Reaction to "Story of an Hour"

The thing that first struck me about this story was the length. I never know what to think of short stories when my response to them will probably be about the same length as the story itself. The brevity reminded me of my American Literature teacher from my junior year of high school; she always spoke of specificity and control, what she believed to be the two most important aspects to writing. The same thoughts appeared a year later. My English teacher senior year consistently made us write two hundred word analyses of poems throughout the year. I found that anyone can write ten pages on a subject, but it takes massive amounts of skill and precision to get a point across using only a few. What I am trying to say with this rambling memory of high school is that the lack of length in Kate Chopin’s “The Story of an Hour” impressed me from the beginning.
On the other side, I was not fully impressed with the content of the story and I could have been. While the story is entertaining and surprisingly funny, I found the “short story filled with irony” form to be clichéd and downright annoying. While I understand that the story was written in the nineteenth century, where the story’s concept was probably not as hackneyed as it is today, the story does not stand out in modern times as anything more than an unoriginal story of irony with a feminist twist.
The twist does add a redeeming quality to the short story. I was honestly surprised that Mrs. Mallard is so happy about her husband dying. It made me wonder what kind of relationship the two of them must have had in order to make repeat that she is finally “free, free, free!” Even with an overbearing husband, it seems that the initial reaction would not be overwhelming joy. She even mentions that her husband has never looked “save with love upon her.” Mr. Mallard was clearly a loving husband, and the fact that she registers that she now controls herself before sadness is slightly disturbing. It is not as if she hated her husband, she admits that she will cry again when she sees him dead; she clearly cared for her husband, but values power over that love. The feminist message is clear, but I find it slightly odd. Mrs. Mallard’s joy at the thought of living the rest of her life alone made me not feel as sorry for her, even as she dies at the sight of her husband being alive.
Overall, I found the story entertaining, but rather worn-out. However, I do not think that my “fancy would run riot along those days” ahead of me if it suddenly disappeared.