close reading on page 42

On page 42 of The Wife of Martin Guerre, there’s a beautiful descriptive passage that narrates interior progression from one state of mind to another by juxtaposing metaphor and concrete detail. Bertrande is teaching Sanxi the catechisms, and the calm summer day brings her a long-forgotten sense of peace.

First, we get the objective correlative that triggers the epiphany: “She looked at Sanxi’s cool young cheek…”; following that, we get an interior thought: “’At last I begin to be at peace.’” This is explicit enough to center the following passage on a specific theme, and remove any ambiguity that might ensue. Still, the description in the next paragraph shows us that this is anything but a singularly happy thought. Her thinking “sweep[s] backward,” a figurative action that compares her cognition with maybe a broom or a hawk (it could go either way). She contemplates every emotion predicated upon Martin’s absence, which is partially enumerated in a catalog that goes from general “all the moments of anguish, of desire, of hatred…” to more specific, e.g. “when she had contemplated his death in some engagement of the Spanish wars…”—an increasing size of phrases which builds anticipation until it culminates in a single moment. Indeed, the effect this description pulls off is a sense of simultaneity, the rushed reading it demands prompting the reader to evoke these feelings in quick succession.

Following that, we are told that a “sharp inward knowledge” informs her reminiscence. The word “sharp” is sharp itself, suggesting the violence and “agony” she is reviewing, in contrast to the bliss that follows. Her bliss is described in poetic terms that evoke purity and innocence, but it’s a tainted innocence longing to return to its former state, a “tired dove” (an oddly ironic presentation of the symbol for peace and the divine). Love is diminished from a broad, tempestuous abstraction that has tortured her for eight years, into a particularized “only love for Sanxi,” and indeed becomes embodied in Sanxi himself, a love “as innocent and cool and gentle as the curve of his cheek. The return to Sanxi’s cheek signals to us the compact singularity of this moment, that it has occurred in a single instant when Bertrande is looking at her son’s face.

The action at the end of this passage is almost redundant: we are told that “she regarded him thoughtfully and tenderly,” but after this careful exposition of her thought process and perceptual focus, we would expect nothing less of her. Finally, in a curious instance of “eye dialogue,” much shorter than the scene in Oroonoko, Sanxi returns a smile “with a secret amusement.” In this phrase, we get a sample of the true innocence that Bertrande will never regain, an innocence that laughs at complexity and finds simple pleasure in familial interaction.