“When the doctors came they said she had died of heart disease – of joy that kills” (Chopin 758). This is a quote from “The Story of an Hour” written by Kate Chopin in 1894 and first published on December 6 1894 in Vogue under the title “The Dream of an Hour” (Lanser 254). The story may appear as a report, but there is no historical proof for it. Kate Chopin was born in 1851 in St. Louis, had six children and started writing after her husband’s sudden death in 1885 (Lanser 246). Chopin is most known for her novel The Awakening written in 1899 (Lanser 246). In her stories and novels Chopin mentions themes such as gender, independence, class and race, and the rebellion against restrictions (“Kate Chopin’s Themes”). In “The Story of an Hour” Chopin addressed the struggle of women at the turn of the 19th century and the development of the ‘New Woman’. The term ‘New Woman’ was developed by Sarah Grand at the end of the Victorian Age, when women tried to break out of their Victorian roles and started to life a free life they chose (Grand 271). The New Women ideology led to changes in women’s rights, the definition of gender roles, the education of women and labor restrictions (Grand 271). The Woman in “The Story of an Hour” finds herself confronted with a sudden freedom, after her husband’s death, unknown to her and shows traits of the New Woman in her development. The narrating voice of the story, cannot easily be cleared and throws up many questions and therefore is to be examined in the following essay. Reading Kate Chopin’s “The Story of an Hour” brings up many questions concerning the characters, the narrator and the circumstances under which the story originated. Most striking is the question of the narrative voice, for it is not obvious in the story who the narrator is. The first step to analyzing the narrator is to find a definition of the term ‘narrator’. The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms & Literary Theory distinguishes three basic kinds of narrator, according to “Plato and Aristotle; (a) the speaker (or any kind of writer) who uses his own voice; (b) one who assumes the voice of another person or persons, and speaks in a voice not his own; (c) one who uses a mixture of his own voice and that or others” (narrator). In the story “The story of an Hour” it is not clear who the speaker is, and whether the author Chopin is using her own voice for the narrating. Therefore another field of analysis is needed and can be found in Gerard Genette’s Narrative Discourse, where Genette comes up with several major areas of interest. Those are order, duration, frequency, mood, voice and some subcategories like focalization and point of view (Genette 10). Genette makes a strict distinction between voice and focalizer. The voice is the person who speaks and can be overt or covert, part of the story world or outside of the story world. While the term focalizer, which is a replacement for the term ‘point of view’ means the person who sees or perceives. Genette determines three types of focalization: the internal focalization, the external focalization and zero focalization (Hühn et al. 115). Analyzing the voice and focalization can help uncovering the narrative voice. In order to analyze the voice and focalization it is important to analyze the protagonist because often the main character has a relation to the narrating voice or is the person, through whose eyes the reader focalizes the story. However as Fernando Ferrara explains in his model for studying fictional characters, there are different levels on which the character has to be uncovered in order to do a full narrator analysis (Lanser 226-227). The surface level contains the phraseology and the temporal stance, while on the levels below the individual behavior, the emotional tendencies, the character traits, attributes and habits and the ways of seeing and speaking are important (Lanser 226). In order to do so in the following the protagonist will be examined. In the beginning, Mrs. Mallard, the main character of “The Story of an Hour” seems to be a weak and sick old lady waiting for her husband to come back home from a journey, which can be seen in the opening sentence. “Knowing that Mrs. Mallard was afflicted with a heart trouble, great care was taken to break to her as gently as possible the news of her husband’s death” (Chopin 756). The ambiguity of “heart trouble” is caused by a lack of knowledge of the reader (Chopin 756). However later in the story she is described as “young, with a fair, calm face, whose lines bespoke repression and even a certain strength.”, leaving one to realize that the previous assumptions were wrong and creating a completely new picture of Mr. Mallard’s wife (Chopin 765). Her reactions to the news of her husband’s death add to the picture of her as a strong woman. “There would be no powerful will bending hers in that blind persistence