The Boarded Window

Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1891

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The Overwhelming Wilderness

Murlock and his wife carve a clearing out of a vast forest in an attempt to make a new life for themselves. The giant wooded region, however, has other plans.

The area’s first human settlers quickly moved on, either seeking even more remote frontiers or perhaps running from a forest that strikes fear into the hearts of human intruders. Although Murlock and his bride are “young, strong and full of hope” (Paragraph 5), we expect them to pick up stakes also, but instead tragedy strikes, a disaster that points to the dangers of life in the wilderness.

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Bierce’s natural world humbles its optimistic human beings, serving up a series of terrible stresses that overwhelm the hardiest of souls. A fever overtakes Murlock’s wife while he’s away; when he returns home, he finds her in a delirium. Far from medical help, he has no way of evaluating or mitigation whatever infection she has contracted. The illness—an aspect of the wild and unpredictable natural world—takes it course until Murlock’s wife is comatose. Thinking her dead, he prepares her body for burial—and the natural world intrudes once again as a panther comes to scavenge the dying body. The rough-hewn cabin cannot provide protection from the tiny and large predators that lurk in the forest—the people inside are at the mercy of the wilderness around them.

Overwhelmed by the sudden ferocity of the forest’s creatures, and forever unsure exactly what transpired during the brief battle between panther and human, Murlock lives out his life in resignation, no longer willing to struggle against the encroaching forest.

Death as a Cruel and Arbitrary Mystery

In a mundane reading of the short story, Murlock’s wife appears to be dead, but is merely in a comatose state while her body fights off a severe illness. In this, case, the dead woman’s clenched fists mean that she struggles against the intruding panther in a last burst of living energy. In a reading inflected with the supernatural, we infer that she rises from the dead to do battle with the creature. The vicious animalistic detail that she bites off the panther’s ear suggests that her sudden strength is superhuman. Either way, in quick succession, she appears to die, then live, then die again in a series of cruel, arbitrary events.

Though his wife’s death seems inevitable, Murlock has several premonitions about her near-death state. First, when he can’t cry over his wife’s death, he’s lulled by “an undersense of conviction that all was right—that he should have her again as before, and everything explained” (Paragraph 8). He feels guilty for not weeping, but in fact, his instincts are correct—this first death is not his wife’s actual demise, as she will rise to make a final stand in battle. The second premonition happens when Murlock lays his head on the table that acts as his wife’s bier and hears a terrifying cry from the forest. The story never explains this wail. It could an animal (the predator, perhaps), nature howling over the death of Murlock’s wife just when he himself can’t, or even his wife’s anguished spirit as it leaves her body.

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Just as his wife’s death is a mystery, so too is Murlock’s own demise. One day he’s found dead in his cabin, his prematurely aged body having expired for no detectable reason. Again, there is a prosaic explanation and a more fantastical one. The locals assume it’s due to old age, though Murlock is only about 50. Perhaps, instead, he dies of a broken heart—but Bierce never resolves the ambiguity.

Guilt without Redemption

Murlock fails to protect his wife either from illness or from a panther. It would be clear to Bierce’s readers that this failure calls into question his fitness as a 19th century man and as a husband—meant to be a protector and provider, especially when choosing a pioneer lifestyle.

After his wife’s death, Murlock can travel no further in life than the forest to hunt, and retreat no further than his cabin. His life thus circumscribed, Murlock lives out his days in constant awareness of the devastating loss he suffered and the fatal mistakes he made that helped to cause the loss. His guilt prematurely ages him:

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Something besides years had had a hand in his aging. His hair and long, full beard were white, his gray, lusterless eyes sunken, his face singularly seamed with wrinkles which appeared to belong to two intersecting systems (Paragraph 3).

Murlock’s first error is completely understandable: His feverish wife goes from delirium to absolute stillness. The young man isn’t a doctor, and there is none nearby in the wilderness, so he does the best that he can with his own resources. Her apparent death shocks him, not to tears, but to exhaustion: He keeps falling asleep, as if consciousness is too much to bear. This will be Murlock’s further undoing, since his somnolent vigil over his wife’s body creates an opportunity for a predator to take her from him.

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Murlock compounds his mistake: He reacts to the shock of the animal attack not by rushing to his wife, but by falling asleep a second time. He believes that she’s dead, and has little concern for his own safety. On waking, though, he discovers the horrible truth: She was alive when the panther attacked, and her throat bled out while Murlock slept.

No matter how much others might forgive his mistakes, Murlock can never do so. The uncertainty of the events surrounding her last moments also haunts him. His neglected homestead speaks volumes about the tragedy, and his untimely demise points to a man slowly tortured to death by the endless torment of remorse, uncertainty, and guilt.