SUMMARY
The story deals with the memories, feelings and
perspectives of a couple of spinsters a week after their father’s death. The
action takes place in a brief lapse of time inside the house, and there’s a lot
of dialogue, so it’s almost a play for the theatre. The sisters talk about the things
they have to do following their father’s funeral. They speak about giving or
not their father’s top hat to the porter, about the convenience or not of dying
black her dressing gowns, about not paying the nurse for having been invited to stay
with them a week after the decease, about sending their father’s watch to his
son Benny, who lives in Ceylon, or to give it to his grandson Cyril who lives
in London, about having or not the holy communion, about arranging and
disposing of their father’s things, about dismissing or not the maid now they
don’t need a cook to prepare colonel’s meals any more…
They discuss all these questions, and they have a lot
of doubts as to take a decision for the most of them, for all their lives they
had been under the authority of a tyrannical father, and now they are at a loss
about how to deal with the things to do. We have to suppose their father was a
soldier serving in India (not an easy post), who treated his children with
military discipline to the point of annulling their wills. And this
strict education was aggravated because their mother died when they were very
young.
Now, Josephine, or Jug, and Constantia, or Con, cannot
get rid of the feeling that, even now, they are under their father’s authority,
and even, when they know he’s dead and buried, feel his presence: they imagine
he’s watching them, that he’ll raise from the tomb and scold them for having
buried him, they imagine that if now they shut him in a cupboard, he’ll fight
to get out, dead as he is. For they remember the exact moment when he died,
when he opened only one threatening eye to look at them angrily, just before
passing away.
So these two girls had spent their lives taking care
of their father, bore his angers, his quarrels with the family friends, and bore
to be isolated from the society, and thus having the possibility of finding a
husband who would carry them away from their home-barrack hindered. No suitor
would approach them with a so unpleasant father, a father more bent to chase
them away than to allure them. Jug and Con couldn’t even ask their brother
Benny for help, because we can imagine that he followed his father’s calling,
career and character, as he lives in a remote part of Ceylon.
But the two sisters were (and are still) not only
afraid of their father, but of the maid, a woman who has adopted the colonel’s
character and treats the sisters with a contempt and rudeness improper of a
servant.
Their sense of abandonment, fear and indecision reaches
its highpoint at the end of the story, when they wanted to say something to
each other, and they cannot (or perhaps don’t want to) remember what was it.
The story is a sad and a hopeless: we can imagine how
secluded, monotonous and even poor their life has been until now, and how it’ll
be for them in the future: they cannot even cook! But this topic isn’t new in
the literature of the 19th and 20th centuries; the
novelty is the way Mansfield tells it. We find funny or surprising moments in
her narrative, as when they laugh imagining their father’s hat on the porter, when
they imagine dying their dressing gowns, when Con worries about the poor mice, when
Jug is afraid her father will be angry when he discovers that they had buried
him, when Jug wanted Con to be the first to go into their father’s dormitory
because she is taller, when they feel his presence inside the chest of drawers
and then locked the wardrobe, when they imagine so vividly Benny’s life that we
believe we’re seeing him, although it’s only a sisters’ fantasy; we also get
confused with Cyril’s visit, because at the beginning we don’t know if it takes
place before his grandfather’s death or after; we don’t know either what to
think when they don’t want the holy communion because of minor details like the
difficulty of finding a place for the altar, when they remember they gave
money to the barrel organ to stop the music, not as a tip for it, etc.
And finally one cannot help praising Mansfield’s ear for the dialogues; one cannot help thinking what a master of the spoken words she was: the characters talk so fluently, so naturally, that one can imagine really hearing their voices.
QUESTIONS
-What has to be your attitude in a funeral? You cannot laugh there, but how can you avoid a laughing fit?
-According to your experience, is mourning for public appearances or for a personal feeling?
-Beside the black clothes, what else you do to show you’re in mourning?
-Obituary and epitaph: do you have your own ones
composed? What do you know about the Spoon River Anthology, by Edgar Lee
Masters?
-What last words or last gestures of famous people (or not famous) do you know? E.g.: Please, believe me if I tell you that I would like my last sentence was: “I have no choice but to die; I apologize for any inconvenience.”
-In your view, what are the meaning of these symbols:
the top hat, the dressing gowns, the watch and the box they wanted to
send it with, the shortened names, the boa, the snake, the barrel organ, the
meringue, Con lying on the floor with her arms outstretched, the tunnel…
-What do you think is going to happen to the sisters in
the future?
VOCABULARY
heaved, dyed, shrieked, scurry, crumbs, tabbies, marmalade,
appallingly, gimcrack, bold, callous, told on, runners, rocker, blow-out, breezily,
brooded, give Kate notice, bypath, made a face, mantelpiece, thieved
