To the outside world, Mrs. March is a model of the perfect wife.
Always dressed tastefully — on her daily excursion to buy olive bread and macarons, she favours an ostrich clutch bag and mint green leather gloves.. A skilled hostess whose evening soirees in an artfully casual apartment are planned to the last detail. A loving and supportive partner to her highly successful author husband George.
This controlled existence is rent asunder when the owner of her favourite patisserie makes a casual observation about George’s latest novel. The protagonist is so like Mrs March in dress, speech and mannerisms, she remarks. How did it feel to be the inspiration for a character in a book, she wonders.
Mrs March is aghast. She’s not read the book yet but she knows it’s about a whore; a horrible, stupid, ugly, woman in her eyes. How could George have betrayed and humiliated her this way?
The whole world would know or, worse still, would assume. They would see inside her, wickedest of violations.”
That one remark sends Mrs March on a descent into paranoia.
It begins with sightings of cockroaches in her spotless home. Takes on another dimension when she becomes convinced guests at her party are sniggering over her resemblance to the whore in George’s novel. And tips over completely when suspicions take hold that her husband is involved in he murder of a young woman.
Everything she has believed to be true is brought into question.
This is a taut novel tracing the disintegration of a personality and the rupture in a woman’s grasp of reality. At times we find echos of other novels. Like Mrs Dalloway, Mrs March begins with preparations for a party. And on her bedroom table lies a copy of du Maurier’s Rebecca, teasing us maybe about the trustworthiness of the housekeeper in the March household.
What makes it particularly unsettling is that — like Rebecca — this novel deals with issues of identity.
Mrs March for example is never referred to other than by her married name. We never get to discover her birth name, even when she is recounting elements of her life during childhood and college when she met George days. the novel progresses, it becomes evident that Mrs March is seldom ever her true self. She’s always playing a part, hiding her real self behind a mask.
Her apartment is more like a stage set than a home with Mrs March trying on various personas.
The painting of nude women in her guest bathroom is there to suggest she is a woman who appreciates suggestive art. The couch is adorned with cashmere throws tossed repeatedly until she achieves just the right degree of casualness “suggesting that Mrs March had been reading and lost track of time, so at ease that she had forgotten abut the party she was hosting…”
The persona of a cultured woman is at odds with that of the Mrs March who harbours thoughts of killing her party guests with cyanide and who drags her son through the apartment when she’s upset.
As the novel progresses we discover that these violent impulses are not confined to adulthood. There were similar instances in her childhood and then in adolescence some risky flirtations with a stranger on a beach.
So who really is Mrs March? The answer to that becomes increasingly unclear to her and to readers of the novel. For a debut novel, Feito’s portrayal of a fragmented personality and the collapse of mental stability is remarkable. It could so easily have been just a gothic pastiche but Feito keeps a firm hand on her narrative, teasing us with possibilities rather than certainties.
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