Brently Mallard's death. Richards: He is Brently Mallard's friend and was the one to learn of Brently's death and inform Josephine, Louise's sister, about it. Critical responses In Unveiling Kate Chopin, Emily Toth argues that Chopin "had to have her heroine die" in order to make the story publishable. In a 2020 article, Cihan Yazgı provides a different perspective on why Chopin had to let Louise Mallard die at the end and analyses her death as a part of the story's tragic plot. Drawing upon the Aristotelian formula and supporting his reading with stylistic evidence from the text, Yazgı argues that it is possible to understand the story's plot in terms of classical tragic elements of anagnorisis, peripeteia and catastrophe. He states that Chopin's reliance on these tragic elements in structuring her plot, helps Chopin to attain sympathy for Mrs. Mallard and to have her readership reflect with a critical eye on gender politics; this might not have been possible without the tragic plot. Meanwhile, Yazgı uses textual evidence to emphasize Chopin's stylistic mastery in creating a language that "reveal[s] in half concealing," which makes these tragic elements achieve their intended effects: The delaying of information creates a feeling of suspense and anticipation that eventually makes Mrs. Mallard's anagnorisis and catastrophe the more striking in such a short text. Bert Bender, an English professor at Arizona State University, offers a biographical reading of the text and argues that writing of the 1890s was influenced by Charles Darwin's theory of sexual selection. Chopin's understanding of the meaning of love and courtship, in particular, was altered and became more pessimistic. This attitude finds its expression in "The Story of an Hour" when Mrs. Mallard questions the meaning of love and ultimately rejects it as meaningless. Lawrence I. Berkove, a professor at the University of Michigan-Dearborn, notes that there has been "virtual critical agreement" that the story is about female liberation from a repressive marriage. However, he contests this reading and argues that there is a "deeper level of irony in the story". He proposes that there is an underlying irony where Louise is not depicted as a “heroine”, but instead as an “egotist and a victim of her own extreme self assertion”. Berkove also points out that Louise puts love after her own self-assertion and how it is peculiar a married person would think like this. He also dives deeper into how