Dressed as she was for her last walk, they had laid the dead lady on her bed. She was never interesting in life; in death she was not impressive; and as her husband stood before her, with his hands crossed behind his powerful back, that which he looked upon was the very image of the insignificant.
“Her and me were never cut out for one another,” he remarked at last. “It was a daft-like marriage.” And then, with a most unusual gentleness of tone, “Puir bitch,” said he, “puir bitch!” Then suddenly: “Where’s Erchie?”
I woke up early on Christmas day and started to read this unfinished novel by Robert Louis Stevenson. The tense irony of the prose delivers up a world of harsh resolutions and expedient relationships. This brief summary of the dead Mrs Weir sustains the point of view of her husband, the pitiless hanging judge of the area. Who is it who remarks upon his ‘powerful back’? Is it his own view of himself or is it the narrator concurring with the character’s physical ascendancy at this moment of mortality?
The repetition of the woman’s insignificance resounds as a patriachal summary of woman’s expediency in this bleak world. The surprise of pity cleverly privileges some lingering humanity and makes the passage real. The question moves the reader’s attention away from the death of the wife and mother, compelling us to consider the location of the son in terms of the narrative. The novel we realise, is about the father and the son. Mother is dead and will be avenged. Oediphus is never far away we suspect.