The narrator provides a great deal of imagery when Mrs. Mallard goes to her room and sits at the open window. The narrator says,
She could see in the open square before her house the tops of trees that were all aquiver with the new spring life. The delicious breath of rain was in the air. In the street below a peddler was crying his wares. The notes of a distant song which some one was singing reached her faintly, and countless sparrows were twittering in the eaves.
Here, we have the visual image of the quivering trees full of young birds and other animals. There is also an olfactory and tactile image of the rain in the air; we can imagine both its fresh smell and its slightly damp feel on the skin. There are a few auditory images as well: the peddler yelling out to tell the town what he has for sale and all the birds chirping in the space created where the rooftop hangs over the sides of the house.
Some of these images do double duty as symbols as well. The "new spring life" seems to symbolize Mrs. Mallard's rebirth as a widow. Now that her husband is dead, she is quick to embrace her new freedom: "She said it over and over under her breath: 'free, free, free!'" The fresh air that has followed the rain seems to represent this freedom as well, especially after the figurative "rain" of her marriage. She now feels that "this possession of self-assertion [is] the strongest impulse of her being!" Married, she felt confined and restricted; she used to shudder at the thought that life might be long. But now she feels free, having weathered the storm of married life, so to speak.
Kate Chopin packs a great deal of imagery and symbolism into her short story of only about one thousand words.
Much of the imagery is tactile imagery that helps the reader feel the physical sensations Mrs. Mallard experiences. Upon first hearing the news, she weeps "with wild abandonment, in her sister's arms." In her room, she sinks into her chair, exhausted with grief. As she leans her head back against the chair, she perceives a new feeling coming upon her, and "her bosom rose and fell tumultuously." As she contemplates the idea of freedom, "her pulses beat fast, and the coursing blood warmed and relaxed every inch of her body." When she gives in to her sister's pleas and exits the room, she clasps her sister's waist as she descends the stairs. All these descriptions give the reader an excellent perception of what it feels like to be in Mrs. Mallard's body during this eventful hour.
The most obvious symbols in the story are the open window, the downstairs/upstairs dichotomy, the closed bedroom door, and "heart disease." The open window, facing west, symbolizes the future. Mrs. Mallard views a bright patch of blue sky and fluffy clouds that meet each other. These are symbolic of positive future experiences: no storm clouds lower; only an idyllic scene presents itself to her mind as she contemplates her life going forward as an independent woman.
The lower floor of Mrs. Mallard's house represents her public life. Here she first responds with socially acceptable sorrow to the news of her husband's death. Later, she confronts the husband she has been so quick to abandon emotionally, and her public responsibilities appear again, briefly, before she dies. The upstairs is where Mrs. Mallard is free to be her true self, to contemplate her individualistic desires, and to savor the "long procession of years to come that would belong to her absolutely."
The closed door represents Mrs. Mallard's inner sanctum—that world of private thoughts that she won't share with others, even someone as close to her as her sister. Josephine tries to access Louise's close-kept emotions through the keyhole of the door, showing that if anything is accessible to others, it is only a sliver of Louise's real heart.
The "heart disease" that the doctor diagnoses as the cause of death is symbolic for the emotional repression that Louise—and indeed many married women of that time period and our own—invisibly suffer from.
Chopin's little story is rich with imagery, especially tactile imagery, and symbolism.
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