like, Kaskie going directly to the Thrill Jockey offices and having them spend $350 on display ads.

Kaskie: We were charging $30 for two banner ads. It’s like, Oh my God, we’re going nowhere, man .   Drake: In college in the early 2000s, I remember meeting a guy who seemed like the kind of guy who would read Pitchfork. I was like, “Do you read Pitchfork?” and he was like, “Yeah.” That was Pitchfork becoming real to me.

Harvey: For my money, Arcade Fire was the one that sent it over the edge.

Turner: Pitchfork was a very different site post–Arcade Fire.

Moore: After one month of writing there, I got this huge review mostly because things were not super professional yet. I was like, “Hey, is anybody reviewing this Arcade Fire album? I really like it.” And Ryan was like, “Well, I kind of want to write about it, but I don’t think I have time, so yeah, you should definitely do it.” Then the deadline got pushed up—they wanted to get it out before the album release. I was 20 and I wrote this crazy review. I suggested giving this thing a 10, and a lot of people were against it because it was actually a divisive record on the staff message board.

So long as we’re unable or unwilling to fully recognize the healing aspect of embracing honest emotion in popular music, we will always approach the sincerity of an album like Funeral from a clinical distance. Still, that it’s so easy to embrace this album’s operatic proclamation of love and redemption speaks to the scope of The Arcade Fire’s vision.  —David Moore’s 9.7 review of Arcade Fire’s Funeral , 2004

Harvey: There’s a venue in Louisville called the Southgate House. I saw Arcade Fire there, I want to say, early 2005 . The place was packed, and there was an absolute explosion of noise when the band hit the stage—the kind of thing you’d expect for a legacy act with a devoted fan base, not a band that no one had heard of two months prior. I was like, Oh, OK, this is the effect that Pitchfork is having .

“Putting too much weight in somebody else’s opinion of a piece of art, that is a dangerous thing,” says Richard Reed Parry, a musician for Arcade Fire, whose album Funeral received a rapturous 9.7 rating from the site. —“ The Pitchfork Effect ,” Wired, Sept. 1, 2006

Jeff Weiss (contributor, 2011–17): The Arcade Fire review obviously changed everything. I remember, six months later, the L.A. Times did a big story on the site, and they had kind of arrived.

Shortly after a glowing Pitchfork review came out in September, the Arcade Fire’s label, Merge Records, was hounded by nearly two dozen publications asking for copies of the album. “I said, ‘Sure, but didn’t I send you a copy two months ago?’ ” said Martin Hall, a promoter for Merge. —“ The Zeitgeist Guys ,” L.A. Times, March 7, 2005

Schreiber: Once I got a taste for it, I was like, Man, I can’t believe we can do this .

Howe: I think of a puppy that’s just pounced on a grasshopper for the first time and is like, Oh, I can do that. Let’s try and do that again. Let’s try and do it on purpose this time .

Harvey: Clap Your Hands Say Yeah’s album from 2005 was another big Pitchfork moment when Pitchfork coordinated this band that came from the blogs.

Howe: I genuinely was enthusiastic about that band. But the message I took from whatever Ryan said to me was, like, “Yeah, we’re going to blow this band up. Do you want to be the guy?”

Schreiber: Clap Your Hands, in hindsight, maybe not the most—how would I say this? Probably not our finest draft pick.

Megan Jasper (CEO of Sub Pop Records): They knew music really well. They could make connections in a lot of the reviews that may have been lost on a lot of other people. And oftentimes you could take those connections and actually discover something else. Pitchfork really did truly serve as a music discovery resource for a lot of people. And it was trusted, because they had great writers and they had great thinkers.

Puja Patel (contributor, 2013; editor in chief, 2018–24): Reading Pitchfork was kind of like talking to the guy at the record store. It was the person who was a little arrogant—but possibly rightfully so.

Kaskie: We are not trying to be everything to everybody. We’re trying to be something to someone.   Patel: In many ways, I’ve got to say, I didn’t necessarily think Pitchfork was intended to be for me. But at the same time, I desperately wanted to know what they thought about things.

Jasper: As a publicist, you’re pitching multiple publications for a review or a story or a cover, but really, there was a massive window where if you were able to land something positive from Pitchfork, it was the most impactful. We would see immediate spikes on all of the records that were favorably reviewed, and we would see a really loud nothing on any new records that were just completely fucking decimated.

Zola Jesus (musician, 2017 Best New Music recipient): It felt like Pitchfork was in control of the destiny of my career to an extent, because it did have this huge place in breaking or burying artists. The pressure as a musician got more to be I better get a good review .

Daniel Gill (owner of Force Field PR & Mgmt): That’s what caused people to put so much weight in their reviews—they were not scared to call out somebody when they turned in a stinker.

Kaskie: In order to know what’s good, you have to know what’s bad. So negative reviews were important.

Jasper: You loved the great reviews when they would do right by an artist, and you hated the super snarky, shitty reviews.

Mark Richardson: We talk about all of the stunt reviews that Pitchfork had, a lot of which are very funny and I thought were great.   Kaskie: I never “wrote” any more than a few reviews on the site. But one of them was the video of the monkey peeing in his own mouth for the Jet record Shine On . We were sitting at Lula Cafe, right downstairs from the Chicago office, and we’re like, “This record’s dog shit. I just got this video from my friend, let’s just put this up instead.” We used the byline “Ray Suzuki,” our catchall byline for a writer who didn’t want to use their name directly. And it was as simple as that. We laughed and we did it.

2007–15 “Sorry :-/”

Craig Jenkins (New York magazine music critic; Pitchfork contributor, 2013–16): I thought the site needed a turnaround. The perspective was very walled-in. It was antagonistic toward the stuff that the average person would be appreciating.

Julianne Escobedo Shepherd: When Pitchfork started to get much bigger, the emails I was getting didn’t really reflect who I wanted to be writing for. Most of it was invective, and it was all, like, young white men who were writing from college email addresses. I remember I wrote a column about some split 7-inch that Erase Errata and Sonic Youth had done about Mariah Carey. I said something like, Mariah’s album is fine , which is insane, because that album was fucking amazing. But people were fucking furious that I mentioned a pop star. It bummed me out a lot.

Scott Plagenhoef: One of the immediate editorial takeaways I had was that Pitchfork risked being a dead end if it didn’t diversify what it covered.

Tom Breihan: It was fundamentally obvious that Cam’ron was more interesting than Modest Mouse or whatever.

Andrew Nosnitsky: I don’t think indie rock was the defining music of my generation. I think quite transparently it was hip-hop, but for purely mechanical and straight-up white-supremacy reasons, Pitchfork is seen as the defining music publication.

Lindsay Zoladz (New York Times pop music critic; Pitchfork associate editor, 2011–14): The first Lorde album is a rare one where I think readers can tell you wrote something to a higher score than it ended up getting. It received a 7.3 , but I probably wrote an 8.1, and I think history has proven me right. The funny thing, though, is that review ended up running in the C-slot that day, behind, like, the Afghan Whigs or something. We ran a review of the Lorde album a week late, and in a C-slot, as though it were not important, but some of us felt like it was a triumph just to get it reviewed at all.

Dan Le Sac (musician): Pitchfork could be a little … I don’t want to use the word pretentious , but it seemed to form a scene around a band instead of just letting a band be.

Ryan Schreiber: We wanted to create a roster of artists who people found out about through Pitchfork, who became associated with Pitchfork. It became a little bit of an industry unto itself.

Daniel Gill: I think they had the approach of, We’ll find a group of maybe 20 artists and just kind of report on everything they do .

Amy Phillips: These were the people we cared about so deeply, and we knew our audience cared. We can decide that Jeff Tweedy getting into a fight with a drummer onstage is, like, the biggest story in the world.

Bethany Cosentino (frontwoman of Best Coast): They wrote about everything I did. My friends used to joke, “You could take a shit and Pitchfork would write about it.”

Chris Kaskie: You could see the impact. 2005 is our first Pitchfork Music Festival, then 2006 it keeps going. We start to see these bands playing in front of audiences 10 times the size of their biggest show ever. That’s the goal, man. To put fucking Titus Andronicus in front of 10,000 people. They have never done that before. Then we’re headlining the Silver Jews with 25,000 people. That is fucking amazing.

Gill: In those early years, we usually have six or seven artists on the Pitchfork Festival bill every year, and I would have people doing simultaneous interviews with six different artists and just moving everybody around the room. Nardwuar is doing the interview over here, WBEZ is doing the interview over there. Woods are over here, Vivian Girls are over here. It was pretty wild.

Plagenhoef: The Pitchfork Festival proved you could sell out an experience with artists who wouldn’t normally be considered headliners.

R.J. Bentler (vice president of video programming, 2007–19): We built the first Pitchfork.tv site on a Flash player from scratch. Somehow Radiohead caught wind of what we were doing, and we launched with this incredible Radiohead video of Thom Yorke playing drums. We went along for a few years there doing our thing, and YouTube was obviously growing immensely, and we went out to L.A. and managed to convince them to give us a few million dollars to start a YouTube channel.

Megan Jasper: It became normal, honestly, for some bands to grow and be able to sell 100,000 records. Indie rock just kept blooming and growing. It became something larger than we had ever anticipated.

Carl Wilson: There was this frenzy going on about band discovery at the time in a way that I have never really seen in North American music journalism before. It reminds me of what the ecosystem was always like in the British music-weekly world. They were basically all covering London and vying with each other to be the one who discovered the latest thing in London. The result was that things got a little polarized. Bands were either vying to be the next big discovered band, or they were setting themselves up in opposition to that and trying to make music that nobody could market in that way.

Mark Richardson: Pitchfork became very aware of its power. For that couple-year period after Arcade Fire, the awareness of that was probably detrimental to Pitchfork in some ways. That self-consciousness about where Pitchfork fit into things and the power that it had kind of informed how you would hear music. And the famous example would be Black Kids.

Kaskie: We went a little overboard on their EP.

You can download Black Kids’ four-song demo, Wizard of Ahhhs , for free on their MySpace —it’s not available in stores. They’re giving away something we can’t buy often enough: a record with not just a distinctive aesthetic, but also one single-worthy track after another.  —Marc Hogan’s 8.3 review of Black Kids’ Wizard of Ahhhs EP , 2007

Richardson: We had plenty of chances along the way to step back and say, “Is Black Kids really a great band?” We didn’t, we got swept up in it.

Plagenhoef: With Black Kids, it was an apology to really everyone involved—the audience, the band.

Richardson: Now we’re saying, “Oh, that was a mistake.” To me, that’s not the best of what I remember of Pitchfork.

Kaskie: Those are my dogs. I took the picture in my kitchen.

Richardson: I think Pitchfork got better after that in some ways because it wasn’t entering the mix so much. Once you’re like, “We say it’s great,” and it doesn’t necessarily become a huge deal, then it’s like, “Well, we better just focus on what we think is good then, because we don’t have the Midas touch of creating a frenzy.”

Plagenhoef: The closest I remember to allowing myself to feel like we really shifted something was before the 2008 festival. We did a standalone show in Millennium Park with a few bands, including Fleet Foxes. It was a gorgeous night, we’re sitting along the waterfront in the grass of a Frank Gehry–designed amphitheater listening to them performing “ White Winter Hymnal ,” a song we first heard maybe six months earlier on their MySpace page. Having a small part of bringing something like that to so many people felt magical.

Eric Harvey: We mostly interacted on what was called the staff board. It was a private message board, named Staffington. All the writers were on it.

Brian Howe: We’d get on the board and show off, and peacock our hot takes, and share whatever we called “memes” in those days.

Phillips: That was how I first “met” all of these people, through this message board.

Plagenhoef: It was a huge timesaver to have all of this dialogue written down and accessible. As far as our staff was concerned, Mark Pytlik discovered Beach House . He started a thread on the album, said, I know we get a lot of pitches from this PR company and you may not be inclined to check them all out but this one is special .

Breihan: It was the same type of shit that we would be talking on Twitter a few years later, except even more unguarded because it was just this small closed loop of people doing it.

Howe: Pitchfork was just a bunch of people spread out all over the country. A lot more staffers from the Midwest, people from the smaller scenes, and even people from the middle of nowhere. The message board was a place that made Pitchfork feel like a community and like a lifestyle.

Harvey: When an album got announced, Pitchfork would usually have a watermarked MP3 copy of it, and they would upload it to a password-protected FTP server. And so we would listen to it, and then we would talk about it on the staff board. Some records got six, seven, eight pages of conversation. Other records were a fart in the wind.

Howe: Joanna Newsom’s record Ys eventually leaked from that server.

Phillips: I think Drag City never forgave us. When the Condé Nast sale happened and we were doing the transition, one of the first things was, like, OK, we have to nuke this server.

Cat Zhang: Everyone who works at Pitchfork probably has a really ambivalent relationship with the score system and yet knows that the moment that Pitchfork abolishes it, the whole site tanks.

Schreiber: The ratings matter. We have 101 possible ratings, and it needs to mean something. Let’s really protect that.

Brent DiCrescenzo: We inherently understood how ridiculous and funny it is to split hairs between a 4.3 and a 4.4. It’s ridiculous. But we thought it was funny. And now it’s like, it seems so arrogant and serious.

Schreiber’s semi-favorable review, which begins in earnest after a six-paragraph preamble comprising a long list of baroquely rendered, seemingly unrelated anecdotes peppered with obscure references, summarizes music as a “solid but uninspired effort.” —“ Pitchfork Gives Music a 6.8 ,” the Onion, Sept. 10, 2007

Lindsay Zoladz: I remember emails from Mark Richardson like, “This sounds like a 7.0, is that OK with you?” I would be like, “How about a 7.3.” I sometimes relished in pushing back on a score because I had a lot of fight in me at that age.

Jenkins: Past a certain decimal point, I never cared, which is a funny thing at a website where people are really fighting over a .2.

Howe: The way I read Pitchfork, and the way I think it should work anyway, is that the words represent the writer’s view, and the score represents the site’s editorial perspective.

Harvey: There were times where Scott would try to place a review with somebody who had a vibe on the album that synced up with the editorial vibe, which I always thought was fine. You want to have a strong editorial voice in this magazine.

Breihan: Every once in a while I would hear one of the other editors complaining about Schreiber’s tastes.

Matthew Perpetua (contributor, 2009–12): I think sometimes if Ryan just wasn’t feeling an album being Best New Music, he would have the prerogative to downgrade it. It’s like that. It’s his company.

Schreiber: There were definitely a lot of records throughout Pitchfork’s history where I either pulled back on the hype wagon, or other times where the staff wasn’t feeling something, and I was like, “This is something that is really going to resonate.” And in those cases, you’re just trying to steer the ship to the port as steadily as you can.

Breihan: I was once told that Ryan Schreiber was the reason Bon Iver’s For Emma, Forever Ago did not get Best New Music.

Schreiber: I did not see what was special about that album in the beginning.

Breihan: I went into Pitchfork with a chip on my shoulder, because I was like, “They never write about rap, and if they do, they write about it wrong.” It’s all Sage Francis. It’s no Three 6 Mafia.

Nosnitsky: It seemed like a lot of online music journalism was boosting backpack rap aggressively. Little Brother, Def Jux—which, I like a lot of that music, but I’m sure if you go look at Metacritic for what the best-reviewed 2003 rap albums are, it’s going to be all MF Doom and no 50 Cent.

Jenkins: This website could use a lot more people who are writing about street rap who understand anything about the inner city from experience, who can talk about that music, who can talk about the lives that the people are leading that make it.

Breihan: It was a very, very white, very male group. And not just that, but people from a particular musical perspective. You could advocate for David Banner if you could also talk about Devendra Banhart.

Timmhotep Aku (senior editor, 2018–19): Pitchfork felt like maybe an interloper at a certain point when it came to hip-hop, until they took steps to kind of legitimize itself with the right writers—being more cautious with tone and reverent to context.

Nosnitsky: What hit me quickly in writing for Pitchfork is suddenly I was not a person who had been writing about rap music for a decade at that point. I was an indie white guy on the indie white site, and anybody who wanted to catch feelings about it put me in the same crosshairs as everyone else.

Aku: I think a big blemish on Pitchfork’s legacy is taking Chief Keef to the shooting range.

Jenkins: That was definitely way up on the list of Pitchfork rap mishandlings.

David Turner: That was Vice-level shit.

During the approximately two-hour hearing, a gun range employee testified that Chief Keef was holding the rifle during an on-camera interview by Pitchfork Media, an Internet-based music publication . The judge ruled that by holding the firearm, Chief Keef violated the terms of his 18-month probation sentence for pointing a gun at a Chicago police officer in 2011. —“ Chief Keef Jailed After Judge Finds Probation Violation ,” Chicago Tribune, Jan. 15, 2013

R.J. Bentler: I wasn’t there for that shoot. I don’t really remember the specifics of how that was concepted, but clearly, that was an oversight, a mistake. I don’t know what more I can really say about it.

Richardson: Gawker published a piece that was very funny. The headline was something like, “There are more people named Mark writing for Pitchfork than there are women writing for Pitchfork.” There were women that wrote for the site from the very beginning, but the idea that it was mostly white guys was totally true. That was really embarrassing. I became editor in chief in 2011, the year Pitchfork moved to Brooklyn. Things really started to change then.

Zoladz: I don’t know that I’d have a career without Mark. He DM’d me on Twitter and said, “Feel free to pitch me sometime.” I was 23 or 24, living in an attic apartment, and I went home from my job and I poured myself a very large glass of wine, to the brim, and I sat down and I wrote an email to Mark pitching all these crazy ideas that I had.

Turner: I was at my college library, I was working, and then I got an email from Mark Richardson. I felt so fucking giddy. My co-worker was like, “What’s going on?” I was trying to explain it, but he didn’t give a fuck.

Puja Patel: Mark was one of the first people from the site to reach out to me just to kind of say, “Hey, what’s up? I like you and your writing.”

Jill Mapes (senior editor and features editor, 2016–24): Mark Richardson is a mentor of mine and was a proponent of my work. I think Richardson’s era as EIC and part of Plagenhoef’s era was when it was getting more professional—they launched features, they were doing these incredible, dynamic-looking cover stories.

Zoladz: I was hired to work in an office in Williamsburg, and then we moved to an office in Greenpoint.

Jayson Greene : It was whitewashed, cinder block walls, literal bare lightbulbs.

Jeremy Gordon (deputy news editor, 2014–16): There was one bathroom that was shared with the floor, which in retrospect was so crazy. Two urinals and one stall for a whole floor.

Zoladz : It was really fun and I met some amazing friends there. It was a social thing too. That was a time when all the venues were still in Williamsburg. So I would finish my workday and then just walk to a show at 285 Kent or Death by Audio or Glasslands or something, all these places that don’t exist anymore.

Jenkins: In 2009, I went to a Williamsburg waterfront show where Grizzly Bear and Beach House played, and Beyoncé and Jay-Z attended. Those New York artists even being in the same room goes to show how blasted-open the barriers between indie rock and the mainstream were. These magical collisions of taste are, I think, uniquely Pitchfork.

Phillips: When Radiohead dropped In Rainbows , I just wrote this completely unhinged news story that was like “ NEW RADIOHEAD ALBUM AAAAAAAHHH!!! ” But the next time Radiohead dropped an album, it was very much like, “Radiohead announced a new album . It’s coming on this day.” We grew into a legitimate news enterprise.

Among the winners at the American Society of Magazine Editors’ prestigious National Magazine Awards on Thursday night was indie music website Pitchfork , which picked up an Ellie (ASME’s elephant-shaped trophy) for General Excellence in Digital Media. —“ Indie Music Site Pitchfork Wins National Magazine Award ,” the Hollywood Reporter, May 3, 2013

Schreiber: We were just trying to weather the state of the media at that point. We were well into the era of social media influencers sucking up all the marketing dollars and ad dollars. So we were making a decent go of it, but it was getting harder and harder.

Adam Krefman: I think the economic headwinds in small or niche media are really strong. And if you don’t have diversified revenue, and specifically if you don’t have a really good model to bring in basically a paywall of some kind or some type of membership model or something, it’s nearly impossible to make it on advertising dollars alone.

Schreiber: We needed to find a partner. Because otherwise, we were going to have to make some very difficult decisions.

Greene: I remember very clearly a huge advertiser blithely changed the nature of their reporting schedule and told us that we wouldn’t be getting the money that we always got for another 60 days. There were moments like that where you were such a tiny guppy that it was kind of hard to do anything except brace yourself.

Kaskie: I spent the entire year of 2014 going and meeting with different types of people that have money, whether it’s VCs or private equity or anything else. And most every time, the only thing they ever wanted was scale. And unnatural growth, non-organic growth is not what we do. The minute you do that, you’ve pissed in the fucking waterhole. It’s over.

2015–24 “A Very Passionate Audience of Millennial Males”

Al Shipley: Pitchfork basically did the classic indie rock thing of building a cool thing, selling it to a big company, and then the big company fucks it up.

Chris Kaskie: We started talking to Condé Nast, at first just about video syndication. And they asked if we’re open to an acquisition. So it’s like, “Yeah, let’s investigate that.”

Ryan Schreiber: We were really enthusiastic and very excited about it in the beginning, because it felt like, here is a place where great journalism is valued, is prized, and we’re now going to have resources to do that much more of it.

Mark Richardson: My immediate response was that if this is going to happen, this is probably the best version of it. At some point Vice had said something like, “What if we buy Pitchfork?” I knew that there had been conversations around that. I was like, “Oh, that would suck.”

Jayson Greene: If I’m going to be owned by a major media corporation, what’s the one that you want instead of being owned by the place that also owns Vogue and the New Yorker?

Schreiber: The pitch was that we could lean on them for resources to support new verticals like our print magazine, the Pitchfork Review, and film site, the Dissolve, while drawing on each other’s expertise to help pave the way forward.

Timmhotep Aku : I wasn’t one of those people who were like, “Oh, you’re selling out to the man.” You’re kind of all  the man in different flavors. There’s a big corporate man, and there’s an independent man.

Jill Mapes: There was this assurance that things weren’t going to change and that they weren’t going to make us move into the World Trade Center. And then by that summer, we were moving into the WTC.

Amy Phillips: I think that so much good came out of that marriage. I mean, just strictly resource-wise. I got pregnant a year after the sale, and Condé Nast had a whole maternity plan, and they had a pumping room at the office. I don’t know what that would’ve looked like if we hadn’t been a part of Condé.

Richardson: Of course, the first day was a disaster.

The acquisition will take immediate effect. It gives Condé Nast a stand-alone music publication with a strong editorial voice, said Fred Santarpia, the company’s chief digital officer, who led the acquisition. It brings “a very passionate audience of millennial males into our roster,” he said. —“ Pitchfork Media Becomes Part of Conde Nast Stable ,” New York Times, Oct. 13, 2015

Richardson: That was kind of a worst-case scenario in terms of how it was messaged. The staff took that very hard and they were already pretty nervous about it.

Jeremy Gordon: They brought us into a meeting with Ryan and Fred Santarpia, the guy who gave the “millennial males” quote. There were trays of food. They made a Champagne toast, and I knew pretty much immediately that the site was going to change. I remember very dramatically borrowing a cigarette from my co-worker. I was like, “I need to go take a walk.”

Quinn Moreland (staff writer, 2015–22): When Condé bought Pitchfork, from what I understand, no one got any sort of pay bump. There wasn’t: Suddenly we have all this money, and everyone’s receiving it!

Gordon: We were all waiting, like, Are they going to give us more money? What is the gesture of goodwill here?

Moreland: This was my introduction to unionizing, in a way. It was what eventually flipped the lightbulb. We had a meeting at Charlotte Zoller’s house in Greenpoint. That was the first time it seemed that the editorial staff had gotten together to talk about: “Why aren’t we getting any benefits from this acquisition?”

Gordon: The attendance was pretty full. The word union wasn’t said out loud, but I was interested in what collective positions we could take to shore ourselves up. Everyone was on the same page emotionally, but we didn’t have the language to really organize.

Mapes: There’s a before-and-after for anybody who experienced Pitchfork pre-union and post-union.

Moreland: I had been making $32,000 a year. I think there is a lot of bitterness within that publication for all the years that people were working for crumbs and being treated like shit.

Schreiber: Pretty quickly after the sale, it turned into us fighting for resources and trying to help people understand what Pitchfork even was.

Kaskie: In January 2016, Ryan and I went to a Condé meeting. It was me, David Remnick, Scott Dadich from Wired, and so on. The CEO pointed to a board and was like, “We’ve lost some money, here’s our goal for next year.” And I looked at David Remnick. I had just met him that day. I was just like, “OK, well, I don’t know how we’re going to help that.”

Schreiber: It became apparent pretty much immediately, when they laid out what the traffic goals were … well, how can I say this? I think our expectations were just different from what was delivered, and what was promised never really materialized.

Kaskie: It was very clear that the energy in the room shifted to, like, “Oh my God, we all have to figure out how to make more money.”

Schreiber: As we got deeper into the relationship, we were made to move into the World Trade Center, into the Condé offices, and given this whole initiation situation, we started to realize how little anyone there knew what Pitchfork was, and who its audience was, and its history.

Greene: I remember thinking that I felt like we were on a middle school field trip. It was a very funny and awkward situation, going to this gleaming spire of a building. We’d been working in this place with barely any plumbing.

Moreland: When we started at the World Trade Center, we had a finance team that sat next to us. A majority of the people just seemed like they didn’t care at all about the site.

Kaskie: For a while we had some of the most brilliant salespeople in the entire world at Pitchfork. Those people lived and breathed music. They knew more about the B-sides on Merge Records from 1993 than anyone in the world.

Richardson: Before you knew it, our sales guys were moving on, and now we’re dealing with Condé’s salespeople, who really didn’t understand the audience.

Kaskie: I broke my contract two years in. It literally said that I was responsible for Pitchfork, the brand, and all of its moving parts. And so any diminishment of that role meant that I have rights to terminate my agreement. And there were plenty of people that would be in there saying, “No, you can’t do that.” When you make it harder for me, you have diminished my ability to do my job.

Speaking with Billboard , Schreiber, 42, says his decision to leave Pitchfork has been about a year in the making, and involved ensuring that he left the publication in good hands—both under Condé Nast, which acquired the company in 2015, and with new editor-and-chief Puja Patel, who has overseen all general operations since joining in September. … “I don’t want to be defined in my life by just one thing. I feel like, in a sense, I’ve kind of beat the game.” —“ Pitchfork Media Founder Ryan Schreiber Leaves Company ,” Billboard, Jan. 8, 2019

Schreiber: To be real, also, at the same time, the result of Pitchfork signing on with Condé was that it did get to do another eight years of great music journalism that it might not have been able to do otherwise.

Moreland: I remember there was a contentious meeting when we wanted to go public with our unionization campaign. This must’ve been in 2019. There was a party for a Sky Ferreira cover story , the first under Puja. Condé was very excited about it. They had this party for it at Kinfolk. Anna Wintour was there. We had wanted to go public that day and make it a big, in-your-face, “There’s all this money being spent, but we’re not seeing any!”–type situation. I think, in retrospect, it was the right decision not to do that.

Puja Patel: I came in with a pretty strong vision of what I wanted to do, which was make things a little more accessible, make things more expansive, bring more women, bring more people of color into the fold, and also just kind of relax a little.

Julianne Escobedo Shepherd: I credit Puja with turning that place into something that was better, editorially, than it’s ever been.

Patel: I think what people don’t always realize is that simply having someone at the top who is of a background that is not traditional to the publication, it does not mean that the rest comes easy. If anything, it just means that there is more pressure, more eyes, more weight, more expectation. It takes a year of getting folks to trust you, to prove that you are doing the work of diversity intentionally and not in a way that is showboaty and tokenizing, but in a way that furthers the journalism.

Moreland: I remember the bargaining session that Puja came to. She spoke about her past at Gawker, being involved in organizing there and that it was something she found very important. I think she was supportive the whole time, but she also had to deal with Condé, who were clearly not supportive.

David Drake: She brought in a lot more writers of color and writers with different backgrounds. Stuff that I had felt kind of lonely in championing , like Jazmine Sullivan was now Best New Music .

Shepherd: She made Herculean efforts to diversify it in a way that was natural and not just ticking off some DEI boxes. I really appreciated that because especially in music criticism, a lot of women get out of the game when they hit middle age. And credit to those who are still doing it, because it’s not easy, especially when you have kids. But I really appreciate her for looking at a middle-aged woman and recognizing my writing on its merits rather than whether or not I can stay out past 11:30.

Patel: From what I’ve heard, the previous era, it was a pretty small room where things like Best New Music or big pans were decided, or what might get covered and get skipped. We have some of the best experts in their genres on our staff. So I really try to let those folks have a stronger hand in how things were scored within their expertise. If Alphonse Pierre is coming to you saying, “This young rapper is making the most interesting music in Michigan,” you should trust him.   Kieran Press-Reynolds (contributor, 2021–present): What’s honestly really nice about Pitchfork is that even though a lot of the staff were millennials and older, they were not the Bob Guccione Jr.s of the world. They were appreciative of being introduced to things.

David Turner: The idea that people have about Pitchfork, like, “Oh, it used to be about indie rock and it used to be serious, and then it got all interested in women and people of color,” never made any sense to me. Because it was on that trajectory.

Dean Van Nguyen (contributor, 2013–present): Since the early days when it was very much an indie-rock website, they went through a long-term development, and rap became one of the cornerstones. When they gave Justin Timberlake’s “My Love” song of the year, it was signaling that a lot of the more sophisticated pop was also coming into their view.

Cat Zhang: Sometimes people claim that you are part of this Pitchfork conspiracy to shift opinion to what’s popular, now that norms have changed. I’m like, “No, I’m just young, and I wasn’t paying attention to those guys at that time. I just like pop music.” I don’t really want to be beholden to what Ryan Schreiber had to say, and it’s frustrating as a young woman to have to account for the failures of these guys.

Greene: The idea that somehow this pop shift happened, and particularly in relation to being sold to Condé Nast, is hilarious.

Turner: Was the poptimist turn at Pitchfork when they put Big & Rich on their top songs of 2004?

Greene: I would ask anybody to look at the review slate of the past year and add up the number of experimental electronic records, records by noise artists or electronic collage artists, and then compare that to the number of records that were released by major labels, by pop stars. I just think it’s a stupid claim made by people who clearly didn’t read Pitchfork very much.

Gordon: All of a sudden we decided that we were going to cover bigger artists right after the sale. There’s nothing wrong about that, but when you open the door to that sort of growth, you can no longer decline coverage for reasons that are simple as “I don’t want to cover that shit.”

Moreland: At a certain point, Pitchfork couldn’t be a legitimate cultural voice without acknowledging mainstream music. That’s just, like, you’re lying to yourself. That’s a huge gap.

Zhang: It is true that especially as music media corporatizes and has to think about SEO, the more you have to run a review of the Taylor Swift re-recording. You have to write a news item about Taylor Swift. It doesn’t necessarily mean that we had to review her well—there was no mandate that was like, you had to give Taylor an 8.

There are those who already dislike Folklore on principle, who assume it’s another calculated attempt on Swift’s part to position her career as just so (how dare she); meanwhile, fans will hold it up as tangible proof that their leader can do just about anything (also a stretch). —Jill Mapes’ 8.0 review of Taylor Swift’s Folklore , July 27, 2020

Mapes: The review went up at 1 a.m. And about an hour later, I started getting phone calls and weird voicemails that weren’t even like … I could barely even hear what they were saying. It’s not like they were screaming at me. It was just like they had access to my phone number, so they just decided to see what would happen if they disrupted me in the middle of the night.

Various tweets, some of which have now been deleted or removed and some of which still remain, included Mapes’ address and phone numbers old and current. Some have included photos of Mapes and even her home. Users have “joked” about burning her house. —“ Taylor Swift Remains Silent as Fans Doxx and Harass Music Critic Over ‘Folklore’ Review ,” Daily Beast, July 30, 2020

Matthew Perpetua: Pop stans maybe take Pitchfork’s judgment more seriously than most anyone else does, probably because they’re so eager to have the stuff they like validated.

Mapes: The women who were reviewing pop records, they talked. People were afraid. They understood the power of stan groups.

Zhang: If someone was writing a controversial review, they would be told, “Hey, let us know if your mentions get out of hand,” and maybe they would advise us to deactivate. It felt very much like Pitchfork staff trying to look out for freelancers and each other. It didn’t really feel like Condé was concerned about these types of things.

Mapes: It still gives me anxiety. There’s all this big pop stuff coming out, and I feel like I should pitch reviews, but I don’t want to because I don’t want to engage with that. And also, I don’t know who it serves, because everyone knows these things are coming out. It’s not shining a light on artists. It’s not necessary. It’s not like a smaller artist or even a mid-level artist that you’re making a case for.

Moreland: In bargaining, we would always say something like, “What if Condé just decides it’s not interested in Pitchfork anymore?” Condé would be like, “Oh, that would never happen.” That’s basically exactly what happened.

“Both Pitchfork and GQ have unique and valuable ways that they approach music journalism,” Ms. Wintour said, “and we are excited for the new possibilities together. With these organizational changes, some of our Pitchfork colleagues will be leaving the company today.” —“ Condé Nast Is Folding Pitchfork Into GQ, With Layoffs ,” New York Times, Jan. 17, 2024

Mapes: This was a complete blindside—like, 15 minutes before a mandatory all-hands Zoom with Anna Wintour. Puja’s not invited. She doesn’t know about it. Anna starts speaking about the GQ thing and how some of our colleagues will be departing today, but in extremely vague terms. People even internally thought the site was being shut down.

Moreland : Big artists reached out to a lot of my laid-off co-workers to say thank you. Artists who had been criticized by these writers being like, “I always enjoyed your writing.” Artists read Pitchfork, and that was always cool, too.

Dan Le Sac: Ticket sales went up. Pitchfork drove more listeners to us with that 0.2 than it would have if they’d just given us a vicious 5.

Drake: A lot of the people on the label side, who I respect and know, actually root for a very strong critical apparatus. In a spiritual sense, there’s more support for a strong music press than one would think when talking about the guys that keep cutting these jobs and destroying these publications.

Schreiber: The site’s still operating with 8.5 million unique monthly visitors and 3 million Twitter followers. They’re obviously doing something right.

Adam Krefman: That’s kind of all you can ask of an editorial team at a website—that’s the metric. So even if Condé didn’t understand Pitchfork, they could understand that the numbers were strong.

“I Guess It Wasn’t Enough” (Epilogue)

Matthew Perpetua: I think to some extent what people are mourning with Pitchfork is music publications having that kind of power at all.

Scott Plagenhoef: I think we proved that you could reach an audience by first and foremost taking that audience, and the music, seriously. I think we proved that leading with quality—long reviews, no photo books, no comments—had a home.

Adam Krefman: How many times have you read a Pitchfork review and had seven tabs open at the end of it so you could figure out what all these references are? And then you’re down a wormhole and you found three other things? It’s the discourse and the context, all with the discovery. I think that’s what everyone’s mourning.

Jayson Greene: Streaming certainly ate into the market value of what it meant to be a curator, because the minute you give someone who is funding the engines a whiff of the idea that an app can do this thing that they think they need people to do, then they will stop spending money on the people and they will start spending on the app. That is time immemorial.

Mark Richardson: Once all music became accessible, music criticism was really for people that like to read music criticism. It’s not for the general public anymore, and I don’t think it ever will be again.

Tom Breihan: I don’t think it has anything to do with the audience for this stuff. I don’t think it has anything to do with the buzziness or the culture surrounding the site itself. I think it is just these money people coming in and making bad decisions. If they’re going to lay off people in Boeing and cut safety protocols or whatever, they’ll do it to anyone. And they did it to Pitchfork.

Carl Wilson: It seems possible to me that the only thing that is going to survive of Pitchfork is album reviews, and that everything else they do is going to disappear. They’ll just be the album review vertical of GQ.

Will Welch (global editorial director, GQ and Pitchfork): This is the beginning of a new era at Pitchfork. We are thinking big about what role music criticism and journalism should play in the era of recommendation algorithms. How can Pitchfork continue to serve music fans in ways that the machines cannot? With such a large, loyal readership, and so few other media outlets operating in the daily music space, the opportunity is huge and exciting.

Ryan Schreiber: I think people are premature to eulogize Pitchfork, because there are still a handful of people there who are continuing its mission, albeit with a skeleton crew of a staff. I have been very pleased at the job that Jeremy Larson and Matthew Strauss and the others have been doing in this sort of interim period. To me, the question is, Well, what happens whenever whoever they hire for the next editor in chief gets in that role?

Wilson: A couple of weeks ago in Toronto, I ran into an artist who had been the subject of some major indie attention. It was a wintry night, and I had just come from a friend’s birthday party, and he was just hanging around outside. I said, “It’s been a rough week with Pitchfork and everything.” And he said, “Oh, really? Because I feel like Margaret Thatcher just died.”

Timmhotep Aku: I think people have to hold the contradiction that Pitchfork provided a lot of opportunity for people to have careers in writing across the board who may not have otherwise gotten the chance. But I also think that Pitchfork has a legacy of not being self-interrogating, in a very white way.

Brian Howe: It only seems like this big monolith because it became so important somehow. But otherwise, it’s a lot of individuals, maybe strange people, working really hard to do a thing that’s strange and futile, in a way.

Greene: It was always, and only ever, a bunch of nerds writing essays about records. It was that before it became famous. And it was that after it became famous. It was only ever that, and those are the people who still come to Pitchfork, but I guess it wasn’t enough.

Amy Phillips: I think we had our time, and we were lucky that it was a very long time.

Perpetua: I think, broadly, I would say I don’t think we need to maintain Pitchfork. I think we can kind of see this as a sort of death.

Zola Jesus: Making music is a lonelier process now. I can make one of the best records of my career in 2024, and I put it out, and less people than ever will hear it, not only because there’s no more music journalism but because people don’t even know about it because of the algorithms. It kind of feels like shouting into a void.

Andrew Nosnitsky: Maybe just let Pitchfork go away and see what cool hobbyist blogs emerge in its wake. We can start the whole horrible cycle over again and see which of those blogs become the institutions over the course of 20 years, if ever.

Megan Jasper: I do think the one thing that I’ve learned over time is that when there is a vacuum—and there is one now—something else comes up.

Aku: If you’re going to do something better, it has to be different. “I’m going to be Pitchfork but brown” or “I’m going to be Noisey but Black” is corny to me.

Perpetua: You could imagine a future where Ryan Schreiber eventually buys Pitchfork back. I don’t think he necessarily should, but it’s his baby, and I would not blink at it.

David Drake: The impact of something like Pitchfork is just not what it once was, with things going to TikTok and YouTube. But those things are all also on a timer, the same way that Pitchfork was. Part of me wonders if all this is a lesson in impermanence.

Quinn Moreland: The world is so cruel right now on so many levels, and the cultural sphere is a reflection of that.

Jeff Weiss: I think it was easy to hate on Pitchfork. And probably some of it, at the time, was deserved. But find me anyone who’s confident in their taste and their opinions that isn’t worth being hated on at any moment.

Chris Kaskie: You’d rather have 10,000 people caring a lot about you than a million people who don’t give a shit.

Update, March 19, 2024: This article has been updated to clarify when Mark Richardson first contributed to Pitchfork.

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thesis on the story of an hour

The Story of an Hour

Kate chopin, everything you need for every book you read..

Women in 19th-Century Society Theme Icon

Women in 19th-Century Society

In the late 19th century, much of American society held to the deep-seated belief that women were inferior to and should remain dependent upon husbands and other male figures. On the whole, women were expected to accommodate their husbands by cooking, cleaning, and generally maintaining the household. Any employment available to them offered wages significantly less than what men earned, and women were expected to conduct their lives according to their husbands’ wishes. Most women…

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Freedom and Independence

In “The Story of an Hour,” freedom and independence—not love, not friends, not family, not honor or glory or anything else—are held up as what make a life worth living. Though Louise is at first genuinely upset by the news of Brently ’s death—and though she makes it clear that she will greatly mourn the loss of her husband—over the course of the hour in which she believes him to be dead, she comes to…

Freedom and Independence Theme Icon

Love and Marriage

You might reasonably guess, if you were told that a woman became deliriously excited soon after her husband’s sudden death, that the marriage was not a very good one. However, “The Story of an Hour” makes it clear that Louise and Brently ’s marriage was perfectly loving or, at the very least, normal. After all, Louise ’s initial reaction to her husband’s death is completely authentic and powerful: she goes alone to her room not…

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Kevin Bacon surprises students of school where ‘Footloose’ was filmed by announcing he’s visiting on prom day

Payson High School students are going to get a lot closer than six degrees of Kevin Bacon.

“Footloose,” which celebrates the 40th anniversary of its release this year, was filmed at the school in Payson, Utah. For months, the students there have tried to get the actor to attend this year’s prom , which will be the last at the building as the school will be relocating at the end of the academic year. Well, they will get a visit from the actor after Bacon confirmed he would be visiting on prom day while on TODAY March 22.

The actor called in from Atlanta while a throng of students filled the school gym. He shared his appreciation for all they have done and to let them know he will indeed be visiting Payson High School on prom day, with the announcement prompting an eruption of cheers.

“I have been so impressed with everything that’s been going on there with this crazy idea to get me to come back,” he began while noting how big the movie and the school has been to his own life.

Footloose

Bacon also showed appreciation for the students supporting his SixDegrees.org charity and how much effort they've put into trying to get him to come visit.

“I’ve been amazed at the work that all of you have been putting into this, with the musical and the flash mobs and the re-creations," he said.

“It hasn’t gone unnoticed by me, not to mention the fact that you tied in SixDegrees.org, our foundation, and are trying to figure out ways to give back to your community. It’s really inspirational, so thank you. Thank you. And I’m gonna come. I gotta come,” he continued, as the gym exploded in joy.

Students have indeed put on an all-out blitz to get Bacon to come to visit their school, using the hashtag #bacontopayson on social media, re-creating scenes from the movie, learning the “Footloose” dance and hosting an event on prom day to benefit SixDegrees.org.

"Let's dance! We're gonna do it! This is awesome!" student Rubie Raff told him after he made the announcement.

"We're gonna party really hard, Kevin," Kaleb Dymock added. 

"Thank you guys. Let's dance," Bacon said.

In a segment that aired right before Bacon's announcement, the school's student council advisor Jenny Staheli said she's proud of all the work the students have put in.

“To watch them just take ownership of that and run with it has been ... it succeeded beyond my wildest dreams, honestly,” she said.

Bacon, who celebrated the end of last year's actors strike by re - creating a famous dance scene from "Footloose," has embraced the enduring popularity of the film.

“I think that it was a great gift to be part of that movie,” he told TODAY’s Willie Geist in 2022. “I certainly took it very seriously when I was doing it and I love that people will still come up and say that they just showed it to their kids.”

CORRECTION (March 22, 2024, at 2:59 p.m. ET):  An earlier version of this story said Kevin Bacon was planning to attend Payson High School’s prom. Bacon plans to visit the school during the day of prom, not attend prom.

Drew Weisholtz is a reporter for TODAY Digital, focusing on pop culture, nostalgia and trending stories. He has seen every episode of “Saved by the Bell” at least 50 times, longs to perfect the crane kick from “The Karate Kid” and performs stand-up comedy, while also cheering on the New York Yankees and New York Giants. A graduate of Rutgers University, he is the married father of two kids who believe he is ridiculous.

Opinion Long live the overpaid cable news host!

thesis on the story of an hour

According to a piece published last month in the Wrap, CNN is headed for some tough times. Mark Thompson, CNN Worldwide’s chairman and chief executive, is targeting the network’s more than $50 million talent budget as part of a cost-cutting initiative, reported the site — meaning that top earners such as Jake Tapper, Anderson Cooper and Wolf Blitzer would be in for a haircut. A CNN spokesperson told me that the report wasn’t true.

Time will sort out this discrepancy, which I have no intention of refereeing. But if the story bears out in any of its particulars, it could portend a retrenchment in pay for the stars of cable news. A source at Fox News said, “Talent costs are certainly being looked at given the entire business model is changing.”

That would be a pity — and not because I relish subsidizing Sean Hannity’s private-jet trips or Rachel Maddow’s ice-fishing excursions. It’s deeper than that.

Barbara Walters made history in 1976 when she signed a five-year contract for $5 million with ABC , making her the first news anchor in broadcast history to clear the million-dollar annual threshold. That red-letter contract preceded the founding of CNN — the world’s first 24-hour news channel — by four years, and cable-news pay took its time in catching up to the salary scales of the major networks .

thesis on the story of an hour

Things have changed, however, in recent decades. In a 2022 arbitration demand over his firing from CNN, Chris Cuomo revealed that his base salary for 19 months of work was $14,406,250. Former host Don Lemon recently agreed to a separation agreement that paid him $24.5 million, an amount that covers the 3.5 years on his contract from the date of his gaffe-filled departure , according to the Wrap. CNN issued a statement saying that the report was “incorrect.”Salaries for other notables — CNN’s Cooper and Fox News’s Hannity, for instance — have been reported in the eight-figure ballpark. Before Fox News woke up to the fact that Tucker Carlson wasn’t worth a penny, he was in their league. MSNBC’s Maddow reportedly pulls $30 million annually for one scheduled night per week, plus some enterprise projects on the side.

Outrageous, all of it. The excess carries on while adjacent industry sectors enter a free fall even more precipitous than the tough times they sustained in decades past. The Post, the Los Angeles Times, Vice, BuzzFeed, Time, National Geographic, the Messenger and many others — all of them have either reduced staff or shut down altogether in recent months, contributing to a circumstance addressed by a provocative headline in an Atlantic piece by former Post reporter Paul Farhi : “Is American Journalism Headed Toward an ‘Extinction-Level Event’?”

What’s more, it’s these dying outfits that serve as a fodder rack for the cable news airwaves. Sure, cable news outfits have their own reporting platoons who occasionally break news — yet they also have way too much airtime to fill, and so they aggregate the best offerings of the print sector. Take it from MSNBC host Katy Tur. “Allow me just to add something,” Tur said last June after handing out honors to several print outlets at the Mirror Awards , which recognize the work of journalists who shine a light on their own industry. “A big thank you from people like me who work in cable news. You guys produce a lot of the content that we get to chew over on our shows every day. And it’s remarkable reporting, and we — I — would not have a job without you,” she said .

What could struggling news organizations do with a cable news host’s salary? In the 2000s, I edited the Washington City Paper, which produced political reporting, arts coverage, investigations, features, a food column, original photography and, I must confess, a generous helping of slapdash essays and half-baked stuff just to separate one ad from the next. (Looking back, we probably should have paused each week to give thanks for all those ads.) By the late 2000s, we were putting out a weekly print edition and updated our website constantly, all on an annual editorial budget of around $1 million and staffing levels of about a dozen. Meaning Maddow’s yearly haul could have kept us rolling for decades.

Enough angry media-oriented populism. Though the Maddow vs. alt-weekly comparison speaks to an ugly class schism in the industry, its utility ends there. Cable news became rich because it fuses entertainment with its core product; it gorges on a double-barreled revenue stream — subscriber fees paid to the networks by multichannel TV providers and advertising on the news shows; and it pounces on the national obsession with politics. This is an industry that has earned its money, one redundant bout of stale analysis after another.

Though salaries so deep in zeros reflect a traditionally prosperous segment, brutal media realities don’t much respect tradition. Have a look at the data below, which show the number of households that get the three major cable news networks:

Given the erosion of cable households, it would stand to reason that the sector’s revenue would suffer quite a blow. This chart tells a somewhat different story:

Put together, the charts reflect an industry clawing for continuity. Those who bail on their monthly cable bundle do so for any number of reasons — to save cash and switch to streaming services, for one. The upshot for cable news executives, though, is that their pay model is stalling, if not sputtering. That’s a story that spans news industry sectors: Newspapers, for instance, can no longer rely on advertising to carry the cost of sweeping newsrooms, and efforts to replace that revenue stream with digital subscriptions are disappointing — just sample the paywall travails of The Post , the Los Angeles Times and just about any small newspaper. How desperate has the situation become? A recently published field experiment offered free subscriptions to local papers in Pennsylvania to 2,529 people . Forty-four of them — 1.7 percent — bit on the deal.

Cable news cynics — and I’m one — might cheer on the sector’s plummeting fortunes in hopes that it will just go away. But that’s not going to happen. A more likely scenario is that it will shrink, devote fewer resources to its in-house newsgathering operations and amp up the desperation across its 24/7 schedules. So just picture a CNN with fewer scoops, more hyperventilation and hourly repetition; an MSNBC that panders ever more nakedly to liberal sentiment; and a Fox News — already a proven threat to democracy — inching toward the One America News model, though it has been nurturing Fox Nation, a streaming property with about 2 million subscribers, to bridge the digital transition.

We’ll take the status quo, grotesque pay scale and all.

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Kamala Harris Visits Parkland and Urges States to Adopt Red-Flag Gun Laws

At the site of the 2018 school shooting in Florida, the vice president announced federal help for states to limit weapon access for people deemed to be threats.

Kamala Harris Announces Resource Center to Help With Red-Flag Laws

Vice president kamala harris stood beside the parents of children killed in the 2018 shooting at marjory stoneman douglas high school in parkland, fla., and announced a new federal resource center to help states implement their red-flag laws..

Today I am launching the national resource center for red-flag laws. And this national resource center will be a place where we will, through that, provide for training for local leaders on how to use red-flag laws and keep communities safe. Thank you to the leaders of this community, starting with these families. This school is soon going to be torn down, but the memory of it will never be erased. And let us, through the courage and the call to action of these families, find it in ourselves to consider what they’ve been through as some level of motivation and inspiration for all of us to do more.

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By Michael D. Shear

Vice President Kamala Harris on Saturday toured the still-bloody and bullet-pocked classroom building in Parkland, Fla., where a gunman killed 14 students and three staff members in 2018, using the grim backdrop to announce a new federal resource center and to call for stricter enforcement of gun laws.

The freshman building at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School had been preserved as evidence for criminal trials and is set to be demolished this summer. For now, it remains a memorial to one of the most shocking mass shootings in the history of the United States.

In remarks after taking her tour and meeting for more than an hour with family members of victims of the attack, Ms. Harris said the experience had been a compelling one.

“Let us, through the courage and the call to action of these families, find it in ourselves to consider what they’ve been through as some level of motivation and inspiration for all of us,” she said.

“This school is soon going to be torn down,” the vice president added. “But the memory of it will never be erased.”

Ms. Harris said the attack, carried out by a former student with a history of mental health and behavior problems, should prompt officials around the country to embrace local red-flag laws. These allow courts to temporarily seize firearms and other dangerous weapons when they believe a person may be a threat to themselves or others. The Parkland shooter had purchased his gun legally.

In her remarks, Ms. Harris announced the creation of the National Extreme Risk Protection Order Resource Center, which White House officials said would provide training and technical assistance to states as they work to implement their red-flag laws.

“Red-flag laws are simply designed to allow communities a vehicle through which they can share, and have somewhere to share it, information about the concern about the potential danger or the crying out for help of an individual,” she said.

In her brief remarks, Ms. Harris said that only 21 states had passed red-flag laws and that only six of those had accepted the Biden administration’s offer of financial resources to help implement them.

“I challenge the others: ‘Come on over. We’ve got some resources for you to help you implement the work that you have done,’” she said.

The visit by Ms. Harris to the school is part of the administration’s broader effort to increase gun control measures as the United States continues to suffer regular episodes of devastating gun violence, sometimes targeting young people in schools.

In 2022, President Biden signed into law the first significant federal gun control measure in decades . The law expanded the background check system for prospective gun buyers under the age of 21, gave authorities up to 10 business days to examine juvenile and mental health records and set aside millions of dollars so states can fund intervention programs.

But shootings have continued at a horrific pace since then. Scores of people have been killed in mass shootings in Lewiston, Maine; Monterey Park, Calif.; Louisville, Ky.; Hollywood, Fla.; and many other cities across the country.

Ms. Harris said that must change. But she expressed determination to continue fighting the political gridlock in Washington, where Republicans and some Democrats on Capitol Hill have long blocked more aggressive measures, like a ban on assault-style weapons that are often used in the deadliest mass shootings.

“I will continue to advocate,” she said. “Well, what we must do in terms of universal background checks, an assault weapons ban, what we must continue to do to treat diagnose and treat trauma in our communities.”

Reporters were not allowed to join Ms. Harris on her tour of the classroom building where the attacks had taken place, or to hear her conversations with the families.

Previous descriptions of the building included blood stains from the victims still on the walls, glass shattered from bullets on the floor, and books, paper and other school supplies strewn about as they were on that grim day.

Jurors in the trial of Nikolas Cruz, the convicted shooter, were taken on a tour of the building in the summer of 2022 as they deliberated over his punishment. (He was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.)

Later, the school district announced that it would demolish the building.

“Broward County Public Schools reached this decision in consultation with health and safety experts, and out of concern for the well-being of students and staff on campus,” officials said in a statement at the time. “As we continue to heal, we remain steadfast in our commitment to supporting the Marjory Stoneman Douglas community.”

Michael D. Shear is a White House correspondent for The New York Times, covering President Biden and his administration. He has reported on politics for more than 30 years. More about Michael D. Shear

Gun Violence in America

A Historic Case: On Feb. 6, an American jury convicted a parent for a mass shooting carried out by their child for the first time. Lisa Miller, a reporter who has been following the case since its beginning, explains what the verdict really means .

Pushing for Action: A group of parents reeling from a mass shooting at their children’s private Christian school in Nashville believed they could persuade the Republican Party to enact limited gun control. The Tennessee legislature proved more hostile than they imagined .

Echoing Through School Grounds: In a Rhode Island city, gunshots from AR-15-style weapons have become the daily soundtrack for a school within 500 yards of a police shooting range. Parents are terrified, and children have grown accustomed to the threat of violence .

The Emotional Toll: We asked Times readers how the threat of gun violence has affected the way they lead their lives. Here’s what they told us .

Gun Control: U.S. gun laws are at the center of heated exchanges between those in favor and against tougher regulations. Here’s what to know about that debate .

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  1. What's a good thesis statement for "The Story of an Hour"?

    A good thesis statement for this story might discuss the fact that the original title of the story was "The Dream of an Hour." A good paper could be written discussing all the various ways and ...

  2. The Story of an Hour Critical Analysis Essay

    The Story of an Hour Analysis. Mrs. Mallard was known to have a heart problem. Richard, who is Mr. Mallard's friend, was the one who learned of Mr. Mallard's death while in the office and about the railroad accident that killed him. They are with Josephine, Mrs. Mallard's sister, as she breaks the news concerning the sudden death of her ...

  3. Analysis of Kate Chopin's The Story of an Hour

    Originally entitled "The Dream of an Hour" when it was first published in Vogue (December 1894), "The Story of an Hour" has since become one of Kate Chopin's most frequently anthologized stories. Among her shortest and most daring works, "Story" examines issues of feminism, namely, a woman's dissatisfaction in a conventional marriage and her desire…

  4. The Story of an Hour: Summary and Analysis

    Analyzing Chopin's "The Story of an Hour" takes time and careful thought despite the shortness of the story. The story is open to multiple interpretations and has a lot to reveal about women in the 1890s, and many of the story's themes, characters, and symbols critique women's marriage roles during the period.

  5. The Story of an Hour: a Critical Analysis

    Kate Chopin's short story, "The Story of an Hour," is a masterpiece of American literature, recognized for its exploration of complex themes such as freedom, marriage, and societal expectations. In this critical essay, we will delve into the narrative's underlying messages, character development, and the literary devices employed to convey its ...

  6. "The Story of an Hour" Summary & Analysis

    After her initial sobs of grief subside, Louise escapes into her bedroom and locks the door. She refuses to let Josephine or Richards follow her. Alone, she falls into a chair placed before an open window. Absolutely drained by her own anguish and haunted by exhaustion, she rests in the chair and looks out the window.

  7. Analysis, Themes and Summary of "The Story of an Hour" by ...

    Summary of "The Story of an Hour". Mrs. Mallard, who has heart trouble, is gently given the news that her husband has been killed in a train accident. Her husband's friend Richards found out at the newspaper office, confirmed the name, and went to her sister Josephine immediately. Mrs. Mallard weeps wildly and then goes to her room alone.

  8. Analysis of "The Story of an Hour" by Kate Chopin

    In "The Story of an Hour," there is both internal and external conflict. The essence of the latter is in the opposition of a person to society and its norms. Chopin refers to one of "the numerous paradoxes against which the woman had to survive in the American society in the 19 th century" - imposed roles and stereotypes (Kusi and ...

  9. The Story of an Hour Critical Essays

    Critical Overview. A popular writer during her lifetime, Chopin is best known today for her psychological novel The Awakening. Chopin's depiction of female self-assertion was regarded as immoral ...

  10. The Story of an Hour: Study Guide

    First published in 1894, "The Story of an Hour" by Kate Chopin is a poignant and thought-provoking short story. Set in the late 19th century, the narrative follows Louise Mallard, a woman with a heart condition, who receives the news of her husband's death in a railroad accident. Initially overwhelmed by grief, Louise's emotional ...

  11. The Story of an Hour Analysis & Summary

    The Story of an Hour is a short story written by Kate Chopin in 1894. This famous piece of literature was controversial for its time, as the story mentioned a female protagonist who felt relieved after her husband's death. The conclusion of The Story of an Hour is ironic, which makes the ending memorable.

  12. PDF The Story of an Hour

    Kate Chopin wrote "The Story of an Hour" on April 19, 1894. It was first published in Vogue (the same magazine that is sold today) on December 6, 1894, under the title "The Dream of an Hour." It was reprinted in St. Louis Life on January 5, 1895. You can find extensive, accurate information about Kate Chopin's stories and novels as well as ...

  13. Freedom and Independence Theme in The Story of an Hour

    In "The Story of an Hour," freedom and independence—not love, not friends, not family, not honor or glory or anything else—are held up as what make a life worth living. Though Louise is at first genuinely upset by the news of Brently 's death—and though she makes it clear that she will greatly mourn the loss of her husband—over ...

  14. 108 The Story of an Hour Essay Topics & Examples

    The key purpose of the story is to bring awareness to an issue that a human being is born to be free. The Novel "The Story of an Hour" by Kate Chopin. Speaking more precisely, the renovation of the soul and the renovation of nature go together in stressing the significance of the change.

  15. The Story of an Hour by Kate Chopin Plot Summary

    The Story of an Hour Summary. Louise Mallard has a weak heart that puts her at risk if she becomes too animated. After hearing from Richards —a friend of the family—that Louise's husband Brently Mallard has died in a train accident, her sister Josephine takes great care to break the news to Louise in a gentle, measured way.

  16. The Story of an Hour Introduction

    The Story of an Hour Introduction. Kate Chopin 's short piece " The Story of an Hour " is about a sickly wife who briefly believes her husband is dead and imagines a whole new life of freedom for herself. And then ….well, we're not going to spoil the ending for you here. Chopin's stories have been read more and more over the years - and ...

  17. The Story of an Hour: Full Plot Summary

    Josephine screams, and Richards tries unsuccessfully to block Louise from seeing him. Doctors arrive and pronounce that Louise died of a heart attack brought on by happiness. A short summary of Kate Chopin's The Story of an Hour. This free synopsis covers all the crucial plot points of The Story of an Hour.

  18. 'Story of an Hour' by Kate Chopin

    Essays. English Literature. "The Story of an Hour" by Kate Chopin is a short story from the late nineteenth century focusing on a young woman as she reacts to a report that says her husband, on the top of the list of the report, had died in a train accident. Due to this unfortunate accident she is given the chance of freedom and Chopin's ...

  19. The Story of an Hour Full Text

    The Story of an Hour. Knowing that Mrs. Mallard was afflicted with a heart trouble, great care was taken to break to her as gently as possible the news of her husband's death. It was her sister Josephine who told her, in broken sentences; veiled hints that revealed in half concealing. Her husband's friend Richards was there, too, near her.

  20. The Oral History of Pitchfork

    The inside story of the magazine everyone loved to hate. ... So, probably around an hour later, this thing arrives in my inbox. He logs on to Instant Messenger and is like, "Don't change a ...

  21. The Story of an Hour Themes

    However, "The Story of an Hour" makes it clear that Louise and Brently 's marriage was perfectly loving or, at the very least, normal. After all, Louise 's initial reaction to her husband's death is completely authentic and powerful: she goes alone to her room not…. read analysis of Love and Marriage. Previous. "The Story of an ...

  22. The Story of an Hour Essays and Criticism

    PDF Cite Share. "The Story of an Hour" is built around the "expression of a woman's shockingly unorthodox feelings about her marriage''; so says Bert Bender, in an essay devoted to Chopin's short ...

  23. Kevin Bacon Announces He's Visiting 'Footloose' School on Prom Day

    CORRECTION (March 22, 2024, at 2:59 p.m. ET): An earlier version of this story said Kevin Bacon was planning to attend Payson High School's prom. Bacon plans to visit the school during the day ...

  24. Long live the overpaid cable news host!

    That red-letter contract preceded the founding of CNN — the world's first 24-hour news channel — by four years, and cable-news pay took its time in catching up to the salary scales of the ...

  25. Kamala Harris Visits Parkland and Urges States to Adopt Red-Flag Gun

    At the site of the 2018 school shooting in Florida, the vice president announced federal help for states to limit weapon access for people deemed to be threats.