Theme vs. Morals

The theme of the short story, "The Story of and Hour" by Kate Chopin is not a classic moral. In this work, the theme is that a woman who loses her loving husband is not necessarily a grieving widow. At the time it was written this would have been extremely controversial. We know this because in the text, the narrator states that, "An yet she had loved him... sometimes. Often she had not." She's not free, now that her husband is dead, because he was oppressive, it was simply because she didn't really love him.