Elie Wiesel Response: Night in Term Paper

In "A Story of an Hour" the protagonist must confront the idea that for her to live, her husband and her conventional, protected domestic existence must die. What has been really killing her is not her weak heart, but her entrapment in misery, and when she is returned to the prison of her misery, she expires -- not of joy, but of the shock that she cannot escape. The contemplation of her husband's death also is a kind of shock, as it forces her to radically reconsider her life and her sense of identity in a way that would never have occurred, if she had not believed him to be dead.

Yes, Mrs. Mallard's recognition is more personal than Woolf's more all-encompassing notions of female empowerment -- but both of their experiences embody the same personal recognition of the need for all women to validate their sense of identity, self, and personhood apart from others, to realize their creative integrity.Even if Mrs. Mallard is not an artist, she is still a frustrated artist of the 'self' which is just as poignant as the frustrations of Woolf's smothered writers......