Living for Yourself

In "The Story of an Hour" the recurring theme was freedom; the wife's short-lived "freedom" of her husband, or the freedom from marriage. On the other hand the wife died of being overjoyed by her "freedom" right before her non-deceased husband walked into the house. The moral of the story is that you should always be living for yourself rather than living in his shadow. “There would be no one to live for during those coming years; she would live for herself. There would be no powerful will bending hers in that blind persistence with which men and women believe they have a right to impose a private will upon a fellow-creature.” (Chopin 14). The wife felt that during her marriage she had to live in the shadows of her husband, and due to the time era she couldn't really live as herself but as the person her husband would want her to be. The moral and the theme once again are different.