The Snow Child

The narrative now shifts from the summer wedding tinged with magic to the delivery of Faina and Garrett’s child. That delivery is anything but magical. Even as we wait, like Garrett, apart from the delivery, we think of Mabel’s own childbirth tragedy more than 30 years earlier. Will this baby survive?

The successful delivery gives the narrative its most joyous moment, but within days Faina evidences what the narrative foreshadowed: her need to be free. Her rapid fever is less a medical crisis and more a metaphor for the stifling suffocation she feels in domestic life. The cabin Jack and Garrett worked to build is still without a roof, suggesting that Faina is both a part and apart from her domestic life. She is neither a bad mother nor an ungrateful wife. However, her difficult upbringing, her long years of survival, and her resourcefulness have made the tidy world of wife and mother an elaborate cage.

When Faina departs, the narrative teeters on tragedy. Mabel is devastated, sure that now she must handle losing yet another child. But Faina’s liberation back into the woods returns us to the real-time world where love and loss, joy and sorrow, and hope and despair are inextricably bound. As Faina is carried out to the nest Garrett fashioned for her, we know what Garrett and even Mabel and Jack know but will not say: Faina must return to her wilderness life. It is not that she refuses to be domesticated—that would be egotism and selfishness—but rather that she cannot be domesticated. It’s a matter of self-preservation. But even as Mabel appears to collapse into “terrible grief” (376), the chapter closes with Jack and Mabel holding each other tenderly.