The Way Up To Heaven And The Story Of An Hour
The stories that I have chosen to compare and contrast are ‘The Way Up to Heaven’ and ‘The Story of an Hour’. Before analysing the story, let me define what compare and contrast is. The words compare and contrast have connotations of “pointing out similarities and differences” (Kennedy & Gioia, 1995, p.1756). In ‘The Story of an Hour’, Kate Chopin tells about a young lady, Mrs. Mallard, who experiences the delight of freedom rather than the desolation of loneliness after she learns of her husband’s death. Later, when Mrs. Mallard learns that her husband is not dead, she comes to realize that all hope of freedom for her is gone. The devastating disappointment then leads to Mrs. Mallard’s own death. Meanwhile, in the story ‘The Way up to Heaven’ Roald Dahl tells about Mrs. Foster who had a pathological fear of missing plane to New York to her daughter’s house. Mr. Foster was delaying her until a certain point where Mrs. Foster takes the decision in her own hands. She leaves to New York without her husband and when she comes back he was dead stuck in the elevator. As I scrutinize both stories, I find similarities in their role in male dominant society as well as some differences in their character traits.
The dissimilarity that I find in these two stories is their type of sickness. In the exposition of these stories I am introduced to both characters and also their sickness. Mrs. Foster is mentally sick because she has an ‘almost pathological fear of missing a train, a plain, a boat or even a theatre cushion’ (Dahl, p.36). Mr. Foster refers to the nervousness of his wife’s for being early as foolishness and increases her “misery by keeping her waiting unnecessarily” (Dahl, p.36). Jessica (2008) stated that this nervous flaw is the “instigator” of the entire plot. Meanwhile, Mrs. Mallard is ‘afflicted with a heart trouble’ (Chopin, p.33). Here Chopin uses the literary device paradox and simile respectively to put into words that Josephine ‘revealed in half...
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