The central character that you will undoubtedly want to
focus on and, indeed, the only character that we gain any real insight to, is that of
Mrs. Mallard, who, in the two and a half pages of this excellent short story is the main
focus of the tale. The very first sentence informs us that she is "afflicted with a
heart trouble," which suggests that she is a fragile person, weak and not robust in her
physical frame. However, the way that she greets the news of her husband's death
immediately distinguished her from other women, as the author
says:
She did
not hear the story as many women have heard the same, with a paralysed inability to
accept its significance. She wept at once, with sudden, wild abandonment, in her
sister's arms. When the storm of grief had spent itself she went away to her room alone.
She would have no one follow
her.
Clearly, she is a woman
who is able to experience emotions and feel them deeply, and is not inhibited in
expressing them. She is able to react suddenly and deeply and does not repress what she
is feeling.
Physically, we are told that she is "young,
with a fair, calm face, whose lines bespoke repression and even a certain strength."
This indicates that she feels "repressed" in her marriage, but the "certain strength"
indicates deep strength in her character that allows her to face this repression. The
sense of repression is strengthened as we see the joy with which she greets her new
state as a widow:
There would be no one to live for her during
those coming years; she would live for herself. There would be no 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.
It is this
"freedom" that she experiences, ever so fleetingly, therefore, that is the cause of her
death at the end of the story, as to have savoured such a freedom only to have it rudely
snatched back from you was the big shock to her heart that ended her
life.
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