Considering the news Mrs. Mallard has just received, what is ironic about the details she notices through her window?

Question

Considering the news Mrs. Mallard has just received, what is ironic about the details she notices through her window?

	She is inside her house yet she can look at the tops of the trees.
	A death has just occurred yet she sees signs of new life.
	She closes her door yet she hears birds and a person singing.
	She has been weeping yet she feels that it is about to rain.

Answer 1

Mrs. Louise Mallard is the protagonist of the short story "The Story of an Hour" by Kate Chopin. In this story, Mrs. Mallard has just received news that her husband, Brently, has died.

The question is then asking what is ironic when you consider that Mrs. Mallard just learned that her husband died. In literature, a detail is "ironic" when it is different than what the average reader would have expected based on the circumstances. A central point of the short story is that a wife is expected to grieve her husband's death with a display of sadness, but that Mrs. Mallard's emotional response breaks that expectation. She feels elated at the news of her husbands death and devastated by the news that he is still alive.

For the specific details you mention, you want to ask: how does this detail differ from what you would expect?

How does her looking at treetops and listening to singing outside differ from what you would expect? For the first and third details, I would note that because she is inside of the home, a widow would be expected to be engaging with items in the home that remind her of her husband and the lost order in her domestic sphere, but she is already noticing items in the outside world and gladly discarding domestic order. The tree, the signs of new life, and the rain all point to her awareness that life continues after death, when a widow is expected to be fixated on a singular life that has ended. For all of these details, Mrs. Mallard is responding optimistically immediately after receiving devastating news.

The point of these details and the short story as a whole is that the reader and society expects the widow to be despairing over her husband's death, but her reaction and the details included in the story deviate from that expectation, and are, hence, ironic.