The Story of an Hour: A Text Kidnapped by Feminist Criticism

Abstract

The Story of an Hour as one of Kate Chopin’s classic masterpieces, has always been regarded as a purely feminist work that authentically indicates the awakening of women’s consciousness of freedom under the oppression of patriarchal politics. Since Halliday proposed Systemic Functional Grammar and the three metafunctions of language, transitivity has been widely employed in the interpretation of literary works. The present study focuses on the vicissitude of the protagonist Mrs. Mallard’s mental status through the transitivity analysis as a useful tool and the stylistic features of the text itself as well to explore the hidden theme which has been neglected, and concludes that this classic work is kidnapped by feminist criticism. It satirizes the protagonist’s pathological emotional state of pursuing the absolute freedom in marriage.