Gender critics explore how ideas about how traditionally masculine and feminine behavior can be regarded as socially constructed by particular cultures. According to some critics, sex is determined by simple biological and anatomical categories of male or female, and gender is determined by a culture’s values. Thus, ideas about gender and what constitutes masculine and feminine behavior are created by cultural institutions and conditioning. A gender critic might, for example, focus on Chopin’s characterization of an emotionally sensitive Mrs. Mallard and a rational, composed husband in “The Story of an Hour” as a manifestation of socially constructed gender identity in the 1890s. Gender criticism expands categories and definitions of what is masculine or feminine and tends to regard sexuality as more complex than merely masculine or feminine, heterosexual or homosexual. Gender criticism, therefore, has come to include LGBTQ+ criticism as well as feminist criticism.
Like Marxist critics, feminist critics reading “The Story of an Hour” would also be interested in a text like Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Women and Economics: A Study of the Economic Relation between Men and Women as a Factor in Social Evolution (1898) because they seek to correct or supplement what they regard as a predominantly male-dominated critical perspective with a feminist consciousness. Like other forms of sociological criticism, feminist criticism places literature in a social context, and, like those of Marxist criticism, its analyses often have sociopolitical purposes — explaining, for example, how images of women in literature reflect the patriarchal social forces that have impeded women’s efforts to achieve full equality with men. Consequently, feminist critics’ approach to literature employs a broad range of disciplines, including history, sociology, psychology, and linguistics, to provide a perspective sensitive to feminist issues.
A feminist approach to Chopin’s “The Story of an Hour” might explore the psychological stress created by the expectations that marriage imposes on Mrs. Mallard, expectations that literally and figuratively break her heart. Given that her husband is kind and loving, the issue is not her being married to Brently but her being married at all. Chopin presents marriage as an institution that creates in both men and women the assumed “right to impose a private will upon a fellow-creature.” That “right,” however, might be interpreted, especially from a feminist perspective, as primarily imposed on women by men. A feminist critic might note, for instance, that the protagonist is introduced as “Mrs. Mallard” (we learn that her first name is Louise only later); she is defined by her marital status and her husband’s name, a name whose origin from the Old French is related to the word masle, which means “male.” The appropriateness of her name points up the fact that her emotions and the cause of her death are interpreted in male terms by the doctors. The value of a feminist perspective on this work can be readily discerned if a reader imagines Mrs. Mallard’s story being told from the point of view of one of the doctors who diagnoses the cause of her death as a weak heart rather than as a fierce struggle.
LGBTQ+ critics focus on a variety of issues, including how individuals from nonnormative or nonbinary gender and sexual identifications are represented in literature, how they read literature, and whether sexuality and gender are culturally constructed or innate. The emergence of “queer theory” in the 1990s served to destabilize the dominant ideology that normalizes heterosexuality and considers other sexualities deviant. These critics have produced new readings of works by established canonical writers in which underlying homosexual concerns, desires, motifs, or motivations are lifted out and examined as revealing components of these texts. A reading of “The Story of an Hour” for example, might consider whether Mrs. Mallard’s ecstatic feeling of relief — produced by the belief that her marriage is over due to the presumed death of her husband — isn’t also a rejection of her heterosexual identity. Perhaps her glimpse of future freedom, evoked by feminine images of a newly discovered nature “all aquiver with the new spring life,” embraces a repressed new sexual identity that “was too subtle and elusive to name” but that was “approaching to possess her” no matter how much she “was striving to beat it back with her will.”
A queer theorist such as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick would interrogate any simplistic assumptions about Mrs. Mallard’s sexuality. A superficial reading of “The Story of an Hour” might point to the fact that Mrs. Mallard initially displays her grief by embracing a woman, her sister Josephine: “She wept at once, with sudden, wild abandonment, in her sister’s arms.” One might be tempted to read into this brief gesture a lifetime of latent homosexual longing, especially given the term “wild abandonment.” But such a reading is potentially reductive, and assumes that sexual desire must be placed in one of two categories (homosexual or heterosexual). Upon closer examination, the evidence for Mrs. Mallard’s lesbian tendencies is thin given the fact that she is weeping here rather than experiencing sexual pleasure. Contemporary queer theorists tend to see sexuality and sexual desire as fluid, and sometimes difficult to label. A more nuanced queer reading might look at Mrs. Mallard’s autoerotic identity. Focusing on her body, such a critic would concentrate on the scenes when Mrs. Mallard is alone. She anticipates “something coming to her … too subtle and elusive to name … creeping out of the sky.” On the surface this feeling is merely relief, but a LGBTQ+ critic might focus on her body’s reaction to it: “her bosom rose and fell tumultuously … a little whispered word escaped her slightly parted lips…. Her pulses beat fast, and the coursing blood warmed and relaxed every inch of her body.” These descriptions sound unabashedly sexual, and Mrs. Mallard seems to gradually embrace the idea that she can achieve bodily ecstasy when alone: following the quotations above, she throws open her arms, comments on the freedom of her body (as well as her soul), and locks her bedroom door. Her sister desperately calls through the keyhole, alarmed by the clearly transgressive behavior going on inside: “open the door — you will make yourself ill. What are you doing, Louise?” What she is doing is private and clearly involves a feeling of bodily ecstasy. This critic might move in a number of directions from this initial observation — to discuss the effects of a repressive culture, for instance, or to examine the fact that Mrs. Mallard’s feeling of freedom can only take place behind a locked door, which is nearly a closet, the central metaphor for the repression of one’s natural sexual desires. Although nonnormative gender or sexuality readings often raise significant interpretive controversies among critics, they have opened up provocative discussions of texts that might otherwise seem completely unconcerned with sexual desire.