"Hamnet" reviewed by Belén Tizón Méndez

AGNES: SWARMING LIFE

by Belén Tizón Méndez 

Source: https://leabradovich.com/artworks/new-work

 It was about time to give relevance to those women who back men, always a couple of steps behind but irradiating ideas, love and upholding full-time support in order to inspire their careers, and ultimately their success. This fact seems to be one of the aims in O’Farrell’s novel. The Great Shakespeare, master of Universal literature is intentionally and completely left aside. His real name is not mentioned at all, he is always named for his roles: husband, father, Latin teacher, no trace of his name, but on the contrary, his wife’s, Agnes, is mentioned and highlighted all along the novel; not only her name but also her constant and heroic endeavours.

I wonder if O’Farrell’s purpose is to give back to this masculine character the ostracism women, wives, daughters are or were used to having all along history. The main character of this novel is Agnes. An endless list of epithets could be used to describe her: a superwoman; a loving, caring, tender mum; a pretty woman with a wild allure; nature-lover—precisely, her understanding with animals makes her a misunderstood woman, being harshly criticized by neighbours and even relatives (i.e. her stepmother), and also despised. M. O’Farrell has selected very accurately all the natural symbols (bewitchery, herbs, bees, plants, birds) that surround Agnes, these are key to understand her personality and to let the reader know how she feels.

• “A woman with a room of her own.” She behaves freely and moved by her intuition, escaping from conventionalism (she gets pregnant before getting married, she does get dressed in a modest or conventional way), she gives evidence of being a brave woman (she gives birth in the middle of the forest, she brings up her kids alone, she confronts her step family)

• A pleasure-seeker of small things, a woman living life passionately in all senses: family, nature, sex.

• Resignation is also present in her life, we can feel the traces of resignation when his husband closes up in his room day after day and finally decides to leave to London, in search of a better life but just for him, for the sake of becoming a recognised writer leaving Agnes with the eternal doubt about being cheated by other women.

As an empowered woman, she tries to cope with the most terrible fear in a person’s life, the death of a child and, despite of it and all the misfortunes she had to confront, she always emanates positivism, heading up, as she says:

“Later, and for the rest of her life, she will think that if she had left there and then, if she had gathered her bags, her plants, her honey, and taken the path home, if she had heeded her abrupt, nameless unease, she might have changed what happened next. If she had left her swarming bees to their own devices, their own ends, instead of working to coax them back into their hives, she might have headed off what was coming.”