A Story I Loved: “Florida” by Mavis Gallant
- Staff Writer
- Aug 21
- 5 min read
This story is a strange one. I’ll admit that I don’t quite know how to categorize Mavis Gallant’s work. It has the sharpness of minimalist fiction, but there’s something bruising about the silences she works with here. I get the sense that she is not a clean writer, not as clean as Carver, for example. She likes to leave things vague.
It makes for an interesting short story. In today’s read, we are looking in on the lives of a woman named Marie, a widow from Canada, who speaks French. She goes to Florida during Christmas to visit her son Raymond, who is a bit of a failure in every sense of the word. He keeps on starting up endeavors that fail, inevitably, and Marie returns home to her sister, Berthe. There’s an interesting recurring theme of electricity here- every time Marie returns, jaded from another one of her son’s failed ventures, she is sparking with electricity, and Berthe notes that whenever she touches her sister, she is charged by a “small silver bullet”. This time, though, when Marie comes, she is met with a change- her son has decided to marry a woman named Mimi, who is pregnant with his child. The story charts the tense Christmas they undergo.
I’m reminded, in this short story, of how the author has complete control. They can choose how much or how little to share with the audience. We can spend years with them in the time of a sentence, or spend a whole story focused on a few minutes. There’s nothing linear about emotion. It convolutes and folds upon itself.
It’s hard to tell what Marie feels. You can sense that she doesn’t quite take well to Raymond’s bride or the idea of her being with child. Whether this is because of particular dislike for the woman or because she simply knows her son’s track record- the story remains uncertain on that front. Marie is certainly daunted by the fact that her son, at the end of the day, is just a man, and she knows that marriage will likely not make him any better of a man. The story questions, then, inadvertently, the kind of things we put our faith in. We say often, societally, that having kids changes people. Marie wants to believe in this, maybe, but she does not know if it is true. She has seen many things come to pass and many things remain the same.
A distance remains between the son and the mother. Marie speaks French, and her son, though he was fluent as a boy, prefers to speak in English. He’s placed himself emotionally with his American wife, and this alienates Marie. We are told, also, that the closest bond one can ever really hope to feel in their life is between themselves and their child. Biologically, it’s the closest bond one can hope to have with another human being in their life. Biologically, and societally, we are told that we are to love our children unconditionally, and if that love falters, then one’s humanity then, also comes into question. I think that’s what Marie is also struggling here with, on some level. She knows that her son may not have this connection with his own child- that it may become only another black mark of failure. And she wonders, too, privately, if her own relationship with her son is a failure.
But what Gallant does is that she doesn’t really offer much of her own ideas or opinions on her characters. What I mean by this is that as the writer she could choose to steer the story into the saccharine or the heartbreaking, but she doesn’t really choose to. These are the elements of a story that could easily turn trite in the wrong hands, and the motif of an unborn child makes it easy to do so. But Gallant doesn’t. Marie is raw and lonely and lost deep in her own watery French thoughts, which she does not reveal to anyone else. I can’t really see the tinkering here, that I can sometimes see with other authors- how a clear theme or line of thought emerges. Gallant’s work is unstudied. What I mean by this is that she is a leaver of clues, maybe, but she is not really constructing a whodunit here, the way you can sometimes find in very formulaic fiction. What captures us here is a feeling- just like in real life. I think that's also what gave this peice realism for me. In real life, in the moment these stories are being told, we don't know the significance certain actions or words will have. But certainly, they will add up to something greater later. Gallant leaves the decision and responsibility of what exactly this entails up almost entirely to the reader.
Marie both tries to place distance and close it. She uses French alternatively to be closer to his son and farther away from his wife. Raymond uses his history, or his and Marie’s shared history, to get closer to his wife, to give her the feeling of projecting a real, solid human being, as a proxy for emotional vulnerability. There is strain in their marriage, we can feel it. Raymond defends his wife and uses his new role as a father to get away from his mother. But at the end of the story, as they’re cleaning up dishes, it’s Marie and the daughter-in-law that grow closer. The daughter-in-law confesses she thinks Raymond wants to leave her. Maybe she has had this baby, then, as a way of closing the distance between her and her husband. Marie seems to acknowledge, in her own way, that she too does not truly know her son. Who can know another human being? The dialogue is realistic. It halts at some points and continues at others, just like real human conversation. There is some deception towards other people, and some self-deception. The last scene is of Marie and her daughter-in-law embracing, and Marie tells the child in French, “Everything around here is electric. I’m electric… we’ll have to make sure we’re grounded from now on.”
What do those words mean? I puzzle over them. On a simple, facetious level, they refer to Marie’s quality of giving shocks. If we delve deeper, they could mean that Marie feels her life has a charged, sudden quality to it, prone to danger. The last line says “She had gone into French, but it didn’t matter. The baby could hear, and knew what she meant.” On a literal level, of course a baby can’t understand English or French. But this may be Marie closing the emotional distance for herself. Physically close to the baby, she yields, at last. We are going to change. Is she referring to herself, life in general, or both at once? Isn’t that what those words mean? Of course, however, words are only feelings. But what they will actually entail, in the future, in terms of actions, we the reader are left in the dark about. Only Marie and the baby will know.
Resources:
Read "Florida" here: https://centerforfiction.org/fiction/florida-by-mavis-gallant/