Structuralist Perspective on Chopin’s ‘The Story of an Hour’: Transformations of Eighteenth-Century American Women

Abstract

This study critically analyzes Kate Chopin’s “The Story of an Hour” (1894) with special reference to Saussurean structuralism. It aims at exploring several different aspects of this work such as the notions of signification, binary oppositions, and language arbitrariness. The analysis conforms to the framework of Structuralism put forth into the field of linguistics by Ferdinand De Saussure. From the perspective of Structuralism, a close reading methodology is undertaken to evaluate this short story, its diction, characters, narration, and arrangement of paragraphs. Qualitative in nature, the study investigates a work of fiction through a linguistic theory thus giving the article a sense of novelty, originality and making it a worthy contribution to the disciplines of both linguistics and literature. Moreover, the reasons behind the author’s choice of employing certain structures and figurative language are brought into light. These interpreted purposes, which are significant in comprehending Chopin’s work within the parameters of Saussurean structuralism, go side by side in this paper. Considering its twofold significance, this article holds an important place in both the fields of linguistics and literature since it allows the readers to understand this short story from a new perspective and a new standpoint. To sum up, besides Saussure, structuralism has been worked upon by many other renowned linguists as well. Therefore, this study can pave way for researchers to examine “The Story of an Hour” from different structuralists’ viewpoints like L?vi-Strauss and Jakobson.