Mary Maloney regains her consciousness of reality when her husband tells her she is being abandoned. At the beginning, she is unwittingly sunk deep in unreality. She believes that her husband is true to her, and that they are part of a project that will go on serenely into the future:
She loved to luxuriate in the presence of this man, and to feel almost as a sunbather feels the sun -- that warm male glow that came out of him to her when they were alone together.
Then, when her husband returns home, he reveals himself as a monster -- the sort of person who would not only cheat on his wife but abandon her when she is pregnant and expect her to take it all in good part with the offer of a bit of money. This makes it starkly clear to Mary that her whole life has been built on a lie.
Desperate, Mary's first instinctive response is to clutch at the remnants of domesticity: "'I'll get the supper,' she managed to whisper, and this time he didn't stop her." It is only when this final effort is rejected ("Don't make supper for me. I'm going out.") that she reflexively lashes out at him and kills him, ironically with the very leg of lamb that was to have become his supper.
After the murder, her thinking is clear and her motivation is the same as it had been before: love. Only now, she has shifted the focus of her love to her unborn child and will do anything necessary to protect it.
No comments:
Post a Comment