The Final Mist: Analysis of Major Characters

Author: María Luisa Bombal

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

Genre: Novel

Locale: Southern Chile

Plot: Surrealism

Time: The late 1920's

The protagonist, whose name is never revealed, a woman who very subjectively narrates her own feelings of frustration and loneliness. She posits that they are a result of her husband's disinterest in her, in particular, and society's treatment of women, in general. Afraid of old age and incapable of expressing her true feelings to a despotic husband, she lives an existence permanently tainted and defined by a withdrawal into herself. She consciously opts for a fantasy world in which her repressed sexuality finally finds an outlet. It is only then that her love and observation of her own body become positive traits. Her marriage is a failure from the very start, and every contact with her husband is a constant reminder of that fact. The logical world limits and closes her within a boringly repetitive and senseless world, and her dream lover liberates her. Her mental activity establishes different mechanisms for self-realization only when Regina, her husband's sister-in-law, shows her how a woman can truly respond to her own innermost desires. The protagonist's flights of fantasy and reliance on reason and practicality, however, condemn her to the passive existence she had at the start of the novel. She never becomes aware that such constraints can be fought, for they are imposed by a society in which women have at most an unreasonable facsimile of life. She does not fight what by her own description will be a future full of petty and frivolous worries and undertakings.

Daniel, her extremely sarcastic and bright husband, who possesses boundless cynicism. His wife's passivity makes her an easy mark for his irony and his desire to control every one of her actions. Insultingly, he constantly reminds the protagonist that she will never be more than a weak substitute for his first wife. His arrogance is never undone, even though his everyday concerns are banal and positively bourgeois.

Regina, Daniel's sister-in-law. She is the barometer of activity, beauty, and self-expression for the protagonist. Regina, a lover of the arts, talkative, and full of life, has taken a lover. She is thus capable of venting her passion much more concretely than is the protagonist. Her fulfillment, like the protagonist's, is postulated as something that cannot come exclusively from her relationships with men; nevertheless, even Regina's attempted suicide is a source of anger and envy for the protagonist.

The protagonist's lover, who is unnamed. He is not her reason for being, like Regina's lover was. More than a concretely described character, he is a representative of the “otherness” in a man for which the protagonist longs. In her mind, he is presumably wealthy and stimulatingly erotic. His mundane end is attributed by his servant to a fall he suffered because of his blindness.