Birth

Is this story about a birth or a death? Well, you kind of need the former before you can have the latter. In fact, the figures of birth and death don't really become clear to us until we see them together. Before we get to the husband's suicide in the story, the birth is just a birth. Frankly, the fact that it's a birth as opposed to, say, an infection, or a triple-bypass, or an amputation, doesn't seem to matter all that much until we find the husband dead.

So the first thing we might notice about birth and death is that they seem to be associated with women and men respectively. Symbolically, it seems to make sense that birth would be associated with women, since they, you know, do it. But the symbolism isn't all that clear-cut here. It's not simply as though the woman is creating life: it looks as though the birth might actually kill her, or result in the death of the baby. And afterward, the woman is far from a symbol of life:

She was quiet now and her eyes were closed. She looked very pale. (36)

Awfully corpse-like, don't you think? In a way, this not-so-happy birth foreshadows the revelation of the husband's suicide, because we know that something is not quite right about this scene.