Reader Response to "The Story of an Hour"

     Ah The Story of an Hour. So we meet again.
     It's been a while, old friend. I think the last time we sat down together was about three years ago in my senior year of high school. The time before that was in sophomore year of high school. 
     You have not changed since then. But I have. I've always thought it was interesting, that praise that some stories are simply timeless. Are stories timeless, or are we?
     Back during the first time I read you, you seemed a lot longer than you do now but in truth you have not changed a bit. My judgement of what counts as a long assignment has changed, which would probably not delight the 10th grade me, but the current me is totally okay with. Tenth grade me did not understand you at first. How can something be

"a joy that kills?"

     That did not make any sense to me at the time, but for some reason I knew that line was the winner of the story. I did not understand the paradox of a joy that could kill. Joy is supposed to be joy. It's not supposed to kill. So for the assignment I had to do I just talked about the beautiful lines like 

"She breathed a quick prayer that life might be long"

because I thought that was pretty and

"The delicious breath of rain was in the air"

because, well, I like rain a lot and that was a good example of personification. 

    To be honest I don't even remember the assignment twelfth grade me was doing with this because I think I was more concerned with my tennis match and prom and big looming things like life after high school.

    My memory of the assignment is something along the lines o

Blah blah The Story of an Hour Blah by LilyAnne Rice blah blah analysis.

     I probably had not consciously realized it at this point because I was, unfortunately, naturally capable in the area, but I hated doing literature analysis.

     I wondered if there was ever going to be a concrete reason to me having to write a ten page paper about a theme explored in the dense literature we were exploring. Because I could not help thinking

What

is the

point?

     Ok, ok, I see the point a little bit now, it's to train your brain to look at things deeper and believe my my brain was trained but it's not like I'm ever going to look at the papers I wrote back then and get some mind blowing revelation. Mostly because they really weren't that good. I'm not discrediting others' abilities to write papers like this. For the most part, though, I can't help but thinking - boooring.

    Anyway, after that long-winded explanation, current me is reading The Story of an Hour for the third - or maybe even more than that- time, and without the constraints of having to write a paper on it and maybe the fact that I have hopefully grown up a little, I can saw now I get it in a way I didn't before. A joy that kills makes so much sense now after I've gone through heartbreaks and struggles and just living a little more time on this planet.

     That last line is ambiguous - are we supposed to think that the joy that killed our dear Mrs. Mallard is joy about finding that her husband is actually alive, or the joy that she had experienced thinking that he was dead was too much for her and caused her to kick the bucket?

     Ambiguous endings kind of used to drive me crazy. We'll never know. But hey. All endings are kind of ambiguous, if you look at it in a certain way. It's like they say - everything will be ok in the end. If it's not okay, it's not the end.