Short Fiction · Chapter
The First Fall of Snow explained
A woman trapped in a cold, isolated Norman manor suffers from her husband's indifference to her physical and emotional needs.
What happens
A woman trapped in a cold, isolated Norman manor suffers from her husband's indifference to her physical and emotional needs. After losing her parents, she becomes increasingly desperate for warmth and change. In a desperate act to force her husband to install a furnace, she exposes herself to the snow, contracting a lung infection that ultimately leads to her being sent to the South of France. Though she recovers somewhat, she lives with the dread of returning to the cold and finds a bitter happiness in her impending death, knowing she finally got her furnace.
Themes in this chapter
Marriage and Domesticity
The marriage is a prison of neglect and misunderstanding, where the wife's needs are trivialized by her husband.
Cruelty and Suffering
The husband's casual cruelty and the wife's self-inflicted suffering to gain control over her environment.
Isolation and Loneliness
The wife's profound isolation in the cold manor, both physically and emotionally, from her husband and the world.
Characters to notice
- Monsieur Parent
The unnamed wife of Henri de Parville, who suffers from the cold and her husband's neglect.
- Henri Fontal
Henri de Parville, the husband who is content with his simple country life and dismisses his wife's pleas for warmth.
Key passages
“She suffered continually from the cold, which was sharper and more penetrating than the winter before.”
The cold tormented her more intensely than the previous winter.
Highlights the worsening of her physical suffering.
“I want a furnace and I am going to have it. I will cough until he makes up his mind to put one in the house.”
She resolved to make herself ill to force her husband to install a furnace.
Shows her desperate and manipulative plan born of powerlessness.
“Now she is going to die; that she knows, and is quite happy about it.”
She accepts her impending death with a sense of relief and happiness.
Reveals the tragic irony of her finding peace only in death.