Jane Perry
English 102, 40720
December 11, 1992
The Object of Her Affections
The use of symbolism has long been a technique by which an author can present far more than the literal meaning of a story. However, symbols are not always easily defined; indeed, it is sometimes possible that one symbol in a story may be endowed with multiple meanings, all of which lead the reader to a greater understanding of the author’s message, Such is the case in Jose Donoso’s short story, “Paseo.” The story is told from the point of view of a grown man looking back on the isolated, frightened child he was. As the boy’s jealousy focuses on the attention gained by a nondescript but persistent dog, Donoso leads us into the realm of multiple symbolism.
Perhaps most obviously, the dog represents emotion. The boy in the story grows up with the cold people in a house that is “not happy” (316) and that expresses “an absence, a lack, which because it was unacknowledged was irremediable” (316). The boy wishes for more from his family. “I wished.” He tells us, “that their confined feeling might overflow and express itself in a fit of rage, for example, or with some bit of foolery” (317). Of course, he knows it is not to be. The dog that his Aunt Mathilda adopts, however, represents the opposite of repelled, or perhaps nonexistent, emotion. “her whole body, from her quivering snout to her tail ready to waggle, was full of an abundant capacity for fun” (323). It is the dog’s expression of emotion that permeates Aunt Mathilda’s cold exterior and provokes her to express emotion of her own. Yet, still, the boy is isolated, perhaps more so, as his jealously takes hold. As he watches his aunt stroke the dog sleeping on her lap, he realizes the extent of his own isolation and feels the loss of any hope that he, too, might be the recipient of her affection:
On seeing that expressionless hand reposing there, I noticed that the tension which had kept my aunt’s features clenched before, relented, and that a certain peace was now softening her face, I could not resist, I drew closer to her on the sofa, as if to newly kindled fire. I hoped that she would reach out to me with a ook or include me with a smile. But she did not (324).
In addition to emotion, the dog also represents disorder and its effect on constrained order. Dedicated to her brother’s, one of whom is the father of the boy in the story, Aunt Mathilda is the creator of order in the house, one whose focus is frightening in its rigidity and in her insistence on perfection. Defects cannot be tolerated and, as the boy relates, “…When she saw affliction about her she took immediate steps to remedy what, without doubt, were errors in a world that should be, that had to be, perfect” (317). Yet, with the dog’s appearance there are “things that can neither be explained nor resolved” (319). The dog itself is a waling representation of disorder:
It was small and white, with legs which were too short for its size and an ugly pointed snout that proclaimed an entire genealogy of misalliances: the sum unevenly matched breeds which for generations had been scouring the city, searching for food in the garbage can and among the refuse of the port. (320).
Mathilda, surprisingly, grows more and more attached to the dog, and with her attachment comes the beginning of chaos. The chaos starts with simple things, such as Mathilda losing at billiards and no longer remembering the order of the shooters, but it progresses to the point that she loses “the thread of order” (323) that has been the thread of her life. Eventually, the disorder so dissolves the very core of Mathilda that her midnight strolls extend to her disappearance.
In retrospect, the dog also represents madness, a madness that results when the spontaneity of the dog disrupts the rigid world of the adults. The boy speculates on the first look that passes between the dog and his aunt and feels that look “contained some secret commitment” (320), and her half-hearted attempt to make the dog go away seems “a last eff ort to repel an encroaching destiny” (320). When the dog first makes Mathilda laugh, the boy is surprised, but not amused, because he “…may have felt the dark thing that had stirred it up” (324). It is that unnamed dark thing that permeates the boy’s jealousy and causes him to imagine a sinister influence in the dog. When her perceives in his aunt “an animation in her eyes, and excited restlessness like that in the eyes of the animal” (326) after one of her evening walks with the dog, the boy begins to feel concern rather than jealously. His aunt, formerly a fortress of routine and order, has become a mystery of the night:
Those two were accomplices. The night protected them. They belonged to the
murmuring sound of the city, to the sirens fo the ships which, crossing the dark or illuminated streets, the houses and factories and parks, reached my ears (326).
One night upon hearing his aunt come in, the boy recognizes the final influence the dog and the madness it represents are to have on his aunt. “I went to bed terrified, knowing this was the end. I was not mistaken. Because one night …Aunt Mathilda took the dog out for a walk after dinner, and did not return” (327).
Who is to say whether the aunt’s disappearance is a manifestation of her madness or simply a rebellion on her part, an affirmation of the life she has never before experienced? Yet, in the boy’s mind, she is dead, and her death has been brought about by the dog and all it symbolizes. The repression of emotion in his aunt has been freed by something not human, and in dosing so it has brought disorder to order and madness to composure.
Works Cited
Donoso, Jose. “Paseo.” The Riverside Anthology of Literature. Ed. Douglas Hunt. 2nd
Ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1991. 315-327.
Borrowed from A Brief Guide to Writing about Literature by Deborah Barberousse.