The Snow Child

Magical realism refers to narratives in which the author imbeds moments that cannot reasonably be explained. These touches of fantasy create an environment of enchantment that suspends and even challenges the larger frame of realism. Imagine the story of Cinderella with all its elements of elaborate magic presented as a documentary.

When The Snow Child was published, Eowyn Ivey recalled how the idea for Faina came to her when, as she was shelving books in a small bookstore, she came upon a copy of a children’s book, the Russian fairy tale called Snegurochka, or The Snow Maiden, an enchanting folk tale about an elderly childless couple in the woods who are visited by a beautiful young woman, the offspring of Winter and Spring, as a way to bless their long life of love. The woman stays with the couple until she must return to her wilderness home. Although the story has many variations in Russian folklore, the basic premise appealed to Ivey.

Throughout Parts 1 and 2, the novel maintains a kind of enchantment around the figure of the mysterious child. She is stunningly beautiful. She appears mysteriously then vanishes without explanation. She seldom talks. She moves about the wilderness with a strange and curious ease. She befriends a wild fox. Mabel, who knows the Russian folktale, sees the girl as her own magic child, created by her displaced maternal love. That magical realism is coaxing to the reader. In many ways, we fight against the mounting evidence of the child’s reality. But for all its fantastical moments, for all its evident touches of magical realism, the narrative never entirely concedes to that sensibility (Ivey herself is a career journalist). In each case, we are also provided with a clear, coherent, and entirely logical explanation of what might appear to be supra-natural phenomena. By the end of the narrative, we are challenged to accept that magic does not have to be imported into the real world but rather discovered there.

The presence of Joseph Maurice, Mabel and Jack’s dead son, not only haunts the narrative but also drives its events. Joseph Maurice simultaneously is and is not. He is not a ghost nor is he a memory. Unlike other tragic losses involving infants—miscarriages, for example, or sudden infant death syndrome—a stillborn birth carries with it a significantly different grief, a trauma that can last much longer. In that single crushing moment, Mabel both was and was not a mother. She never said goodbye to her child, never even knew the child’s name; she did not attend the brief funeral service, did not even know where the child was buried.

Now, 10 years past the experience, Mabel still struggles to manage her grief—her strategy thus far has been retreat and denial. Only by understanding the psychological implications of a stillborn child does Mabel’s need for Faina become clear. Initially she sees Faina as some magic second chance; only gradually does she realize grief is a necessary element of her emotional recovery.

For Mabel, her stillborn birth created a devastating moment in which joy and loss, expectation and disappointment, and love and death fused into a single event. For nine months, she was a mother who bonded with her child. She knew her child in ways Jack could not. In the aftermath of the death, she feels unbearably alone. That severed bond with her dead child leaves her unwilling to trust others, to even hope for joy. When she can bring herself to remember the experience, she struggles with an overpowering sense of guilt that she somehow had failed her child. Only under the tonic influence of the wilderness girl-woman does Mabel finally open up to Jack and to her own memories; only then can she love rather than deny her stillborn child.