The Shrouded Woman is a captivating novel. María Luisa Bombal explores some of the themes I am most interested in and she does so through the memories of a dead Latin American woman. The narrative is a juxtaposition of fictional and non-fictional events and a puzzle of different perspectives. It is up to the reader to reconstruct the main character’s life through the points of view of the different narrators. The world constructed by Bombal is very dream-like in some ways and very real in others. The outer framework where the main character lies in her casket and the inner one made up of past events create a fascinating dynamic between reality and the supernatural.
The theme that I found most interesting and the most prominent in the novel is the relationship between life and death. Death is seen as a spiritual experience in which Ana María is able to understand a lot about her life. The author embraces the idea of death as an unknown process and rejects its negative connotation. Whenever I get asked if I believe in the afterlife or in something after death, I am torn between the spiritual belief that there is a journey after death or the realist idea that after we die nothing happens, we just rot cease existing. Bombal portrays death as a final act of life. Ana María gains wisdom and freedom after her death and she embodies human individuality in our unknown universe. The novel shows how illuminating dying can be for a human and how naturally beautiful the journey can be.
Nature is another important theme in the novel and it goes along with the main character’s life course. Ana María seems to be very connected to nature in the parts of the novel where she is content and free. When she is young, in love with Ricardo and pregnant with his child, the main character deeply identifies herself with nature. She passes hours on her hammock “suspended between two hazelnut trees” (169) and lays there for hours. She sees “a flight of doves with their coming and going streaking with fleeting shadows the book opened on my knees; the intermittent chant of the sawmill – that sharp, sustained, soft note, like the humming of a beehive – cutting through the air as far as the houses when the afternoon was very clear” (169). After her death, the main character is immersed in nature in a similar way. In her casket, she feels “an infinity of roots sink and spread into the earth like an expanding cobweb […] feeling the grass grow, new islands emerge, and on some other continent, the unknown flower bursting open that blooms only on a day of eclipse.” (159) The essence of Ana María as a human and a woman is rooted in nature and her relationship with the natural world changed throughout the story.
The question I have for the class is: does the changing role of nature follow Ana María’s development in the story or are the two elements unrelated?
Can’t wait to read the other posts!
– Bianca
Yes, nature is definitely an important theme here… and the ways in which humans are either part of nature and/or interact with it. (The river that is in love with Maria Griselda, for instance.) In some ways, even though the novel is very much about death and “the beyond,” it’s also very material, interested in the physical sensations of being in the world: the rain, the feeling of leaves or earth, and so on.
“The novel shows how illuminating dying can be for a human and how naturally beautiful the journey can be.” I really like this point you made about how the author used life and death to show off an important part of human nature.