Chapter 15

Chapter 15356 wordsCompleted

Mrs Lazarus opens by describing an unrelenting night of grief after her husband’s death: she tears the wedding cloth from her breasts, howls, claws at tombstones until her hands bleed, and repeatedly chants his name (“dead, dead”). She isolates herself in a single cot, discarding his belongings into black bags, and dons his tie as a makeshift necklace, seeing herself as a gaunt nun in the mirror. She learns the “Stations of Bereavement,” each a grim portrait of herself, while her husband’s image shrinks to a snapshot and eventually vanishes from memory, reduced to a gold ring’s zero.

After months of this self‑imposed penance, she steps into a field at evening, feeling the air’s shawl and watching the moon rise. Suddenly, village men, women, children, and barking dogs rush toward her. Recognising familiar faces—the blacksmith’s sly light, the barmaid’s sharp eyes—she realizes the crowd parts to reveal her husband alive. She witnesses his horror‑filled face, hears his mother’s mad song, and smells his fetid stench. He appears as a “bridegroom in his rotting shroud,” moist and dishevelled from the grave, croaking his cuckold name, disinherited and out of his time. The chapter ends with her confronting this grotesque resurrection, juxtaposing her ritualised mourning with the violent, surreal return of the dead.