As a whole, I really enjoyed reading The Shrouded Woman; it never seemed to drag on or feel intractable to read and the prose was really nice as well, with some great quotes and insights. It  aligned with my preconceptions of what was archetypally “Romance literature”, with some sense of foreignness (from a Canadian perspective) and an unabashed explorations of human emotions like jealousy and love, with some events defying rationality (like the ) mixed in. I didn’t interpret the novel as a vindication of “peripheral modernism” like what was discussed in the lecture, but looking back, I can see how it argues for creative value in the periphery, with a Chilean female author writing a book with a female narrator.

Like a bunch of other posts, one of the first unique things that struck me about the book was the narrator’s insight, or hindsight, on her life, writing “Must we die in order to know?” I think that quote framed the way I read the rest of the novel, because I figured that in that transition between life and death, one becomes almost a spectator, powerless to change anything. If we have no ability to change the past or affect the course of the future in death, I thought that maybe there would be some impartiality that could provide some new insight.

I often felt that Ana Maria expressed many feelings in such a way a living narrator might not have; even though narration is fundamentally created by a living author at the time, it can mean something different from the dead narrator. For example, at the end of the 15th chapter, when talking about Fernando, she thinks “From that time on, in order to feel myself alive, I needed your constant suffering by my side.” That statement initially surprised me because that feeling of “suffering” or facing adversity to feel alive was oddly familiar, but it felt unspeakable in the context of love. Knowing that no one was there to judge her thoughts and she was no longer constrained by social norms or expectations of women, it felt like she was honestly confronting her feelings, which made it more powerful to me.

The often haunting description of nature takes on new power as well. When Bombal describes the forest as “shed[ding] a kind of eternal silence” or likens the buzzing of the bees to phantoms, it emphasized a haunting, tranquil nature to me, as though someone who was immediately confronted with eternal silence, living at the interface between life and whatever comes after could see the world in a new, beautiful way. In light of those observations, my question is “Do we gain a new perspective on our lives in times close to death, from hindsight or reflection without others’ judgment, and what might be the nature of this knowledge?”