The Final Mist by María Luisa Bombal

First published:La última niebla, 1934 (English translation, 1982)

Type of plot: Feminine surrealism

Time of work: The late 1920’s

Locale: A hacienda in the south of Chile and an unnamed city

Principal Characters:

• The protagonist, an unnamed woman who tells her story in the first person
• Daniel, her husband
• Regina, her husband’s sister-in-law
• The protagonist’s lover, whose name is unknown
• Andrés, a young boy who works in the hacienda

The Novel

The Final Mist begins in a very symbolic way: The protagonist has just married Daniel, and they arrive at the hacienda during a storm, the rain and the cold functioning as metaphors for their loveless marriage. From this first night, the protagonist’s life is tinged by loneliness and frustration. She wanders through the woods, bitterly anguished by the fact that her life has no purpose and her body is aging without experiencing real love. The image of the young girl lying dead among artificial flowers in a house surrounded by heavy mist becomes, in the novel, the objective correlative of the protagonist’s own existence.

One day, Regina, her husband, and her lover come to visit, and the protagonist compares her barren life with Regina’s, who becomes a symbol of passion, music, and vitality. From this point on, the protagonist’s existential dilemma is symbolized by the dual oppositions of life (sound, light, fire, water, earth) and death (silence, darkness, coldness, deadly mist). One foggy night she leaves the house and encounters a mysterious young man who takes her to a house and makes love to her. The eroticism of this scene is highly symbolic as she feels, for the first time, that her life has a true meaning. Because of the surrealistic presentation of this encounter, the reader does not know if the lover really exists or if instead he is a product of her feverish mind. Reality and dreams merge in an ambiguous counterpoint between the protagonist’s loveless marriage and the mysterious appearances of the lover, who waves at her from a horse-drawn carriage that makes no sound and disappears in the mist.

After many years of lonely passion for a man whose existence itself is deceptive, the protagonist’s final encounter with Regina throws light on the empty value of her own life. Regina has attempted suicide because her lover has abandoned her, and now she lies in a hospital bed still calling for her lover. As an adulteress who was brave enough to transgress the laws of her society, Regina had the capacity to choose the course of her life whereas the protagonist confronts the futility of a love nurtured by dreams. Her only choice is to follow her husband, to live correctly—to cry from habit and smile out of duty, following him to die, one day, correctly. As she and her husband leave the hospital, the fog settles over everything like a shroud. Symbol of darkness, coldness, and sterility, this final mist underscores the tragic fate of female existence irrevocably condemned to death in life by a social system which regulates and represses women’s essential instincts.

The Characters

In The Final Mist one observes a sharp dichotomy between men and women. Ownership, domination of nature, and sports are activities which define the masculine, whereas femininity is a synonym of passivity and empty leisure. The relationship between both sexes is established through the institution of marriage, which is depicted as women’s only possible goal in life, as well as a structure of female subjugation. From the author’s feminine perspective, vis-à-vis the traditional conception of femininity, there are other experiences such as eroticism and the ancestral ties with nature which are sanctioned yet repressed by conventional society. Thus, as a result of these marginal experiences, women’s existence is condemned to anguish and frustration. In this sense, The Final Mist must be considered a powerful statement about the social predicament of Latin American women in a world dominated by masculine values. This basic conflict is illustrated by an unresolved dilemma between the protagonist’s intimate desires and social conventions which prevent her from attaining love. Social values have forced her into marriage with a man she does not love in order to escape the stigma of spinsterhood in a society which made marriage women’s only destiny. Burdened by spiritual dissatisfaction and erotic frustration, she is forced into an anguished search for love. As a typical feminine heroine, she undergoes a spiritual adventure that leads her to a profound and shattering understanding of the conflict between feminine aspirations and the moral conventions of society.

At the structural level, Regina functions as a character who contrasts with the protagonist and, at the same time, symbolically prefigures the theme of illicit love. Her loose hair—a symbol of the feminine conceived by María Luisa Bombal as a prolongation of the primordial forces of nature—contrasts sharply with the protagonist’s bound hair, an image of natural erotic instincts which have been suppressed by marriage. Regina’s adultery is an act of subversion against the strict Latin American moral code which demands virginity and monogamy for women. As an adulteress, Regina is punished by society, a sanction which is symbolized in the novel by the act of cutting her hair, still tinged with her blood.

On the other hand, the lover motif creates a metaphor of vitality: His body radiates luminosity and warmth, his embrace evokes the vital movement of the sea, his chest smells like ripe fruit. Even at the primordial level of erotic instincts, it is the lover who, as a symbol of masculinity, becomes the real agent of action, the powerful force which guides the protagonist into spiritual and bodily fulfillment.

Critical Context

María Luisa Bombal wrote The Final Mist while sharing the kitchen table with Pablo Neruda, who at the time was composing Residence on Earth, a book which would revolutionize poetry. As many critics have pointed out, The Final Mist was an equally significant landmark for Latin American prose. Published during a period in which the predominant literary trend was Criollismo—a nativistic depiction of Latin American prototypes and their peculiar geographic environment rendered through the aesthetic mode of realism—The Final Mist presented an avant-garde vision of reality, radically modifying the traditional literary techniques of the period. Subjectivism, poetic elaboration, and the fantastic were elements which made the book an outstanding example of the emerging avant-garde in Latin American writing, as well as a precursor of the world-acclaimed Latin American novel produced during the last two decades.

Apart from its notorious importance in the development of Latin American literature, The Final Mist is considered the most artistic testimony of women’s predicament in Latin America. María Luisa Bombal denounces her society’s unfairness to women by presenting the devastating power of patriarchal society. Forced to fulfill the primary roles of wife and mother, women have no choice except to get married and become housewives. Thus, being marginal to politics and economics, they do not have the opportunity to participate actively in society. As Simone de Beauvoir has demonstrated in The Second Sex (1949), women’s search for love has been conditioned by a system which has equated the condition of being a woman with the imperative of being a mother; even in a love relationship, women stand as the subordinated Other while men represent the Absolute.

Frustration, passivity, and alienation have become, then, the feminine mode of life, and the dilemma of the protagonist in The Final Mist must be considered a true literary representation of a historical circumstance. In the 1930’s, women in Latin America did not have the right to vote, nor did they have full access to work, hence they obviously were second-rate citizens who depended totally on men, and it is within this context that the protagonist’s defeat, at the end of the novel, becomes symbolic of Latin American women’s tragic predicament. Although Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda in Sab (1841) and Terese de la Parra in Ifigenia (1924) had denounced marriage as an enslaving bond for women, it was María Luisa Bombal, by the incomparable excellence of her writing, who gave voice to a silenced reality allowing her denunciation to be heard not only in Latin America but also in the United States, Sweden, Norway, France, and Japan.

Bibliography

Adams, Michael I. Three Authors of Alienation: Bombal, Onetti, Carpentier. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1975. Adams presents a sociopsychological critical interpretation of three Latin American authors whose works share similar themes.

Alegría, Fernando. “María Luisa Bombal.” In Latin American Writers, edited by Carlos A. Solé and Maria I. Abreau. Vol 3. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1989. An essay on the life and career of Bombal. Includes analysis of her works and a bibliography.

Guerra-Cunningham, Lucía. “Mariá Luisa Bombal.” In Spanish American Authors: The Twentieth Century, edited by Angel Flores. New York: H. W. Wilson, 1992. Profiles Bombal and includes an extensive bibliography of works by and about the author.

Mujica, Barbara. “The Shrouded Woman.” Americas 48 (January/February, 1996): 61-62. A review of Bombal’s novels. Mujica sees Bombal as a precursor of the Magical Realists and part of a literary elite that sought to integrate fantastic elements and social criticism into her work. A brief analysis and synopsis of The Final Mist and The Shrouded are included.

Ryan, Bryan, ed. Hispanic Writers: A Selection of Sketches from Contemporary Authors. Detroit: Gale Research, 1991. Entry on Bombal gives an overview of her life, writing, and critical reaction to her work.