Reader Response Criticism God is the Space Between by Maryanne Moll

Reader Response Criticism:  God is the Space Between by Maryanne Moll
Roland Raymond A. Roldan    LIT230   Prado     Ateneo de Naga University

The story “God is the Space Between,” by Maryann Moll, tells the reader the story of a forty-one year old woman coming into terms with herself so that she can kill “Satan,” her husband who has been abusing her for years.

As a reader, one may react either with horror or enthusiasm to its text. Its first line, “There are stories that do not really feel like stories,” was a precursor of what is to come, an ambivalence of sorts, a possession of base emotions that slowly control the reader. “These are the stories,” the narration continues, “that hold no deep, numbing sensation, cause no smarts, create no stigmas, but stay on the heart like a bottomless hollow.”

Naming a husband to be “Satan” brings due response to many readers, female and male alike. The description may strikes one reader to be nearest to such a “dark angel” with a loathing that bears a fitting description of hell. The condition wherein a woman is abused for a very long time would be infernal in experience, and the cause of her suffering be named as such.

 Would the reader imagine his or her own mother to be in such a predicament, as he/she re-experiences a life that reflects his/her own, and upon such reenactment, one becomes seduced by a fantasy that has never been fulfilled? Would the reader be a wife who shares a common experience with the story? Or would he be a husband that realizes his folly? Such identification to a story would be like a literary mirror, revealing a symbiotic relationship between   author and reader, where acts that the reader cannot do in reality would be realized in fantasy, or a probable future that could be changed?

Does the mother’s act of giving an antique cross of St. Benedict, with the whisper “All you need to say is ‘Get thee behind me, Satan’” imply unacknowledged empowerment, that she the power all along, but chose not to use it? Or is everything in vain—that in real life, Satan cannot be rid of? The simplicity of the suggested act seemed too ridiculous to be a solution in the first place, and thus cannot be true. Yet the author’s offer of such simplicity entices the reader to continue the literary journey: such a “simple” solution proved to be in vain, and the killing had to be done, if only to exorcise the evil.

The text’s indeterminacy in its description adds more to stimulate the imagination. Is the narration but a dream? Is the act of killing but a fantasy in the story, owing the omission of typical endings, where the police closes a case, and that we can move on?  Or is it but a dream, where characters wither and die, and the persona that thinks himself a butterfly recovers a previous existence, and he finds himself hollow, after the butterfly ebbs away, again to be replaced by another.

After all the doubts brought on by the text to the reader, the former finally brings things to an end, as she says the words: “It was done, I am free…” almost messianic in tone, almost reminiscent to Christ’s “consummatum est,” but then the words of betrayal comes next, when there was a mention that murder came “eleven years too late.” The mention of time clarifies the intent of the author, a correction of sorts, wherein the depiction of possession is deemed completed, a monstrosity that overcomes humanity: “Yet some things will stay on…Like hunger.”