Is it possible to die from a broken heart? In Kate Chopin's "The Story of an Hour," Mrs. Mallard is a stay at home wife with some health issues. During this period, it was common for the wives to stay at home and raise the children. One day her sister and one of her husband's friends inform her that her husband has been involved in a train accident. After the main character's sister, Josephine, informs her of her husband's death, she runs upstairs. Whilst staring outside, Mrs. Mallard has the strangest feeling of freedom overtake her body. Mrs. Mallard could not be happier with the revelation of finally being free from her marriage and to her marital obligations inside the house. Chopin depicts Louise's transformation by using lots of imagery, internal conflict, and foreshadowing in order to depict the freedom that Mrs. Mallard feels with the death of her husband.  

Imagery plays a huge part in this story. Mrs. Mallard "could see in the open square before her house the tops of trees that were all aquiver with the new spring life. The delicious breath of rain was in the air. In the street below a peddler was crying his wares. The notes of a distant song which some one was singing reached her faintly, and countless sparrows were twittering in the eaves (7)." In this moment, she realizes that the sun is always brighter on the other side because she has been restricted and held from the outside world. She once had a "dull stare in her eyes" because her marriage to Brently was boring and predictable. By staring out the window, she sees this beautiful landscape versus the tiny little house that she has been confined to for the majority of her marriage. The house is small and suffocating because Louise sees the vast open land outside the window, but she has never gone out and seen what this vast open land has to offer her. "The delicious breathe of rain ...  in the air," shows how Louise was robbed of the simplest joys while in her marriage to Bentley. This imagery shows the reader how confided Louise is inside her marriage because the house represents her marriage while the vast of land outside the window represents her future now that her husband is dead. Mrs. Mallard struggles internally with how to interpret her newfound freedom.

Finding out her husband is dead causes Mrs. Mallard to face the reality of becoming a widow. While she says, "'And yet she had loved him--sometimes.  Often she had not.  What did it matter!  What could love, the unsolved mystery, count for in face of this possession of self-assertion which she suddenly recognized as the strongest impulse of her being!'(15)" She is realizing that her constant battle to love her husband has finally ended. Her internal conflict for not loving him does not have to be justified now because of his death. She no longer has to dread his homecoming because he will not be coming home ever again. After first finding out about her husband's death, she tried "to beat it back with her will--as powerless as her two white slender hands would have been, (10)" yet she knew that she could not do it because it was something she had craved for many years . Her conflict has finally reached its resolution, and now she can start to live the life that she always craved, but could not achieve because of societies views on marriage. 

Heart conditions either can be fatal or lived with. In the case of Mrs. Mallard, everyone knows she "was afflicted with a heart trouble" (1). Chopin uses Mrs. Mallard's heart condition as an example of foreshadowing as to how she will eventually die. Josephine, Louise's sister, and Richard, her husband's friend, both exert copious amounts of compassion when telling Mrs. Mallard of her husband's death because they know of her heart condition. While Chopin states that Mrs. Mallard has a heart condition, she never actually tells the reader what the heart condition is. The newspaper foreshadows Bentley's death by saying, "Brently Mallard's name leading the list of "killed."(1)" This could be construed as false due to the severity of the accident and the numerous injuries and the way the newspaper says "killed" in quotations as if they were unsure if he was amongst the dead or not. By using Josephine and Richard's concern for Mrs. Mallard's heart condition, Chopin is foreshadowing that her illness will be the death of her.

In the case of Louise, it is possible to die from a broken heart. It was not for the death of her husband, but rather her loss of her freedom from Bentley. Chopin uses of imagery, internal conflict, and foreshadowing to allow her readers to feel and understand the struggle that Mrs. Mallard goes through in this short period of her life. The open window, Mrs. Mallard's internal dialogue about her marriage or lack thereof, and her heart condition are all examples of Chopin's own interpretation of the story. 

