When I was a high school student,\u00a0my 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.<\/p>\n
I remember feeling shocked that a wife, upon hearing of her husband\u2019s 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 19th<\/sup> century America? Perhaps he assumed that teenagers would have intuitively understood a 19th<\/sup> century woman\u2019s desire for independence from a\u00a0male-dominated society. But the central problem in understanding the irony at work in Chopin\u2019s story, is that our 21st<\/sup> century students do not have a cultural basis for understanding Mrs. Mallard\u2019s situation. Our students, contrary to our graduate-schooled selves, do not understand Mrs. Mallard\u2019s feminist desires. As a teacher, I now know that many of my students would view the \u201cwidow\u201d as cruel and deserving of her untimely death. The element of irony that \u201cStory of an Hour\u201d clearly illustrates would seem overshadowed by\u00a0my students’ negative\u00a0contemporary judgments regarding Mrs. Mallard\u2019s behavior.<\/p>\n 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\u2019 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 \u201cStory of an Hour,\u201d I would prime my students\u2019 contemporary sensibilities with 19th<\/sup>century 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\u00a0behave in modern society.\u00a0 Without explaining my New Critical approach, my students would become better able to analyze the 19th<\/sup> century\u00a0characters in Chopin\u2019s ironic story.<\/p>\n Would my high school class have developed more empathy for Mrs. Mallard\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" When I was a high school student,\u00a0my 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":25,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[75],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2008\/610\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/128"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2008\/610\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2008\/610\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2008\/610\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/25"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2008\/610\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=128"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2008\/610\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/128\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2008\/610\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=128"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2008\/610\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=128"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2008\/610\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=128"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}