Feminist Analysis of the Window by Deborah Eisenberg - Essay Example

The “Window” is one of the most challenging stories in the collection "Twilight of the Superheroes." This story sketches the quest of a clueless young woman, Kristina, who flees her hometown after her year out of high school. She seeks material security and starts working as a waitress in an Eden resort town with “white houses and gentle hills,” a “tender, miniature world.” She moves in with a couple, who after a few months wants Kristina to move out, to accommodate their new baby.

To continue to be a part of the community, Kristina marries Eli who occasionally comes into town andtakes her to hisisolated cabin deep in the woods. Though the marriage gets off to a fine start, Kristina finds challenge in rearing Eli’s toddler son. Being isolated in the cabin, Kristina slowly realizes that Eli’s first wife eloped due to suffering due to domestic violence. Though Eli repents to for his abusive behavior, Kristina decides to run out of Eli’s life, ‘kidnapping’ his son with her.

She ends up with her estranged half-sister, from where she had originally fled in the beginning. The story is unfold in the mood of depressive reminiscence with its beginning and ending frames are fixed in Kristina’s half-sister’s home. These frames focused on the current situation of Kristina, where she is on a run low on money, and caring for Eli’s son, who has contracted an illness. . We can see that Kristina is very confused and afraid while on the run and she expects and fears Eli’s anger and its impact on her future.

In this story, Eisenberg is actively implying that there will be risk behind every decision, whether we will be able to see it or not. While providing us a detailed account of Kristina’s fall from youth and emergence into adulthood, Eisenberg also opens out a window in to her psyche, to reveal the fury of conflicting emotionssuppressed within her heart, bordering her on the verge of explosions. But Eisenberg’s character is neither too weak to go numb before the looming danger, nor is she rebellious enough to stand up and assert her individuality.

Instead, she is a woman in conflict with her own demons, her emotions and she is trying to run away from her husband and the danger of being kept in captivity and abused all her life. But, we can find that Kristina is far more courageous than Eli’s first wife, who deserted her child with Eli for “unknown reasons”, as Kristina chooses to take the child with her, pretending to avoid the probability of Eli hunting her down. In the opening scene of "Window", we find Kristina and Alma drinking coffee engaged in small talks, while the toddler is playing.

The tension in the story starts to surface only when we come to know that Kristina and Alma are the estranged sisters who are trying to move on from their reminiscent and depressing past by forcefully engaging themselves in small talks. The tension felt in the scene forces us to delve deeper in to the story, which then, slowly opens a window to the past life of Kristina. The rendering of the story goes smooth but it get its power from those things that are kept untold and hidden. Eisenberg unwinds her story