Mrs. March and Bodily Emotion
Mrs. March, by Virginia Feito, is about a woman who becomes terrified—and then certain—that her novelist husband has based an unsavory character on her. She does not take it well.
Here is the moment, very early in the book, that Mrs. March first learns of the possibility while she’s buying bread at her favorite bakery.
“But isn’t this the first time he’s based a character on you?”
Mrs. March, still fingering her pocketbook, experienced a sudden numbness. Her face hardened just as her insides seemed to liquify, so that she feared they might leak out. Patricia, oblivious, set her order on the countertop and tallied up the bill.
“I…” said Mrs. March, struck by a sliver of pain in her chest. “What do you mean?”
“I mean… the main character.” Patricia smiled.
Mrs. March blinked, her mouth agape, unable to answer, her thoughts sticking to her skull despite her pulling at them, as if they were trapped in tar.
Notice the way emotions are portrayed through physical sensations. Mrs. March must be feeling shock in the first moment and then perhaps dismay or embarrassment, but the feelings are described through bodily sensations: numbness, a hard face, and liquified insides. Emotions are bodily and making them so in writing can help the reader to feel them with the character.
The physicality of emotion intensifies when Mrs. March fears that her insides might leak out. Does she mean incontinence? Or perhaps organs and blood? Either way, it invites an intensity of response in the reader, as well. We might feel revulsion at the thought of whatever leaking she fears—and so a pang of nausea might mimic the character’s upheaval. (Though I admit this is a bonus disgust for certain readers—not everyone will react strongly, and that’s fine.)
A “sliver of pain” is also a sensation instead of just an emotion. I have a personal (and perhaps unfair) bias against the word “pain” (which is not to say I never use it!) because it feels bland and worn-out to me. But modifying the word with “a sliver of” helps. A sliver is sharp and so that transfers to the pain. The vague abstraction solidifies to be something like a shiv, like a stab to the heart, though a minor one. It’s made solid and specific.
But my favorite bit of this is passage is “her thoughts sticking to her skull despite her pulling at them, as if they were trapped in tar.” Feito is still describing the sensations of shock. But in this moment, it’s not only emotions made tangible but actual thoughts. They become material substance, graspable by fingers—though not in this moment, when they are stuck. And tar is quite sensory—it’s named here for its texture, but of course the color and smell and connotation come along.
Additionally, these thoughts are not in her mind, but in her “skull.” And so again, with the materiality, with hard bone instead of abstraction. Could the skull also evoke a ghastly shiver in some readers? If so, it can transfer those words all the way into the reader’s body, like that revulsion.
Mrs. March’s blinking and “mouth agape” are doing more work than we might credit. No one doubts that these gestures are literally true, that her eyelids move up and down and her mouth hangs open at the surprise of what she’s hearing. The literal physicality of that then slides into the next part of the sentence, when she’s pulling at thoughts. The pulling is metaphor, of course, but the actuality of the previous phrase primes us to understand the thoughts as real matter. This happens because of grammar—because action and metaphor are contained in the single units of a sentence.
And isn’t this, so often, the magic of writing and storytelling? To make ideas feel like matter? To twist slippery abstractions into something we can hold in our hand—or at least so it feels like we can?
But back to that skull. The physicality of the bones, the tar, and the thoughts as substance prompts us to understand the “pulling” as actual too. So consider the choreography of that action. If Mrs. March is pulling at something inside her skull, she must also be inside it—at least her fingers, but possibly her whole self, her whole body. And what an image of madness that is.
In these opening pages Mrs. March is merely embarrassed and hurt, but the image of her stuck inside her own skull prepares us for the mental and emotional spiral that she will experience throughout the book. No spoilers, but it prepares us for the real-world and bodily consequences of that spiral too.