The Mother-in-Law's Fate

This character thread traces the mother-in-law's path from anxious matriarch to shell-shocked widow and finally to moral chorus.

increasingBearing stren­gth in each eventdecreasing

The Prozac at Christmas

The Prozac at Christmas Context The mother-in-law watches the pregnant narrator all day, worried, and at dawn knocks on her door with a glass of water and a green-and-white pill. The narrator tosses the pill into the fire. Turn The mother-in-law is addicted to doctors and speaks so softly and walks so neatly. The narrator wonders how such a proper woman can offer Prozac to a mother-to-be. Aftermath The pill becomes a symbol of the family's solution to every problem: medicalize the unruly woman. The mother-in-law is already an agent of confinement.

The First Sympathy

The First Sympathy Context Standing before the open grave, the narrator imagines the mother-in-law opening up the house, throwing away her husband's spectacles and smelling him on the backrest of his rocking chair. Turn She sees the mother-in-law covering her mouth with her hand, clinging to the bedpan, gasping after sliding a door shut. The mother-in-law says the dead man squeezed her hand just before he died. Aftermath The narrator feels close to her mother-in-law for the first time. Grief creates a bridge between the two women that rivalry never could.

The Sleepwalker

The Sleepwalker Context The mother-in-law carries on washing her husband's trousers after he is gone. At night she sleepwalks, strolling through the village in her nightie shouting Fire. Turn She uses a shoe as a phone and converses with God. She does the hoovering at four in the morning and eats white bread left out for days. Aftermath Her body is an infested house she tiptoes through. The narrator recognizes the widow's limbo as a version of her own madness.

The Sunday Zeal

The Sunday Zeal Context The mother-in-law now acts like any other widow, eating pastries in modern cafés. She wants to go for rides and demands a destination from the narrator. Turn She says she doesn't mind where they go but wants to get a move on, with a widow's zeal. Her only child takes his old mother out of this sewer, and it does her a world of good. Aftermath The Sunday outing becomes a ritual of forced enthusiasm. The mother-in-law's grief is still there, but it is now dressed in normal clothes.

The Moral Chorus

The Moral Chorus Context As the narrator's affair becomes known, the neighbours and the mother-in-law agree that it is not right to run off with another man. They toss empty bottles and repeat the village verdict. Turn The narrator hears the words from a distance and does not know why they sound like a message for someone. The mother-in-law has joined the community against her. Aftermath The mother-in-law's fate is to end up on the side of order and propriety. The woman who once offered Prozac now offers the comforting clichés of the village.

during the narrator's pregnancy, at Christmas

at the father-in-law's funeral

in the months after the father-in-law's death

after the mourning has softened into routine

near the ending, before the final separation