Maria Luisa Bombal's Short Story The Tree

The Tree Although she produce a small body of work during her lifetime, Maria Luisa Bombal (1910-1980) has been one of the most important Latin American writers of the twentieth century. Perhaps, Bombal's best known story is The Tree, a self conscious narrative about the experience of a woman who followed the social rules of marriage and ended up feeling miserable and lonely.The story is characteristic of her work in that it presents the reality in the society, and the theme of a woman's isolated and marginalized existence in search of love, communication, and understanding.

Bombal shows briefly her theme throughout The Tree, through the use of imagery, the tone a little disappointed and sad, she sets the story as a combination of of the present and the past, with a lot of suspense giving the reader the desire to know what hidden under The Tree. Brigida, the main character of Maria Luisa Bombal' s short story The Tree, considers herself a mindless, naive,stupid woman because of the way the men in her life treat her.

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Brigida, who was the youngest of six girls in her family. Brigida did not have an ear for music , and in turn her family had feared she was retarde. She loves to play Mozart in the her youth, but her father uses her various musical love to diminish her mental installations. Brigida believes it, and simply sits on a fountain and revels in her ignorance and beauty. She has difficulty reconciling her imaginative, personable nature.

The story begins in the concert hall where Brigida remember's her childhood experience with piano lessons, where the narrator flashing back to Brigida and her father ineptitude to motivate her daughter to continue pursuit in a formal education. In the beginning she was always happy as a child when she was carefree, and then later in her life she was miserable because she was concerned with other people's lives and thoughts. For example when Br­gida was youthful Bombal writes, How pleasant it is to be ignorant, ( Bombal 234) which gives the reader the reason to believe although being uneducated is bad, it can also be a good feeling and healthy for oneself. This sets the stage for Brigida's future relationship with her husband, she is married to Luis a friends of Brigida's father, he focuses on his job,says he loves her but does not show it, he fails to respect and take her wife seriously because he believes that she is to silly and ignorant to understand. The use of imagery in The Tree heavily used the poetray what Brigida see's, feels, and experience throughout the story.

This allows for the readers to see the story through Brigida's eyes while still maintaining an objective view of the story's theme.The feeling of The Tree being a wonderful story is enhanced by the fact that Brigida continued to stay by her husband side because the tree made her feels happiness. Bombal also continues to give life to the rubber tree throughout the rest of the short story by adding small descriptive pieces such as And how that huge rubber tree chattered! All the birds in the neighborhood took refuge in it. ( Bombal 236). By giving life to the tree bombal create a contradictory situation because Brigida refers to it as the rubber tree. This absurd adds to the marvelous fantastical genre of the story. At this point of the story the only thing that keep Brigida in the relationship was the Rubber Tree outside her window. One day the Rubber Tree had been cut down, and that is when Brigida left Luis.

She realized that she had not married Luis for love and she could not stay in an unhappy marriage. The realization that Nothing, no one could now hurt her. It may be that true Happiness lies in the conviction that irremediably lost happiness.( Bombal 240).came to Brigida only after accepting that her marriages was finished and she take sens of it when they cut down the Rubber Tree. The morale lessons that can be learned of the short story The Tree by Maria Luisa Bombal was that people in some way or another are being held back rather by an object or a person. In the story Brigida was held back by the Rubber Tree even thought she did not feel like he loved her husband Luis. The tree in a way symbolizes their marriages and how she feels unhappy. However, there are social phenomena that never come into the foreground provide a influence that tends to push all women onto themselves, giving them a lack of control over their lives, the position of women in the society described in the story is the most outstanding of these forces, in that it makes marriage the central issue of their lives, which makes them believes that the only way to escape, if one is illiterate is to get married, but most of them do not have happiness in theirs relationship, and condemn to live in the marriage where they do not consider them."The Tree (El rbol) by Mar­a Luisa Bombal, 1941."

Reference

Guide to Short Fiction. . Encyclopedia.com. 27 Feb. 2019 <>.Nina M. ScottModern Language StudiesVol. 17, No. 3 (Summer, 1987), pp. 3-9Published by: Modern Language StudiesDOI: 10.2307/3194730 Count: 7