My first impression of “A Shrouded Woman” was that the many perspectives were really cool: shifting from her POV to the other funeralgoers and even times when it was like she “talked” to others’ narration, like the Father. But the weirdest one is still her own. From what I’ve read, most forms of the post-death narratives are not just of the emotional detachment of the narrator that allows them to look back on their life with a more measured, wide-perspective view, but also the physical detachment. One often speaks of the “soul leaving the body”; for template cartoon imagery, a transparent or wispy image of the character hovers over their body, imperceptible by others. It’s the idea that souls or spirits still linger after death, either in our world or in an afterlife, watching over and reminiscing.
However, “A Shrouded Woman” adds a step between the soul leaving the body and the reminiscence of life. She hasn’t physically detached yet; she is still narrating, as discussed in the lecture, from the corpse. She is “seeing” and “feeling” (157). She feels when each of the mourners touch her or kiss her, or when she sees them, triggering recollections of her life like Proust’s madeleines. It made me wonder about the purpose of writing this way: why keep her in the body?
I think that having Ana Maria narrate from her body makes us as the readers more aware of how much importance appearances for women were and are. Personally, the opening of the book in relation to this was very striking: the emphasis on the beauty of her dead body. The embroidered sheets with lavender scent. A robe of white satin. Her smoothed and pretty hair. All her wrinkles, gone. (157)
She delights in being “perfectly still, serene, and beautiful”, the object of everyone’s gaze (158). And this sets the tone for the rest of her recollections, which is full of characters chasing and missing each other’s affections and feelings in pursuit of some (often superficial, surface level) relationships that never work out that well; Maria Griselda is the clearest example, whose beauty kills and drives mad those around her, and also brings herself to loneliness and despair.
I’ll always remember the first time I went to a funeral as a child, for the burial of my grandmother, and seeing how she had been prettied up to look like she was just sleeping peacefully. In fact, I had never seen her look that nice in her last years, and it was almost off-putting to me. And while it is ostensibly for the dead’s sake, it is really for our sake as mourners; that we see our beloved dead looking beautiful for one last time when viewed in the casket. And now I understand it may be for the dead too, to be admired again in the youthful, slender beauty.
But Ana Maria also challenges this idea: she knows it is just “childish vanity”. It is only for a fleeting moment, too; as the book goes on, she begins to long for what the books terms the “second death” (259) , to be unbound from life and the physical body (204). Possibly, this framing of starting from the corpse perspective, is to answer the question of what can be known after death. And one of those things to be aware of is how momentary and ultimately trivial the physical appearance is in death, and yet how it drives everyone as they live.
Question of the week: What was your first experience at a funeral like?
Track of the Week: Darkside of Memory by Satou Tenpei (佐藤天平)
This lamenting, mournful tracks plays in the backstory sequences of the game; I imagine it playing for Ana Maria’s tragic recollections as well. Also I like any reason to revisit one of my favourite game’s soundtracks.