After reading Bombal’s “the shrouded woman” I am left with many thoughts about life and the many intersecting joys and miseries one experiences in it. This is likely an intended thought process, as the peculiar method of narration, where a disembodied voice describes protagonist Anna-Maria’s post-mortem journey through memory, subsequently switching to her first person perspective from beyond the grave, leaves one in a constant state of awareness of our protagonists fate. However, this framing mechanism, and the way Bombal weaves a narrative spanning her entire life, takes us through important vignettes in her life in which every character in some way feels trapped not only by their material circumstances, but by the very passions and intense emotions that give life so much of its luster. Near the end of the novel, Anna-Maria remarks how she wishes heaven to resemble the hacienda that she lives in and in a way this is a fascinating contrast, as the world Anna-Maria describes to us in her memories is one of drastic volatility both from within her and surrounding her. The world surrounding her is one in which she is refused at every corner, the comforts of a life of her own choosing, where she is constantly told that the demands of others, particularly the men in her life, are of more pressing importance, and that her responsibility as a woman is to adapt to these changes. And adapt she does, although not always willingly or silently, as she is forced to lose love, marry against her will, and see her family fall to pieces over the fanatic emotions they all carry. And this emotion, this passionate emotion, underpins a great many of our central casts actions. Throughout the story we see how fanatical emotions lead to sorrow for a great many characters, be it the bitterness Anna-Maria develops for Ricardo and Antonio, the rupture of jealousy surrounding Maria Griselda, or the hatred Anna-Maria finds for Sofia, these intense emotions are always at the forefront of the novel’s most gut-wrenching exchanges. However, these emotions are never made to be separated from context, in fact it is the interconnectedness between social and physical contexts and one’s emotions and perspectives that colour the narrative. Maria Griselda’s hatred of her own beauty, seeing it as a curse, is a clear communication of this idea. By no fault of her own, the men of her life are drawn to passionate love, and subsequent rage and sorrow due to this love, all of this tumultuousness being hurled on Maria Griselda as she must carry its burden. In the same way, because she is a woman, she is treated differently from Antonio, who is also said to be the eye of many different women’s affections, whose agency is respected culturally. This interplay comes at the forefront when Anna-Maria convinces herself that her husbands’ and her best friend Sofia’s infidelity was only a small betrayal, because she has no way of changing these events, and feels isolated without the love of her husband or her best friend, she decides she must accept that perhaps her betrayal was not as drastic. Her only sense of control over her emotions is to accept what has happened to her and try to change her outlook as best she can. A similar example can be when she is dismayed by her arranged marriage to Antonio, but longing for some form of romantic connection learns that she loves him almost out of a necessity for a passion she’s being deprived of due to her conditions, being forced away from her first love and into the arms of another much later. It is in this vicious cycle that death comes to encapsulate a kind of freedom that Anna-Maria did not get to feel in her life, one in which she is something beyond needing only to accept her life, and she realizes in this moment that even those around her are in some ways subject to the same unavoidable condition, that of age and of death. Her death here is like freedom from the cycle, where she can accept and decompress her life without the constant watchful eye of society, or the prying needs of her own mind. Bombal here crafts a rich story, one that felt deeply human through it’s ethereal presentation.

Question for my peers: what did you think of the way life and death are handled in the novel? What are your opinions on the interplay between one’s own self and agency and the physical and social contexts they exist in? How did Bombal’s structure help or hurt the narrative?