The intolerable: analysis of “La gallina degollada” by Horacio Quiroga.

In today we will analyze the horror story of the Uruguayan writer Horacio Quiroga: La gallina degollada, originally published in the July 10, 1909 edition of the Argentine magazine Caras y Caretas, and later republished in the 1917 anthology: Cuentos de love of madness and death.

After a year of marriage, the Mazzini-Ferraz couple has their first child. The little boy grows healthy and strong until he is a year and a half old, when he suffers violent convulsions and wakes up the next morning without recognizing his parents. The doctors examine him but cannot explain why he has lost “his intelligence, his soul, even his instinct.” The diagnosis: “a lost case.” The couple begins to wonder about the hereditary factor of their son’s condition. The doctor, to get by, states that the mother has a defective lung.

Soon the couple has another child, but at 18 months he has seizures and becomes an “idiot” like his older brother. The parents despair, they believe that his blood is cursed. However, they return to search for a healthy child. They have twins who repeat the same illness as their brothers.

The parents are devastated, but at the same time feel compassion for their four children. They are children who do not know how to eat alone, who walk carrying things in front of them, who moo, who laugh “with their tongues sticking out and rivers of drool.” Although they seem abstracted in their own world, spending entire hours staring at the wall, in reality they are attentive to what is happening around them and even possess “a certain imitative faculty.”

Years later, the couple has a daughter, Bertita. The couple lives with anguish and worry for the first two years, but the girl does not suffer any seizures. She is a healthy, fun and very intelligent girl. Bertita begins to receive all the attention from her parents, which means that the four siblings receive very little, and eventually an “absolute lack of maternal care.” The servant is in charge of dressing them, feeding them and putting them to bed; not with affection and tenderness, but rather with brutality. They spend most of the day sitting on the patio bench looking at the wall.

One afternoon when Bertita, four years old, has a fever, her parents argue. Mazzini blames his wife for the illness of her children. The next day, Berta spits up blood. Mazzini consoles her, but no one says a word about her symptom. They decide to go out with Bertita and ask her servant, María, to kill a chicken for dinner. The four children get up from the bench, go to the kitchen and watch the maid cutting the animal’s throat.

At night, the couple goes out to greet some neighbors and Bertita stays inside the house. The four brothers are sitting as always, motionless on the bench, staring inertly at the brick wall. At that moment, Bertita enters the patio. She wants to climb the fence. The four brothers fix their gazes on her. A “growing sense of bestial gluttony” takes hold of them. Slowly, the four children advance towards the fence and grab their sister by the leg. Bertita screams, calls her mother. One of the boys squeezes her neck as if it were a chicken’s neck. The others drag her to the kitchen, hold her in the sink and bleed her to death just like María did with the chicken.

Mazzini, from the house across the street, hears his daughter’s scream. They return home. The father enters the kitchen, sees the floor covered in blood and screams in horror. He tells his wife not to come in. Berta looks out and collapses in her husband’s arms.

The Slitting Hen is not just a superficial story of madness and death. That and much more. Nor is it a story that allows for a distant, clinical examination. You have to get your hands dirty to analyze Horacio Quiroga.

The doctor attributes the boys’ illness to a condition that Horacio Quiroga does not delve into, because it is clear. The Buenos Aires reader of 1909 can easily deduce that it is meningitis. At the same time, her mother, Berta, is showing the first signs of the most acute stage of syphilis.

At first, the couple really love their “subnormal” children and care for them as best they can. However, after three years, they begin to long for another child to make up for the four “beasts” they have sired. Because Berta does not conceive immediately, they become bitter and resentful, and no longer support each other, but instead make mutual accusations about who is to blame for the children’s illness.

Bertita’s arrival makes them go from “great compassion for their four children” to open hostility towards them, demonstrated by the increasingly strong language used by Horacio Quiroga to refer to the boys: “monsters”, “animals”, in addition to the fact that they are kept in the yard.

When she turned four, Bertita fell ill; In contrast to her siblings, she is overly cared for and pampered. The girl recovers from her indigestion, but the next day she coughs up blood. The horror of the disease once again threatens the couple’s happiness. However, they ignore her and decide to spend the day outside with the girl. That is the morning in which the brothers see the servant slitting the chicken’s throat and are fascinated to see her blood.

It is not unreasonable to think that La gallina degollada by Horacio Quiroga is inspired by The Idiots by Joseph Conrad, published in 1898. In this story, a couple has four “idiot” children, the wife kills her husband when he tries to force her to have another child, and then commits suicide by jumping off a cliff. In both cases there is a marriage that collapses, and four “monstrous” children who are never given names or particular characteristics: they function as a collective, almost like a pack. Both couples also come to hate their children, keeping them out of sight as much as possible.

Horacio Quiroga flirts with the biblical notion that the sins of the father fall on his children. In this case, the sin is syphilis. Perhaps that is why both parents are desperate to find the “redemption of the four animals that were born to them” in poor Bertita.

In psychoanalytic terms we can understand the particular contempt that Berta has towards her four children; In fact, it is not uncommon for the materialization of motherhood not to occur in the face of a sick child. Sigmund Freud would say that Berta has not been able to recover her lost phallus through the motherhood of a healthy child. For her, the Oedipal conflict of castration is reincarnated again and again in the figure of the four children incapable, due to their illness, of embodying the narcissistic satisfaction of the mother, while the recovered narcissistic object is represented in her only healthy daughter, Bertita

Horacio Quiroga is ingenious in using the figure of the House as a representation of the psyche, in this case, the unconscious. It is not whimsical that the four boys spend all day in the yard, marginalized, excluded from the house, but constantly looking at the wall. Furthermore, their brutal instincts, and their location on the periphery of the House makes them a clear representation of the unconscious, that is, of what we do not want to see, what we do not want to deal with. In this context, it is significant that when the boys burst into the kitchen, her servant, María, screams warning her mother that they have entered, because she “didn’t want them to ever set foot there”; in the same way that consciousness simply cannot deal with the raw material of the unconscious.

The four boys have now entered the house and observe an everyday episode, almost banal for the time: the slaughter of a chicken. For this reason, Bertita’s murder is not committed in the patio but in the kitchen, in the conscience, bringing to the surface those brutal impulses that, until recently, were contained, repressed, but in a latent state.

The illness of the four children, which appears to begin with seizures, fever, followed by a state of prostration and cognitive impairment, has clear transgenerational implications. In fact, the Narrator states that the first son “paid for the grandfather’s excesses.” In this way, the old family trauma, which the Narrator refrains from commenting on, resurfaces with each new birth.

That “certain imitative faculty” of the brothers manifests itself in a horrific way, cutting Bertita’s throat as the maid did with the chicken, but Horacio Quiroga also provides apparently innocent previous examples:

The boys’ imitative behavior is ritualistic, and the commission of Bertita’s murder is similar to ritual sacrifices, but its commission does not seem casual. In fact, the parents decide to leave the house and leave Bertita alone with the four “monsters.” Because? It’s true, until then the boys have not shown their aggressiveness. But, if these are not aggressive, why permanently exclude them from the yard? The interesting thing here is that this “certain imitative faculty” of the brothers only has one violent example to imitate. They have not received affection, tenderness, or anything loving to imitate.

There is definitely something primordial in the murder of Bertita by following the procedure of the maid when cutting the throat of the chicken: the game. Indeed, crime as a possibility of play for the disturbed minds of boys adds an unbearable note of joy to this authentic Greek tragedy. In fact, Horacio Quiroga’s The Slain Hen has all the elements of Greek tragedy, particularly that of Sophocles: a family curse, love that becomes violent because of that curse.

The geographical context of the family is not marginal: they have a maid, they live in a house with a garden, the couple usually goes out to “walk around the country houses”, and they also have a family doctor. It is, then, a bourgeois environment, possibly a rich neighborhood on the outskirts of Buenos Aires. However, in this apparently idyllic environment there is marginality: the four brothers, who are excluded from the house and its comforts, practically living like animals. On the other hand, Bertita herself is also a marginal. Her normality distinguishes her from her four brothers, and she also carries a great responsibility on her shoulders. Bertita, the marginal one from the point of view of her brothers, “comes to cut off the rotten offspring” of the family.

Now, the final murder raises many questions. First of all, it is not a premeditated crime nor was it fantasized by the brothers, but rather copied from something they saw done previously: the slaughter of the chicken. It is the exclusion and isolation in which they live that is the main instigator of that act; because the truth is that the brothers imitate everything: they imitate the sound of the tram, they even imitate the patio wall, remaining motionless in front of it. In these conditions of extreme physical and emotional isolation, the stimulus of having witnessed the slaughter of the chicken activated in them the same imitative factor that other stimuli had awakened, but with much less dramatic consequences.

The dynamic of this marriage is a topic in itself. After every…