This was the social environment that Kate Chopin and Ernest Hemingway had been exposed to when they created their works "The Story of an Hour" and "Cat in the Rain," respectively. Both works had women as its protagonists, and implicit each story was the apparent repression and desire for freedom and power of the woman characters, the American wife and Louise Mallard. Though each woman had been put in different scenarios and social roles in life, both were characteristically repressed by their husbands. The American wife sought to attain power over her husband through the possession of a cat, the symbol of power. Louise, meanwhile, had experienced power and freedom with the death of her husband; the story of his 'false death' had only resulted to the woman's death.

This paper delves into the existence of repression and even

In "The story of an hour," Louise Mallard was characterized as a woman with hidden feelings of protest against her being a wife to her husband, Brently. Though not initially established in the story, it became apparent in the middle and latter parts of the short story that she harbored a feeling of resentment against her husband due to years of a bad marriage. When she heard the news that her husband was dead, Louise's reaction was indeed like any other wife would have reacted: shock and surprise. However, as the readers learned within the confines of the room Louise had locked herself in, Brently's death signified her freedom from her marriage, allowing her to become a woman once again, free to do everything she liked. Indeed, Chopin displays this freedom from male suppression as: "She was beginning to recognize this thing that was approaching to possess her...When she abandoned herself a little whispered word escaped her slightly parted lips. She said it over and over under breath: "free, free, free!'" In this remarkable event in the story, we thus witnessed that Louise was more relieved than grieved when she heard about her husband's death.

A similar theme emerges in the short story "A cat in the rain," wherein Hemingway reflected the apparent friction between the American couple, who are also the protagonists in the story. The American wife's persistent request an

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Approximate Word count = 934
Approximate Pages = 4 (250 words per page double spaced)