Feminism in Kate Chopin’s ‘The Story of An Hour’ – A New Critical Reading LIT KA SHING College

As a famous feminist writer, Kate Chopin’s writings have been thoroughly studied by scholars for long; however an in-depth analysis of how her text brings the concept of feminism in different perspectives is still rare in the study of feminist literary criticism. In this paper, I would like to argue that how one of her works, The Story of an Hour, reflects its feminist nature by analyzing the interrelation between the text; the background of the story and author; and the expected readers responses.   When deciding whether a text centralizes on feminism or not, feminist Literary Critics Lisa Tuttle (184) has defined the goals of a feminist text and its criticism as follows: 1. To develop and uncover a female tradition of writing, 2. To interpret symbolism of women's writing so that it will not be lost or ignored by the male point of view, 3. To rediscover old texts, 4. To analyze women writers and their writings from a female perspective, 5. To resist sexism in literature, and 6. To increase awareness of the sexual politics of language and style. In analyzing this text as a feminist literary work, we will have in depth analysis of it through different perspectives aforementioned. Before we go into an in-depth...