44 pages • 1 hour read
The Snow Child
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BetaPart 3, Chapters 53-54Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 3, Chapter 53 Summary
Part 3, Chapter 54 Summary
Days pass, and Faina and Garrett attend to the newborn—although the child still has no name. After two weeks, Faina, despite her care for the baby, begins sitting at the window looking at the newly fallen snow. Later as Mabel rocks the baby, she sees Faina outside, alone and forlorn, looking into the woods. Mabel notices that Faina appears sickly. She fears the delivery may have left the young mother with a septic infection. Within hours, Faina is feverish and can barely nurse her child. Garrett goes outside and fashions a nest with pelts, a bed under the stars. Garrett carries Faina out and offers to stay with her, but Faina tells him to go inside and take care of their son. She assures him that she will be fine, saying, “I can breathe again” (373). Mabel stays with Faina but falls asleep in the warmth of the animal skins. When Mabel awakens, Faina is gone. Frantic, Garrett rushes to the woods to search for her. Mabel feels only a too-familiar grief, a “shuddering, quaking anguish” (376). But Jack comes to her and comforts her.
Part 3, Chapters 53-54 Analysis
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.
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