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