The phrase “Free! Body and soul free!” refers to the unexpected, euphoric feeling that Loise Mallard experiences upon hearing that her husband has died. She realizes that without her husband, she will be able to live her life the way she wants to live it, without being tied down to her husband and her marriage.
Instead of feeling grief, which is the expected emotion, Louise feels relief. Chopin was a feminist author, whose main characters are women who are oppressed and stifled by their male counterparts. While the men in her stories are not necessarily “bad” or malicious, they represent society’s marginalization of women and these men are figures who keep the female characters from realizing their individual potentials.
Louise is physically and emotuonally “free,” if only for a short time, and for a woman in Louise’s society, that feeling is rare and unexpected. It is also exhilarating, considering that the patriarchal culture so rarely allows for women to feel this way.
The phrase "Free! Body and soul free!" is what Louise utters to herself over and over again upon realizing that her husband's death is not affecting her in the way that she (and, it seems, her sister and others) had thought it would. Instead of feeling sullen and filled with grief, she is surprised to find a feeling of relief and even relaxation coursing through her as she comes to terms with the idea that she will now have a life she can live for herself. She realizes that she will no longer have to worry about or be limited by the constraints that her marriage put on her; she is free in both "body and soul" from living her life as it has been shaped by the presence of her husband, who, though he is a man who "had never looked save with love upon her," is also someone she has not always loved. In this way, she is also freed from the institution of marriage itself, something that author Kate Chopin is very critical of, not only in this short story, but also in her other works, including her novel The Awakening.
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