Gilles' Wife True to Form "Gilles' Wife" has few words, and even less world, but it does have form: it says: the way to oblivion is oblivion.
Elisa's diminishment begins with her name: not only does she surrender her last name in marriage, but she makes no claim to her first. She is Gilles' wife. That's his view, her view, and the town's view. He's known, she's hidden.
He works in a steel mill, she does all the work of the household, which includes raising three children, cleaning floors on hands and knees, wringing out the laundry by hand, shoveling snow, raking leaves, cooking and serving meals, and anticipating Gillies every need. She's the good faithful wife.
This is the role she accepts, the bond she makes. She loves him as herself. For sure, her specific reading of her position is both typical and unusual mainly because Gilles is both utterly predictable and non-stereotypical. Yet her loyalty can be carried to the point of self-annulment as when she spies for him on her own sister (his lover), and more incredibly, when she attends to his batterer's thirst before she does her sister's battered bloodied face.
When Gilles is around, and he's around a lot for a worker, he takes up space in a way somewhere in between a corned-up Wordsworth peasant and a porned-up Tennessee Williams stud. He looms large in his pedestrian household, and much larger in bed where his thrusting, top heavy, sometimes rapacious, and sometimes brute sexuality is assumed. In one of countless bed scenes, he all but rapes his fully pregnant wife, his forced entry occurring in on key with his "no danger" sexologist's advice. There is no "yes" for her because there is no "no" for her. Gillie's oppressiveness is exercised on an intimate level.
His control of his her world is pervasive and effective, his authority godlike. His means include violence, and myriad forms of manipulation which allow him to obscure his power over his wife. He makes the gratuitous provocation of an affair with her younger sister seem natural, normal, and righteous. The sexual possession of both serves as a mechanism to sever the supportive friendship between the sisters.
And when his terrorizing and mania bring his affair to a disastrous end, he appropriates his wife's emotional being, feigning muteness and tears. When he finally resigns himself to the loss of his jeweled possession, he offers no apology or even admission of his assault, demeaning verbal attacks, and death threats toward her, instead 'confessing' only his own 'loss': "I ruined all the happiness I had" for a "good for nothing" woman.
Despite Eliza's strange adoration, and apparent masochism, she is never without doubt as to her husband's true nature. Her inexpressivity is telling, even from the opening bed scene, and her sensed thoughts display more dispassion than enthusiasm. In the dance hall scene, her repressed seething at his open betrayals and her own non-entity status, cannot be ignored--except of course by him. When she loses it in the garden scene, in her new son's presence, we grasp that her tolerance and restraints have limits. The gaps in her faith are tiny but real: she is not always responsive, not always deferent.
At one point she seeks explicit help in the confessional. She pleas: "I don't say a word (to him). If I yell at him (over his affair) he will leave me." To which the priest responds: "refrain from any kind of revolt against the Lord." God's will and her husband's will are one. Her stares at the wounded Christ on the church walls can only point to self-sacrifice. Jesus is for her; and Gillies is her cross.
But the confession is one concrete, public step: add on her husband's phony conversion to fidelity and the unraveling has begun. Her bond to him is weakened too by his having displaced her identity by adopting her emotions. Perhaps her mother's banishment of Gillies from the family home has further bolstered her resolve. Whatever, the crucible of her existence is exerting a relentless pressure.
And she soon recognizes that her life is unavailable to her, that she has been systematically undermined and used by the coercions of bed and home, that she has been cut off from both her sister and her mother, and yes that her husband is no more than a shirt--one that, like his concealed life, she will never launder again. But because he is the norm whose sway exceeds his harem world, she can sight no exit. So stepping carefully into the upstairs window frame, she gradually, as if in unison with the natural world, makes a graceful descent. But even lying on the paved walkway, she is beyond immediate help: "go get Gilles," is what is said by the bystanders.
Elisa's diminishment begins with her name: not only does she surrender her last name in marriage, but she makes no claim to her first. She is Gilles' wife. That's his view, her view, and the town's view. He's known, she's hidden.
He works in a steel mill, she does all the work of the household, which includes raising three children, cleaning floors on hands and knees, wringing out the laundry by hand, shoveling snow, raking leaves, cooking and serving meals, and anticipating Gillies every need. She's the good faithful wife.
This is the role she accepts, the bond she makes. She loves him as herself. For sure, her specific reading of her position is both typical and unusual mainly because Gilles is both utterly predictable and non-stereotypical. Yet her loyalty can be carried to the point of self-annulment as when she spies for him on her own sister (his lover), and more incredibly, when she attends to his batterer's thirst before she does her sister's battered bloodied face.
When Gilles is around, and he's around a lot for a worker, he takes up space in a way somewhere in between a corned-up Wordsworth peasant and a porned-up Tennessee Williams stud. He looms large in his pedestrian household, and much larger in bed where his thrusting, top heavy, sometimes rapacious, and sometimes brute sexuality is assumed. In one of countless bed scenes, he all but rapes his fully pregnant wife, his forced entry occurring in on key with his "no danger" sexologist's advice. There is no "yes" for her because there is no "no" for her. Gillie's oppressiveness is exercised on an intimate level.
His control of his her world is pervasive and effective, his authority godlike. His means include violence, and myriad forms of manipulation which allow him to obscure his power over his wife. He makes the gratuitous provocation of an affair with her younger sister seem natural, normal, and righteous. The sexual possession of both serves as a mechanism to sever the supportive friendship between the sisters.
And when his terrorizing and mania bring his affair to a disastrous end, he appropriates his wife's emotional being, feigning muteness and tears. When he finally resigns himself to the loss of his jeweled possession, he offers no apology or even admission of his assault, demeaning verbal attacks, and death threats toward her, instead 'confessing' only his own 'loss': "I ruined all the happiness I had" for a "good for nothing" woman.
Despite Eliza's strange adoration, and apparent masochism, she is never without doubt as to her husband's true nature. Her inexpressivity is telling, even from the opening bed scene, and her sensed thoughts display more dispassion than enthusiasm. In the dance hall scene, her repressed seething at his open betrayals and her own non-entity status, cannot be ignored--except of course by him. When she loses it in the garden scene, in her new son's presence, we grasp that her tolerance and restraints have limits. The gaps in her faith are tiny but real: she is not always responsive, not always deferent.
At one point she seeks explicit help in the confessional. She pleas: "I don't say a word (to him). If I yell at him (over his affair) he will leave me." To which the priest responds: "refrain from any kind of revolt against the Lord." God's will and her husband's will are one. Her stares at the wounded Christ on the church walls can only point to self-sacrifice. Jesus is for her; and Gillies is her cross.
But the confession is one concrete, public step: add on her husband's phony conversion to fidelity and the unraveling has begun. Her bond to him is weakened too by his having displaced her identity by adopting her emotions. Perhaps her mother's banishment of Gillies from the family home has further bolstered her resolve. Whatever, the crucible of her existence is exerting a relentless pressure.
And she soon recognizes that her life is unavailable to her, that she has been systematically undermined and used by the coercions of bed and home, that she has been cut off from both her sister and her mother, and yes that her husband is no more than a shirt--one that, like his concealed life, she will never launder again. But because he is the norm whose sway exceeds his harem world, she can sight no exit. So stepping carefully into the upstairs window frame, she gradually, as if in unison with the natural world, makes a graceful descent. But even lying on the paved walkway, she is beyond immediate help: "go get Gilles," is what is said by the bystanders.