I feel like every book I’ve picked up so far in this class has just left me confused. I thought books from the 1900s were easier to understand than the ones I read in RMST201, but these books might be more confusing??? Anyway, The Shrouded Woman felt like a novel that exists in this strange in-between: not really the world of the living but not fully removed from it either. The story felt very intimate and with the setting being literally a deathbed, I felt like I was reading someone’s death story and I didn’t belong there at all.
The most striking thing about Bombal’s writing is how she makes time collapse. The narrative does not move in a neat line from childhood to adulthood to death. Instead, memories show up how they do in real life, often triggered by a sound, a touch, or even a presence in the room. Compared to Proust and Nadja, the structure of this book did confuse me at times, but it was definitely an easier read. In this book, time does not matter in a conventional sense but the moments that carried emotional weight do stay.
One moment that stayed with me is when the narrator becomes aware of the people gathered around her body and listens to their reactions during the wake. She cannot move or respond but she hears their words and can sense their emotions, which creates a strange tension between presence and absence. This scene made me feel almost like an intruder as if I were overhearing something private. When she looked at the difference in the way she understands her own life compared to other people, I think she gains a self-awareness that she is no longer part of the living world.
In the book, the people around her are defining who she was but her own thoughts were resisting these interpretations. In this way, The Shrouded Woman felt less like a story about death and more like a reckoning with a life that never fully aligned with the self she carried inside, the person she truly was.
By the end of the novel, my confusion shifted into a sort of discomfort. Bombal does not offer the reader any closure but instead, she leaves us with the awareness that maybe some lives are not built around fulfilment and happiness, but constraint. The language is so beautiful while the sadness of the realization is what makes this novel so haunting.
To end off, my question to you is if the narrator only gains clarity and narrative control after her death, what is Bombal suggesting about women’s ability to understand themselves and express themselves how they want to while they are alive?