Horacio Quiroga, a short story writer of Uruguayan origin, is regarded as a master of the short story for his vivid portrayal of the struggle for survival among humans and animals. His writings were influenced in several ways by his life. His stories centered around the themes of life and death, as demonstrated in “The Feather Pillow,” reflected as a result of his personal experience with death in his family and his love of Edgar Allan Poe’s ominous writing style.
The Feather Pillow | Summary
The story of “The Feather Pillow” opens with Alicia, a young woman who has recently got married to Jordan, a stubborn man who hardly ever shows affection to her despite his wife’s unlimited devotion. After moving into a nearly empty house, Alicia finds herself passing the time by waiting for her husband to get home each night. Her health quickly starts to deteriorate due to not having a lot to do around the house, when the season starts shifting to autumn, Alicia starts getting ill. The unpleasant symptoms and signs that Alicia is going through don’t go away; rather, they are getting worse with time. She is in her bed with Jordan by her side as doctors look into the probable causes of her illness.
The doctors are unable to diagnose Alicia’s illness and just advise rest, but Alicia’s mental state worsens as human-like hallucinations start to plague her mind. Jordan paces the room, pleading with the doctors to save his wife Alicia’s life because he is powerless to deal with her unusual illness. Alicia’s illness has no known remedy, and after suffering for five days, Alicia dies. While preparing to wash her bedclothes, a worker discovers two tiny bloodstains on Alicia’s pillow near where her temples were supposed to be. Upon raising the pillow, the servant discovers that it is too heavy for a feather pillow. Jordan is asked to investigate, and when he opens the pillow to look inside, he finds a sizable parasite that had been feeding on Alicia’s blood which consequently killed her.
The Feather Pillow | Analysis
Horacio Quiroga’s “The Feather Pillow” portrays the coexistence between life and death by implying that one cannot exist in the presence of the other. Alicia, whose spiritual and intellectual curiosity begins to deteriorate with her marriage, serves as Quiroga’s image for portraying this theme. The parasite destroys Alicia’s remaining physical health and balances her already-dead emotionless life. The feather pillow serves as a metaphor for Jordan’s secrecy in his marriage to Alicia. Jordan “loved her profoundly but never let it be seen” until he realized his beloved was passing away, just as the pillow didn’t show the parasite until Alicia’s death. Jordan and the parasite in the feather pillow both robbed Alicia of her blood and her love, respectively. It’s also interesting to note that many cultures view the feather as a symbol of unity; as a result, the infestation of the parasite in the feather pillow can be interpreted as a representation of the marriage’s toxicity.
It seems weird to suppose that Alicia’s “most persistent hallucinations were that of an anthropoid poised on his fingertips” if the monster in her pillow was a type of parasite. Although the parasite was the apparent cause of Alicia’s death, her hallucinations show that her limiting love for Jordan was the real source of her initial weakness. The young woman wanted to show her husband love, but Jordan was unable to do so. As a result, the young woman’s desires came back to haunt her during her illness in disguise as a human-like figure.
The story also gently addresses Kleine-Levin Syndrome, which is also known as the “sleeping beauty syndrome” and causes individuals to experience extended spells of fatigue, confusion, and lethargy. In this way, Alicia’s decision to “live like a sleeping beauty” while she waits for her husband every night foreshadows the illness that she would experience later in the novel. Ironically, Alicia compares her love for her husband with Jordan’s inability to save his sleeping beauty by referencing the Sleeping Beauty story. The dualistic theme is made clear by the objects that appear through multiple perspectives. For instance, the pillow is used by Alicia when she is ill since it typically acts as a source of warmth and comfort. When it is found that the pillow obscures the reason for her death, Quiroga unveils a second, darker aspect of the pillow. Similar to the previous statement the mansion was said to have “produced the wintery impression of an enchanted place” but with a distinct, “unpleasant coldness”.
There are instances of antithetical thoughts and nuances throughout the story. Quiroga makes an effort to convey that perception can distort a situation’s reality. The restricting environment in the couple’s home, which hindered their ability to love one another and essentially drained the life out of Alicia on a spiritual and mental level, becomes the root of her death.
Alicia’s character depicted the idea of emptiness in a metaphorical sense as well as in a physical sense. Romantically empty due to Jordan’s lack of emotions and physically empty due to the parasite’s blood-sucking. Quiroga emphasizes that there will be an equal amount of internal and exterior emptiness. Alicia frequently recalls having chills and feeling cold. The story repeatedly refers to what Alicia can touch and feel, as well as the warmth or coolness of her blood. Her life is said to be bleeding away, yet this is a metaphor since the parasite is sucking all of her blood. Like the majority of Quiroga’s works, “The Feather Pillow” has life and death as its central themes. One could argue that the tragedy of Alicia’s life being slowly sucked away had a much greater impact. Even though one of the two protagonists is ultimately killed by a parasite, Quiroga’s work shows how to masterfully build the tropes of horror literature uniquely. Quiroga shows an entirely new reason for Alicia’s death in contrast to how the character Alicia’s suffering and eventual death are depicted throughout the novel, which may be caused by a probable psychiatric disorder. To put it another way, Quiroga’s horror can be characterized as a rigorously realistic horror that does not appeal to the supernatural and only uses dramatic psychological effects as a kind of ruse to hide the very real and ultimately unremarkable causes of the story’s central tragedy. Quiroga presents nuances of Jordan’s self-identity that will contribute to the narrative’s eventual tragedy. Alicia’s illness will allegedly be caused by Jordan’s psychology as a result of the way he expressed his feelings to her.
Alicia’s illness and her deteriorating internal health are portrayed to be connected. Alicia had started to lose weight after getting sick. The doctor also notes symptoms of anemia, but whose cause was “fully unexplainable”, as the doctor explains “She has a great weakness that I can not explain.”
The occurrences of hallucinations that Alicia suffers give further substantiation of the mental onsets of her illness. Given how dreadfully Quiroga describes the breaking down of Alicia’s psychic life, the ethereal and occult substance of these visions points to pure mental health issues. After the readers have been led to believe for further than half of the story that Alicia’s mental condition was indeed the root cause of her death, the narrative of the story suddenly changes with its twist ending when the worker and Jordan discover a parasite which was the real reason or partial reason of Alicia’s death. Quiroga describes the parasite as a monster-
“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.”
The vile description of the “monster” suggests that we have now gone into pure imagination. However, the final sentence of the novel by Quiroga makes it obvious that this kind of creature is a known parasite.
“The Feather Pillow” is considered under the category of gothic or horror literature where elements of imagination, fantasy, and horror are used to blur the line between reality and imagination. Similar to gothic literary works like Wuthering Heights or works of Edgar Allan Poe. The banalest basis of any literary work to classify as a gothic work has to be a dark yet mundane setting that runs chills in the readers. In “The Feather Pillow”, the new house that the couple shifts into is described as an empty massive structure, the house gives Alicia chills with fully bare walls establishing the tone of the story in the beginning. The Anthropoid acts as one of the most blatant symbolism in the story once Alicia has started to hallucinate, she sees an incarnation of an anthropoid, poised on his fingertips on the carpet gaping at her analogous to how she has started to imagine Jordan in her mind as someone unable of being human or showing human emotions, someone Alicia is doubtful if indeed is human or not.
Indeed Jordan’s care is personified later in the story when Alicia falls sick and Jordan’s pacing in anxiety makes him as if he has become one with the carpet and the house, yet he cannot do anything to save Alicia. Alicia had fully isolated herself once she got tired of the distance between her and Jordan. When she fell ill she did not let anyone touch her or her bed, leading to her death as no one could find out about the parasite before it was not too late.
The Feather Pillow | Significance of the Title
The title refers to the pillow that the main character Alicia was sleeping on. The pillow acts as the factual physical reason that led to Alicia’s death. The story centers around Alicia and Jordan, a youthful couple. Alicia changes from a happy newlywed into a depressed physically and mentally sick character. She’s unfit to move or walk and begins having visions throughout the night. Alicia’s husband, Jordan, loved Alicia deeply and profoundly but does not let it be seen which leads to Alicia being depressed and ultimately dying.
