When I was a high school student, my English teacher used Kate Chopin’s “Story of an Hour” to illustrate the concept of irony. Now that I am also an English teacher, I can appreciate the complexity of teaching irony and my students’ subsequent misunderstanding of the literary element. As I reread “Story of an Hour,” I questioned whether a New Critical approach would have better helped me, as a high school student, understand irony and Chopin’s use of the element in Mrs. Mallard’s approach to the news of her husband’s death.

I remember feeling shocked that a wife, upon hearing of her husband’s brutal death, could have felt anything akin to freedom or relief. Would it have benefited my eventual understanding of irony if my teacher had front-loaded the class with information regarding the treatment of women in 19^th century America? Perhaps he assumed that teenagers would have intuitively understood a 19^th century woman’s desire for independence from a male-dominated society. But the central problem in understanding the irony at work in Chopin’s story, is that our 21^st century students do not have a cultural basis for understanding Mrs. Mallard’s situation. Our students, contrary to our graduate-schooled selves, do not understand Mrs. Mallard’s feminist desires. As a teacher, I now know that many of my students would view the “widow” as cruel and deserving of her untimely death. The element of irony that “Story of an Hour” clearly illustrates would seem overshadowed by my students’ negative contemporary judgments regarding Mrs. Mallard’s behavior.

I believe many students would benefit from a well-structured preamble to the teaching of canonized texts. Though I feel New Critical theory has its place in secondary education, a teacher should initially introduce the concept without his or her students’ conscious knowledge. As a student myself, I favor creative and innovative lesson planning over a front-loaded lecture any day. If I were teaching irony via “Story of an Hour,” I would prime my students’ contemporary sensibilities with 19^thcentury role playing. My female students could play the role of Mrs. Mallard-esque women and the males could adopt the privilege bestowed upon Mr. Mallard-esque men. After role-playing, we could discuss their character’s behavior in juxtaposition to how women and men behave in modern society.  Without explaining my New Critical approach, my students would become better able to analyze the 19^th century characters in Chopin’s ironic story.

Would my high school class have developed more empathy for Mrs. Mallard’s cloistered existence if my teacher had helped us develop a cultural basis for our understanding? Cultural compassion, at the very least, would result from a creative New Critical approach to the study of classic texts. Students would develop an appreciation for the literary skill Chopin exercises in her writing, whether or not they understand the complexity of irony. Perhaps teachers should help their students create cultural connections with century-old text before we ask them to analyze difficult literary concepts.