There are more questions than answers blowing in "The Wind" by Lauren Groff

Every year, there comes a time when blogging through Best American Short Stories when it seem appropriate to alert readers who might be reading it for the first time that the order of stories is determined based on the alphabetical order of the surnames of the authors, not based on common themes or subject matter. This seems the place to do it this year. "The Wind" by Laruen Groff follows "Man of the House" by Kim Coleman Foote not only in the table of contents, but in that both deal with the generational legacy of trauma left by domestic violence. A reader new to BASS could completely be forgiven for thinking this juxtaposition was intentional, rather than serendipitous. It would have been easy to think the same thing after the first two stories, too, both of which had a Latinx character named Lucy in them. But no, that's just the way it happened. (Unless guest editor Andrew Sean Green actually somehow managed to pick the winners in such a way that he knew their last names and stories would make these themes align, in which case, he is the greatest editor known to humankind.) 

Not much for a critic to do with a story like this

I've never liked stories about domestic abuse much, maybe for similar reasons to why I don't like stories about serial killers. I recognize this is a thing that happens in the world, and so maybe I shouldn't flinch from seeing it analyzed in detail, but I have a hard time seeing what benefit comes from me doing this, either for me or the world. I thought the story was masterfully told, without a single word that didn't need to be there, and so I read it in one go and didn't hate every minute of doing so. At the end, though, I have a hard time knowing what I'm supposed to do with the experience of having read it. I thought abuse was bad before, and I think so now. Perhaps I have become a small bit better at understanding someone who has lived through this kind of abuse, or better at understanding the children of survivors of this kind of abuse. As a critic, though, I have a hard time digging for hidden treasure, because the point of the story is pretty much out there. Abuse leaves a legacy that endures through generations, in ways that are incredibly difficult to identify. So what's a critic to do with a story like this?

Mrs. Heretic's year 

I'll offer two thoughts related to this story, one of which isn't particularly literary. Mrs. Heretic had a past life living in a small town in Canada for several years. While there, she worked for a year in a shelter for abused women. I told her about this story and explained how I was having a hard time thinking of anything to say about it. I asked her what the main thing she learned from her year was. 

"Most women return to their abusers seven times before they leave for good or get killed by them," she said, without needing to think about it much. "We had a lot of repeat visitors there."

Humans have funny brains. They're evolved to be good at making more humans and then not be good at much else. Our brains have not evolved to make us particularly happy. They can make us do terribly irrational things. Not just abused people, of course, but abuse does seem to trigger parts of the brain that interfere with the rational parts. It's important to remember this when considering any person's story of abuse, which nearly always involve parts where a non-abused observer will wonder why the abused didn't behave differently. Why didn't they leave? Why didn't they report it? Why didn't they call the police? Because abuse breaks the ability to do those things. It's why Grandma in the story has a panic attack that ruins the escape right at the moment when she needed to be thinking clearly. 

Nearly every abuse story I've ever seen or read has a happy ending. A good man falls in love with the abused woman and fights the abuser to free her. In this story, all the men are either too afraid of the abuser to confront him or actually on his side. (In this story, the police are friends with the abuser, which greatly complicates the attempted escape. Mrs. Heretic said the police in her remote home in Canada were very cooperative, for what it's worth.) Our brains make happy endings to abuse stories very challenging. 

The title

The only remotely literary analysis I can provide is a quick examination of the title. You may be forgiven if you got to the end and forgot it was called "The Wind." Why that title? The wind is often a symbol with positive connotations. A number of Korean folk songs I won't bore you with talking about look to the wind as a symbol of freedom, wishing the narrator could move freely about the Earth without cares, feelings, or even a name. 

My favorite story from any BASS is Joshua Ferris's "The Breeze." On a perfect spring day in New York when the weather breaks and a warm breeze blows in, a couple is paralyzed by the feeling of responsibility they have to use the day perfectly. It is perhaps another example of the wind as a negative thing, but only because of human brains again working against us. Faced with too many possible good outcomes, the couple is unable to choose any, and the breeze becomes a symbol not of the freedom to choose many great paths in life, but of how every choice means not choosing other things. 

The wind shows up several times in Groff's story. It is threatened early that the wind is supposed to pick up during the day, and as Grandma attempts her escape, it does increase. It beats against the glass of the car, a symbol of the growing threat the family faces. The wind then makes no less than four appearances in the final paragraph:

The three children survived. Eventually they would save themselves, struggling into lives and loves far from this place and this moment, each finding a kind of safe harbor, jobs and people and houses empty of violence. But always inside my mother there would blow a silent wind, a wind that died and gusted again, raging throughout her life, touching every moment she lived after this one. She tried her best, but she couldn’t help filling me with this same wind. It seeped into me through her blood, through every bite of food she made for me, through every night she waited, shaking with fear, for me to come home by curfew, through every scolding, everything she forbade me to say or think or do or be, through all the ways she taught me how to move as a woman in the world. She was far from being the first to find it blowing through her, and of course I will not be the last. I look around and can see it in so many other women, passed down from a time beyond history, this wind that is dark and ceaseless and raging within.

The wind is a symbol of the trauma that gets passed down from survivor to offspring, even if the survivor tries hard not to pass it down. Which, again, leaves me wondering what to do with this story. Is trying to stop the inheritance of this kind of violence as pointless as trying to stop the wind?

I don't think so. Mrs. Heretic did see some women finally leave. We can do some small part to block the wind for a few people, even if we aren't much more than a car window between them and the threat. The point of a story like this one is neither to call for a final battle to end all violence forever nor to despair of ever ending it, but to remind each of us of exactly what it is we're up against, so when we do reach out to help, we aren't surprised if the people we're trying to help don't act like we expect. 

Other readings: Karen Carlson looks at the way humans perceive time as critical to this piece, and she also provides a link to a guest post from her blog.