Structuralist Criticism God is the Space Between by Maryanne Moll

Structuralist Criticism God is the Space Between by Maryanne Moll

Roland Raymond A. Roldan    LIT230     Prado     Ateneo de Naga University

                                                                                                           

The gore of its ending notwithstanding, the short story “God is the Space Between” is a terrifying story of freedom, a fascinating mini quest-myth of romance, tragedy and irony. One can see the story initially patterned after two sides of representations: an ideal world and a real world, separated by “a dark-colored, very ornate tapestry behind a door.” In this story one sees the falling of the heroine from an ideal world to the real. Adding to these structural elements is the irony with which it ends when the triumph itself becomes the downfall.

The narration, being told in the first person, is the tale of a woman finding her strength to finally end the years of pain and suffering in the hands of her husband by killing him in his sleep. It was told in almost mythical fashion: a forty-one year old woman coming into terms of a monster-like change within her so that she can rescue herself from “Satan,” her husband who has been abusing her for years.

The first line “There are stories that do not really feel like stories,” gives out a warning that this story is not what it seems. The surface phenomenon shows us the narrator, a wife, triumphing over her husband, an abusive drunkard. Just like many romantic stories of adventure wherein the killer is the hero, in this case the narrator-wife, and the one who is killed is the monster, in this case, the husband. Bearing this surface phenomenon in mind, the deep structure may be seen as a heroine fighting and winning over evil. This structure is categorized as the mythos of summer by structuralism proponent Northrop Frye.

However, the author furthers the story using words characterizing its veiled structure. “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.” One can see that the story, far from being a romantic hero’s tale, is structurally also a tragedy, referred to as the mythos of autumn by Frye.

 According to Frye, The mythos of autumn is when “a hero with the potential to be superior, like a romantic hero, falls from his romantic height into the real world, the world of loss and defeat, from which he can never rise.” In the story one can see the ideal world briefly being described when the narrator opens a blue box, bearing the jewels that she usually wore daily. Her family’s bloodline presents a world of adventure, the blood of a patriarch, “a Spanish cartographer of German descent,” an ideal reference to her heroic lineage. The reference to her mother giving her an antique cross of St. Benedict, whispering “All you need to say is ‘Get thee behind me, Satan’” as a prophetic advice, reinforces the romantic bravery and virtue of such a world.

On the other hand, the real world is revealed when she sees herself in the mirror as a wife brutally battered for eleven years. The narrator, in true tragic fashion, falls from her romantic height into the real world, the world of loss and defeat, from which she can never rise. The real world which is the world of experience, uncertainty, and failure is thoroughly seen, as the gradual transformation of the innocent to the monster is exposed: she is her husband’s killer. Although her act seems heroic, in reality, it is not. She realizes it, even as she says the words: “It was done, I am free…” which are seemingly triumphant words, but end the sentence with “eleven years too late”. This fall, not victory, is also apparent in the final words of the story: “Yet some things will stay on…Like hunger.”

At this point, we see the third part of Frye’s quest-myth formula which is the irony. The husband’s death would be seen as similar to the archetypal emancipation of a powerful tyrant, like that of the beheading of Holofernes by Judith, the beautiful Jewess, where the quest of the good, and the desire for freedom is finally acted out in completion, where the closeness to the desired deity is achieved upon the demise of the abuser. However, in the real world, killing a person means imprisonment, a total emancipation to freedom. Irony is the real world seen through a tragic lens, a world in which the protagonist is defeated by the very act of liberation. Her realization of such a tragedy, as she moves from the ideal world to the real world, from innocence to experience, is apparent in the words: “There is enough of God and space to write a million epics of hurt and bestiality.”

In conclusion the story “God is the Space Between” is structurally a three-fold quest-myth of romance, tragedy and irony. That the author was able to pack so much in a short story is quite a skill. The title itself with the words “God”, “Space” and “Between” sums up this three-part structure “God” being the ideal, “Space” being the real and “Between” being the irony.