Marcella, her husband & Cal

Back to Main Page Bernard MacLaverty: CAL

Marcella's relationship to her husband and her attitude towards Cal

In my opinion Marcella hadn't a good relationship to her husband Robert, because the last years of his life there didn't really exist a special and typical deep love to him. Perhaps she lost the confidence in her husband, because of what he had mentally done to her. He made her feel that he didn't really love her and that he wasn't interested in her feelings and her body anymore (p.124). She thought that he had only sex "with some creatures of his imagination", because he didn't make her realize it was her. In her opinion a marriage must be a mixture of friendship and desire, but the friendship had gone out of their relationship a long time ago and Robert's lust was only for someone inside his head.

Shortly before his death he started to tell lies, to drink, to have two or three affairs and spent the money wherever he wanted to. I think that the result of all these things is to lose your love to a person who treats you so badly. And that's the way Marcella did, she used the marriage to keep the comfort of being held, but she distanced herself from Robert (p.124). In my opinion, all these negative experiences had to come to her mind at the end of his life, when she was frustrated and felt inferior, because at the beginning of their relationship they started a love affair on a difficult foundation. Although she was a Catholic woman and Robert a Protestant man, they decided to start alife together, not to think about the devastating results which might follow. But after all she can't forgive him his bad behaviour and her inferior position in this marriage.

In my opinion all these experiences of her past are positive for Cal to have a future with her, because Cal is the opposite to Robert. He's a young man, who makes her feel younger when they are having fun together (p.101). So they are able to build up a good and deep relationship, which seemed not to be able to exist, because she is a widow with main problems and he is a boy nearly without (p.101). In that way she tries to do the sensible thing for both of them, because nobody should get hurt and regret it later on. I think that in her opinion their friendship shouldn't be destroyed by a short love affair. This signals the intensity of their relationship and the feelings which shouldn't stop (p.117). But it also symbolizes that she still feels guilty about Robert and perhaps about their destroyed marriage. But all in all Cal is areal friend to her and she feels awful about hurting him. In my opinion in many aspects of their short love affair she's superior and Cal seems to depend on her mentally (p.124; l.9:" Don't love like that again. It is not you!" "Sorry", he said.). Each time when he tries to receive an answer to the question whether she loves him or not, she just says that she needs more time.

Perhaps this symbolizes that there is always a distance left between Marcella and Cal. Finally, I would say that they spend a nice time together and that she loves him in some ways, but it's always a love with no future and equality.

by Nina Gluns