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Kate Chopin, "The Story of an Hour"

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Student responses

A Night in Acadie  A collection of stories by Kate Chopin. Particularly related to The Awakening and "The Story of an Hour" are "Athenaise," "A Respectable Woman," and "Reflection."

There are at least three video productions of this story which may be available through your library or video store. Two come from Films for the Humanities and Sciences. The third, Kate Chopin's "The Story of an Hour", is a 30-minute production from Ishtar Films from the Feminist Majority Foundation which incorporates excerpts from Chopin's journals.

"The Joy that Kills" is a 56-minute production produced by Tina Rathbone with many interpretive additions and feminist overtones. In this production Louise is presented as an invalid, envious of her husband's freedom. The video is described as follows: "The setting is the world of the upper-class Creole society which dominated New Orleans in the 1870s, a world with a strict code of behavior, one of whose strongest tenets required a wife to subordinate her will and her very being to her husband."

"Five Stories of an Hour" presents five dramatizations for a total of 26 minutes, each keeping the intense brevity of the story but with decidedly different approaches to the "gaps" of the story.

Compare any or all of these interpretations with each other and with your own reading of the story and the characters.

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