The Feather Pillow, Essay Example

The Realism of Quiroga’s Horror in The Feather Pillow

In Horacio Quiroga’s The Feather Pillow, the author presents a narrative that could be classified as falling within the genre of short horror fiction. Nevertheless, Quiroga’s work, despite the plot that involves a strange animal ultimately killing one of the two protagonists, should not be dismissed as a mere work of pulp fiction. Rather, The Feather Pillow demonstrates a masterful crafting of the conventions of horror literature in an original manner. Whereas the suffering and ultimate death of the character Alicia is portrayed throughout the story as caused by a possible psychological condition, Quiroga reveals an entirely different reason for Alicia’s death, as a parasitic animal is discovered to have induced the latter. In other words, Quiroga’s horror can be considered to be a rigorously realistic horror, one that does not appeal to the supernatural, while also employing dramatic psychological effects only as a type of ploy that disguises the very real and ultimately mundane causes for the narrative’s central tragedy.

Accordingly, Quiroga attempts to construct a narrative in which the reader infers some type of psychological logic behind the central conflict of the story. Hence, the initial marriage of the two main characters, Jordan and Alicia, is portrayed in idyllic terms at the outset of the text. Their love is a wholly reciprocal love, as the author makes clear: “She loved him deeply….He too loved her deeply, but without letting it show. For three months – they had married in April – they live in singular bliss.” (2-3) Whereas the mutual affection of the protagonists is displayed at the outset, Quiroga provides some intimations that the subsequent tragedy in the story will be a result of Jordan’s character. His stance of a certain coldness towards Alicia, despite his explicit love for her, infers to the reader that Alicia’s subsequent illness will somehow be the result of Jordan’s own psychology in terms of the manner in which he conveyed his feelings towards her.

This notion of a psychological distance in Jordan, one that ultimately wounds Alicia, is further emphasized in Quiroga’s description of the house in which the couple inhabit. The author writes that “the house in which they lived played no little part in her malaise. The whiteness of the silent patio – friezes, columns and marble states – gave the impression of autumn in an enchanted palace.” (2) The malaise that creeps into Alice and Jordan’s relationship after the initial period of utopian reverie is portrayed by Quiroga in terms of a coldness that is also reflected in the mise-en-scene itself. The home begins to personify the very stoic emotionless that Quiroga confers to Jordan at the outset of the story. Alicia’s plunge into a depression is artfully constructed by Quiroga in terms of a psychological context of alienation from her husband, further emphasized in the form of the home he has provided her.

The apparently psychological character of Alicia’s malaise is combined with a deterioration of her physical condition. After suffering from a bout of influenza, Alicia had begun to lose weight. This is followed by a bout of anaemia that is diagnosed by the physician, however a condition whose cause was “completely inexplicable” (2), as the doctor makes clear: “she has a great weakness which I cannot explain.” (2) The lack of a clear physical diagnosis for the reasons behind Alicia’s illness clearly intends to make the reader to believe that a psychological cause is guilty for her deteriorating condition, a psychological narrative that Quiroga artfully lays the foundation for in the opening of the short story.  The rejection of physical causes conjures images of a purely emotional reason for Alicia’s illness, as the alienation from her husband implants a psychological reason for the woman’s failing health.

The psychological causes for Alicia’s illness are further hinted at in the bouts of hallucination which she experiences. The ethereal and arcane content of these hallucinations suggest a purely mental disorder, insofar as Quiroga sketches the crumbling of Alicia’s psychic life in horrific terms. Hence, her “visions were confused and floating to start with, and then came down to ground level….among her most recurrent hallucinations was an anthropoid, a quasi-human resting on its fingers on the carpet, its eyes fixed upon her.” (3) According to the manner in which Quiroga has framed the story up to this point, the image of the monstrous figure that appears before Alicia is immediately explained by the discerning reader in terms of her deteriorating mental condition. The occult, demonic and monstrous contents of her hallucinations radically juxtapose with the realistic approach Quiroga has taken at the outset of the story. By carefully depicting a typical story of newlyweds in love, who, because of the personality of one of the partner’s involved in the relationship, become distanced, thus resulting in the illness of the more sensitive partner, Quiroga creates a narrative in which it appears entirely logical that Alicia’s deterioration is the result of differences in psychological character from Jordan. Yet with these occult hallucinations, Quiroga throws a radical turn into his story, as it appears now that Alicia’s already weakened condition has now generated into a vivid insanity. A typical story of marital problems suddenly turns into an almost demonic tale of mental collapse.

The manner in which Quiroga has constructed the story to this point, however, rules out the conclusion that there are occult reasons for Alicia’s deterioration. Rather, her marital problems have now resulted in a debilitating schizophrenic and hallucinatory condition: the psychic life of Alicia is shattered. Within the realism of Quiroga’s mise-en-scene, this explanation becomes the most likely one to the reader. Hence, “Alicia’s life was ebbing away in a kind of anaemic sub-fever”, (3) although a fever that appears to be caused entirely by psychological reasons. The unknown reasons for the illness is re-iterated by Quiroga through the doctors’ eyes as follows: “before their eyes a life was ending, bleeding away day by day, hour by hour, and they knew not why.” (3) This suggests an inner psychological breakdown as the cause for her nearing death.

Yet the genial twist of the story lies in its conclusion. Quiroga, having set up the reader to accept the psychological rationale for Alicia’s oncoming death, suddenly plunges this familial psycho-drama into a narrative of horror. It is revealed that the cause for the illness was a creature, living in Alicia’s pillow, which had sucked the blood out of Alicia. Described by Quiroga in monstrous detail, the creature was found “in the bottom of the pillow, among the feathers, slowly moving its hairy legs, there was a monstrous animal: alive, round and viscous. It was so swollen that its mouth could barely be distinguished.” (4) Yet the discovery of the creature is in no way a fantastic animal, as Quiroga makes clear in the very last sentence of the tale: “These parasites that live on birds are usually quite small, but can in certain conidtiions grow to enormous size. Human blood is something they particularly favour, and it is not unusual to find them in a feather pillow.” (4) After eschewing rationale explanation for Alicia’s illness throughout the story, preferring a strange psychic cause for sickness, Quiroga introduces a seemingly fantastic creature as the ultimate reason for her illness. The disgusting description of the “monster” suggests that we have now entered the realm of pure fantasy. However, Quiroga’s last line of the story makes clear that this type of monster is a known parasite: The fantastical reasons for Alicia’s death are in fact purely mundane, as her life was drained by an explainable zoological phenomenon.

Accordingly, Quiroga’s text manipulates the various conventions of horror literature, in order to lead the reader to a certain conclusion, while switching the internal logic of the story at its very climax. The psychological and mysterious world of Alicia’s sudden deterioration discombobulates the reader, suggesting that he is witnessing the psychic collapse of an individual. However, the conclusion that Quiroga offers makes Alicia’s death mundane and preventable: her death is the result of a parasite. Horror, for Quiroga, can thus be something entirely everyday and realistic. In The Feather Pillow, Quiroga conveys that sometimes the quotidian is stranger than the fantastic.

Works Cited

Quiroga, Horacio. The Feather Pillow.