Kate Chopin and

To fully understand what motivates the characters of any story, we have to understand the times in which they live and the struggles they face.  After all, the CONFLICT of any good story - and how the characters respond to that conflict - is what gives us a reason to read the story in the first place. In some stories, conflict is caused by EXTERNAL forces (war, natural disasters, famine, bullies, betrayal, etc.) while in other stories, like the ones we are going to be reading this semester, the conflict is INTERNAL.  Often, the two overlap, with one causing or exacerbating the other.  Only after examining the historical perspective of a story’s setting and the author’s own background can we intelligently comment on and analyze a story’s message or theme.

In "Story of an Hour", the protagonist Louise Mallard faces external conflict AND internal conflict when she receives new of her husband's death in a train wreck, but it is the INTERNAL conflict with which the story is mainly concerned.