Disbelief Against Disbelief

The Cases of Goodwife Agnes and Mrs. Larkin: A comparative analysis of János Arany’s ballad “Goodwife Agnes” and Eudora Welty’s story “A Curtain of Green”

Abstract

In this paper I examine a nineteenth-century Hungarian poem and a twentieth-century American short story. The central characters are both widows who cannot comprehend the death of their husbands, and gradually turn insane, both of them obsessively get occupied with an irrational activity. Goodwife Agnes had helped her lover to kill her husband—but in the text, she is oblivious of the deed: all she knows is that she has to wash her bloodstained linen in the streamlet. Her disbelief is directed against the fact of death and murder, as well as against the fact that the sheet is spotless. Mrs. Larkin’s husband died of an accident in the garden, her disbelief is directed against the powerlessness of her own most intimate protective words, as well as against the fact that her husband was killed by her garden, all she knows is that she feverishly has to plant more and more green life in the chaotic sloping plot behind her house. From the point of view of the gesture of abandoning oneself to disbelief, the difference between murder and accident seems to be irrelevant. However, the central metaphors of cleaning and planting might subtly indicate separate attitudes to disbelief in death, i.e. to the continuity of life.