The “Thing” the narrator refers to in Marie Cardinal’s The Words to say it is not an actual physical presence or the blood itself, rather it is the manifestation of halted urges. The “Thing” is the narrator’s constant desire to bleed out her innermost struggles and urges to live the way she wishes but never could. Whether it is the actual physical presence of blood she leaves wherever she goes or if it is what will be categorized as the “internal bleeding “that replaces the real blood flow, the Thing is this irrepressible urge to express, even if the narrator does not want to. Whether the Thing rears its head in the form of the constant wake of blood the narrator leaves behind or, more covertly, in the more internalized sense where the actual flow stops but the internal wounds are left exposed, it is rooted in self-repression. Her mother’s conflicted treatment of her and the many other major and minor traumas of her childhood were not allowed to flow out of her, to be expressed, thus she is left with either a visibly messy external manifestation of pained repression or an internal scene that is also torturous.
As the narrator begins to recognize how critical events in her childhood and her constant state of repression drove her to her current state, she sees how the Thing, her past, and the constant blood flow are interconnected. At one cathartic point in the text she states that her greatest weapon to combat the Thing was “the flood of words” which she characterizes as a “maelstrom” that “swept away distrust, fear, lack of understanding, severity, will, order law, discipline, as well as tenderness, sweetness, love, warmth and freedom” (65). What is most notable about this statement is that the emotions she describes in her list, such as distrust, order, discipline, and others are all feelings and sensations that she represses and does not allow herself to experience. In line with the view that the Thing is her physical manifestation of these repressed desires to feel and live wholly, when she allows such feelings in for the first time, the blood flow stops.
The associations between the blood and The Thing as conceptualized here are made clearer by moments in the text where the blood stops or starts. This can be either a physical or emotional invocation of blood. For instance, when she begins her analysis with the unnamed doctor and begins to recognize, or at least catch glimpses of the true meaning behind her tortured existence, the bleeding stops. The doctors states that he is unconcerned with this physical aspect of her emotional distress and almost magically, it is halted. What seems to occur is the doctor allows her to stop being engrossed with the physical manifestations of her distress and in doing so, she is able to focus on the root causes. More succinctly, the external bleeding stops so that the internal bleeding can begin. The blood that has been trailing the narrator for so many years, corrupting her ability to live a normal life, might not be a physical ailment at all. As this paper suggests, the blood is emblematic of the “Thing”—the stifled emotion that needs to emerge or get externalized somehow—but it no longer is necessary with the “internal bleeding” her sessions with the analyst allow.
While the blood is a constant presence for the narrator, her childhood memories are marked with bloody epochs, even when not related to direct physical violence or menstruation. Blood in this autobiographical novel can also seep from wounds that are invisible, which is also akin to a child’s view of menstruation. For instance, when her mother stands on the street corner and tells her how many times she tried to have her aborted, the narrator stood stunned on the street. She was reeling from the news and she recalls how she felt, how the experience, “put out my eyes, pierced my eardrums, scalped me, cut off my hands, shattered my knee caps, tortured my stomach, and mutilated my genitals” (p. 134). In some ways, this can be seen one of the most major of “puncture wounds” that created the artificial internal wound from which the constant flow blood emerges. The narrator even prefaces her version of the event as her mother’s infliction of an “incurable and ghastly wound” (134). Even as an adult, this wound is never allowed to heal until finally, in therapy, she is able to trade the blood flows from physically present to mentally present. This is a complex tradeoff and represents further how the “Thing” is repression itself. The narrator is constantly bleeding in one way or another without being able to stop it. However, by recognizing the internal wounds as the cause of the physical bleeding that can be seen by all, she can halt this constant leakage, and work to maintain the invisible leaking. It is this invisible leak of metaphorical blood that leads to her ability to heal, regain her creativity, and finally put the traumatic life experiences in perspective.
Although the actual constant bleeding the narrator experiences is part of her illness, it is more symptomatic than medical. Her constant bleeding represents suppressed urges she has felt her entire life to allow herself to let go, to permit her true self to bleed into the false world her mother constructed for her. The narrator does seek and find some detached medical explanations for her constant bleeding, the explanations themselves are wrapped in language that relates directly to her internal turmoil. Upon focusing on her condition called a “fibroid uterus” she creates the term into a visual object; something tangible. She envisions this condition as “pustular toad” and an “octopus” (8) inside of her body. Both of these parallels to her conditions are living things that are associated with dark places, slipperiness, and an ability to grasp solidly with one’s hands. They are creatures that are often mysterious and that have unique ways of moving about; they must be chased to be captured. What these symbolic associations with these creatures means to the central idea that the “Thing” is her repressed desires to live without constraint can be debated. On the one hand, envisioning her condition through the lens of a slippery amphibious beast that sits and moves inside of her, causing bleeding might just be the mentally-ill author’s way of expressing helplessness about her condition. On the other hand, however, it might be more revealing about her feelings that there is a world inside of her that is horrible or grotesque to look at directly, but that desperately wants out. It is something sentient and ugly, but it must be seen. This second view might be the best explanation as the narrator, upon being told she is ugly and unworthy throughout her life, would imagine that her true self that lies in wait would take the shape of a toad or an octopus, not a fanciful pony or a butterfly.
One of the other strange ways the narrator describes this process of the Thing manifesting physically and internally is through an explanation of inheritance. At one point, she suggests that her mother was “discharging her madness on to me” (135) and that she was a sacrifice to her mother’s own problems with sadness, frustration, and repression. What is notable about this suggestion is that the narrator implies that she has grown up with the notion, however clouded, that one can keep many things bottled away, internalized, silenced, but in order to be able to live at all, those painful elements must be bled out, leached, or otherwise exposed. It is possible that the narrator is suggesting a connection in her own and her mother’s behavior as both took deeply painful events that had been internalized and in an effort to express them, even if doing so was not desired, they both “bled” onto everything. The narrator’s bleeding does not occur until late in her life, but this could also be suggested of her mother as she is represented as a dramatically complex character with dual personality aspects. In many ways, it can be argued that this “discharge” (another flow-related term) was successfully as it set the dreadful paradigm for her daughter to follow.
While the “Thing” is finally coaxed back until it no longer emerges and forces the narrator to uncontrollably bleed outside of her own internal thoughts, the wounds that allow it to manifest are still present. The narrator, after living with immense repressed desires, most of which not abnormal but were shunned by her mother and other women around her, had to express herself somehow, however, before she was able to make a conscious choice on how to do so, the Thing made this decision for her.
