The Shrouded Woman is centered around the perspective of a dead woman, who, though dead, still sees and hears her family and friends who come to her coffin, which plunges the woman into memories of her time spent with these people. The memories triggered by the sequential appearance of her daughter, her old nanny, her lover, her father, her sister, her obsessive crush, her son, her husband, and other family members and friends, truly restore and reproduce the tragic life of the heroine. The entire work is filled with the heroine’s wandering mind, active life trajectory and wandering emotional thoughts. This unique narrative perspective adds a one-of-a-kind aesthetic connotation and intensity on many levels.
What grabbed my attention the most throughout the story was the topic of marriage. For Maria, the heroine, is surrounded by her cousin, who gives her her first experience of love; and then by her best friend and confidant, Fernando, who has always been devoted to her; but by a quirk of fate, she marries Antonio, whom she does not love at all, even though he is firm and discreet in every way. In this loveless and lifeless marriage, every intimate physical contact between the two, without exception, leads the heroine to a heartfelt rejection and resistance to her husband. In a given social relationship, women’s personalities are mostly established in relationships with other people compared to men’s, so for the heroines, if they still have expectations for marriage, they should be able to create a close and tight psychological relationship with their husbands, so as to avoid the threats and harms that may come from the separation. It is clear that Maria has a fragmented experience of life. The world of death is a more complete paradise for the incomplete feelings of life, and it is a strong expression for creating a perfect world of love.
Bombal was a leader in Latin American feminist literature. In the Latin American society at that time, women’s social status was far lower than men’s and they did not have the right to go to school and receive education. The image of women portrayed by Bombal captures the most natural desire and psychology of women’s emotional world, and at the same time demonstrates that women seem to be weak and powerless to the vagaries of fate, but they are never tamed, never deceive themselves, and are faithful to their own feelings and find the power of survival in them.
Question for Discussion:
“The woman in the shroud did not feel the slightest desire to rise again. Alone, she would at last be able to rest, to die. For she had suffered the death of the living. And now she longed for total immersion, for the second death, the death of the dead.” (Bombal, 259)
The death mentioned again at the end of the novel intrigued me a lot, how do you interpret this “second death”, again what does the heroine’s first death signify?
Hello! Cici
I really enjoy reading your blog posts, and I’d like to share my thoughts on the question:
A few years ago, there was a film that I really liked called “Coco.” It delved deeply into the theme of death, mentioning that people experience three deaths. The first death refers to the cessation of breathing and the stopping of the heart—biologically, this marks the end of life. The second death occurs at the funeral because, in society, a person is considered dead and ceases to exist. The third death is the ultimate one, happening when the last person who remembers you also passes away, and you are completely forgotten by the world. I believe this perspective bears some similarities to the themes explored in “The Shrouded Woman.”
In the novel, when she undergoes the first death, it is a form of societal death. This means she loses her place in society because her physical body has ceased to exist. However, the death of the dead which is the “total immersion” she longs for, can be understood as a deeper liberation. It represents a complete escape from the constraints of the physical body and societal expectations, a pursuit of freedom and a sense of belonging for the individual soul.
Hi Cicy,
Thank you for sharing your idea!
I really agree with you on the perspective that “Bombal captures the most natural desire and psychology of women’s emotional world.” I find that in the background where women have lower status than men, thisi novel tries to dig into the desires of a women, and hgihlights their feeling. Despite whether these desires are good or not, Bombal choose to present them without judgment and biases. This is indeed a great feminist literature!
-Esther Zhou
“The image of women portrayed by Bombal captures the most natural desire and psychology of women’s emotional world, and at the same time demonstrates that women seem to be weak and powerless to the vagaries of fate, but they are never tamed, never deceive themselves, and are faithful to their own feelings and find the power of survival in them.”
I’m not entirely sure that this is true… Ana María does have regrets, after all. She did perhaps sometimes let herself be tamed or deceived, for instance. To put this another way: in death she gains a clarity that she didn’t always have while she was still alive, no?