The Shrouded Woman is a unique exponent of the avant-garde movement, a movement in which avant-garde artists promoted their progressive and radical politics whilst advocating for societal reform with and through their works of art. Bombal’s novel is framed as an exploration of life and death that also sets the stage for her socio-political statement. Bombal’s “shrouded woman” condems of the subjugation and enforced subordination of Latin American women. The novel suggests that a woman’s codependence on love deprives them of the right to structure their lives in completely independent manner. Ana María is written as someone constrained to the idea of love as to be in love or to be loved, and, very symbolically, she realizes in death that the construct of love she had built her life around was a deception created by a society and culture where women are supposed to be sentimental, passive, with their personal value  dependent on their capacity to love and the ability to give themselves up in order to wholeheartedly love. The novel makes a clear distinction between love as a higher power that motivates human beings and spiritually guides and grounds an individual, and love as a social activity that reinforces the primary roles of men and women in a patriarchal society. As the novel concludes, after Ana María has returned to the ancestral realm of the earth, she reflects on her life discovering that while she was alive it was if she had been living life as if she were a dead person, because she was a woman her life was policed by her society, restricting her free will. The motif of love/lovers exemplifies this idea, the male characters Ricardo, Antonio, and Fernando represents three distinct stages that mark the progressive deconstruction of Ana María’s character as she is slowly chipped away at by societal expectations of conformism. With Ricardo Ana María initially rejects societal expectation to uphold her virginity however once she becomes pregnant, she is described as intimately united to Matter her pregnancy connects her deeply to the natural. When Ricardo’s abandons her and after her miscarriage this natural bond with nature is disrupted. In response Ana María encloses herself in her room and passively accepts Antonio’s marriage proposal. Married life proves unfulfilling and Ana María feels empty as her marriage is purely based off of exception and the desire to keep up with appearances. Ana María withdraws and becomes narrow minded and petty with this begins her courtship with Fernando an act that gratifies her vanity Ana María’s trajectory is defined by her relations to men unveiling the tragedy of it all as her freedom and independent personhood is situated in death.

Q: Do you believe that Ana María was ever in love at one point in the novel or was she always in pursuit of maintaining social respectability politics?