The Story of an Hour: Irony 3 key examples

This exchange is ironic because the reader knows how Louise is actually feeling, while Josephine doesn’t. Josephine thinks that Louise is so upset about her husband, Brently’s, death that she’s making herself sick. But the reader knows that this isn’t the case—Louise is telling the truth when says to Josephine, “I am not making myself ill.” Instead, Louise has quickly moved on from grief to excitement, as she’s realized that her husband’s death means that she’s now free.

This gap in understanding emphasizes the difference between people’s expectations of Louise—other characters believe that she’s emotionally fragile and content with being dependent on her husband—and her actual feelings and desires. Josephine’s overprotectiveness and interference seem well-intentioned, but it’s nevertheless an example of how the people in Louise’s life want to control her rather than truly understand and help her.

In this way, the dramatic irony serves two purposes. First, it prompts readers to question whether Louise’s happiness in reaction to her husband’s death is socially or morally acceptable, given that the other characters don’t expect her to feel this way and would presumably be offended if they knew. The story never takes a stance on this—it’s left up to the reader to decide whether Louise is justified in her feelings. The irony also points to how society underestimates Louise (and women of her time more generally), and how the people in her life fail to recognize that her marriage isn’t as important to her as her own independence.

This passage is ironic because Brently is completely oblivious to the railroad accident, let alone the fact that Louise, Josephine, and Richards believed that he was killed in it. The reader, on the other hand, has been aware of these things all along. They’ve witnessed Louise process the news of the accident and Brently’s presumed death, undergo a process of self-discovery, and secretly envision a happy future without her husband. Brently, meanwhile, is unaware that any of this has happened.

Even more darkly ironic is the fact that seeing Brently alive is so shocking to Louise that she immediately dies of a heart attack. Brently will almost certainly interpret Louise’s death to be the product of a moment of shocking joy at discovering him alive. So, in the end, Brently will never know how Louise privately felt about their marriage, how she reacted to his death, and how his arrival actually hit her like a renewed sentence to prison as opposed to a moment of joy. This dramatic irony makes the story’s ending all the more bleak and tragic—only Louise and the reader know the truth.

This outcome is situationally ironic because it upends both the characters’ and the reader’s beliefs, and it’s dramatically ironic because the reader understands Louise’s cause of death in a way that the other characters don’t.

First, the fact that Louise, not Brently, is the one who’s dead at the end of the story subverts the characters’ and the reader’s expectations. When Louise received the news of Brently’s death, she quickly realized that her life would be happier and freer without him. It’s an ironic twist of fate, then, when it’s revealed that Brently is actually alive—this outcome is unexpected for Louise, her houseguests, and likely the reader. It completely upends Louise’s newfound excitement and expectations for her future, to the point that she dies of heart failure. Up until this point, the opposite seemed true: that Brently was dead, and that Louise would go on to live a more enjoyable and fulfilling life than ever before.

The story uses this moment of situational irony to drive home the inescapability of Louise’s situation. Trapped in her role as a housewife and eager to be independent, Brently’s death was seemingly her only way out of a dissatisfying life. But ultimately, believing that he died and allowing herself to fantasize about life as a widow is what sets her up to die of shock at the end of the story—preventing her from ever living out the freedom that she imagined for herself. The ending implies that her only escape from being dependent on her husband is, ironically, death. 

Then, the doctors’ assumption that Louise died of “joy that kills” is dramatic irony, because the reader knows that Louise’s heart failure was likely caused by extreme disappointment, the opposite of extreme joy. The doctors, however, seem to assume that her weak heart is simply an extension of her natural emotional weakness as a woman, and that heart-stopping “joy” is the natural reaction to finding out her husband is still alive. 

But Louise’s weak heart actually symbolizes the way her marriage limits and confines her, preventing her from being free to “live for herself” just as her heart condition prevents her from freely feeling her emotions. This is why she privately feels joy after she finds out the misinformation about Brently’s death, and why she then dies from losing joy rather than gaining it when she sees Brently alive. Thus, the final line of the story is ironic in that it fundamentally misunderstands how Louise felt about marriage—a secret that only the reader finds out, and that Louise takes to her grave.