As Louise contemplates the fact of Brently Mallard's death, however, her grief gives way to a far more powerful feeling: a feeling of joy in her own freedom. Louise realizes that she will feel sad when she sees Brently's "gentle and tender hands clasped in death," but she also realizes that for the first time in years she actually wants to live. While Louise is intoxicated by this newfound joy, Josephine, who fears that Louise might harm herself in her anguish over Brently's death, begs her to leave the locked room and go downstairs. As the two women descend the stairs, Brently Mallard enters the front door. Chopin comments: "he had been far from the scene of the accident and did not even know that there had been one". After seeing her husband, Louise suffers a heart attack and dies. This simple superficial action belies the complexity of the prose style. The first sentence of "The Story of an Hour" reads: "Knowing that Mrs. Mallard was afflicted with a heart trouble, great care was taken to tell her as delicately as possible the news of her husband's death." If we consider this sentence simply as a factual statement, we could say that it conveys three messages: Mrs. Mallard suffers from heart problems; Mrs. Mallard's husband is dead; someone took the utmost care to inform Mrs. Mallard of her husband's death. But if we analyze how we proceed through the sentence, we discover a more complex layer of meaning. The first word of the sentence, know, introduces a participatory sentence. The reader expects, and grammatical usage requires, that a participle of the primary position modifies the subject of the subsequent independent clause. Chopin violates our expectations. As we move through the participatory sentence and into the independent part...... in the center of the paper......s. If we examine the story as a whole, we realize that the unsettling effect of the first sentence is accentuated when we face examples of agent disjunction and pronominalization, ambiguity and diminution. Our positive feelings about Louise's self-affirmation are qualified word for word. Although Louise struggles with some moments of fearful anticipation, her progression toward self-affirmation relies on “news” and “veiled clues,” and she gives herself over to an undefined “something” without stopping to ask whether or not it is. a "monstrous joy". As much as we would like to follow it, the path is closed to us. The cumulative experience of the text does not allow for such simple complicity. Works Cited Madonna M. Miner, "Veiled Hints: An Affective Stylist's Reading of Kate Chopin's 'Story of an Hour,'" in The Markham Review, Vol 11, Winter, 1982, p. 29-32