The Boarded Window

Murlock arrives at the great forest a full of youthful ambitions for a frontier life with his beloved bride. Fate scuttles the couple’s plans after Murlock mistakes his wife’s descent into unconsciousness from sudden illness for death. He prepares her body for burial, only to lose her, still alive, to the predations of a panther. Murlock’s failure is multifold: He does not live up to the traditional masculine ideals of being a protector, and his lack of visible grief at his wife’s seeming death questions the depth of his husbandly feelings.

After his wife’s real death, he lives a guilt-ridden life empty of ambition, ages prematurely, and dies alone in the cabin where his wife was slain. He boards up the window through which the panther leapt as a memorial of sorts. Murlock represents the devastation that can haunt people who survive the killing of a loved one while feeling responsible for that death.

Murlock’s unnamed young wife, “in all ways worthy of his honest devotion [sharing] the dangers and privations of his lot with a willing spirit and light heart” (Paragraph 5), is less a character and more a symbol of Murlock’s failure as a protector—her death demonstrates his inability to live up to 19th century ideals of masculinity. His wife’s sudden, fevered illness causes her to lapse into a comatose state so deep that she appears to be dead to his medically untrained eye. However, that night, she fights off a predatory panther and protects her sleeping husband. Only the next morning does he husband find her truly dead, her throat slashed by the animal.