Trompe Veil Rhetorical Analysis

In her short story “Trompe L’Oeil,” Zoë Wicomb describes the mirage of a seemingly perfect marriage and its uncertain future. Gavin and Bev, a married South African couple, unintentionally welcome into their lives a Scottish writer named Roddy, who scrutinizes their relationship through the prose he shares with Bev. In turn, she gives her husband Roddy’s story, which ends with the wife shattering French-double-pane windows (124), unsealing the cracks of her broken marriage, and defying the gender expectations that governed her interactions with others. Through the fairly explicit parallel between Gavin and Bev’s love to Roddy’s story and the implicit conceit of their marriage as an optical illusion, or trompe l’oeil, Wicomb underscores the marginalization and silencing of women, and resultantly, highlights the utmost salience of gender as a determinant of interpersonal relationships within the political …show more content…
Recognizing that her “smiling marriage” was in shambles (121), Y grabs a glass paperweight and, without warning, chucks it at the French window, which “shatters into a million pieces” with the “full trompe l’oeil moon dispers[ing] into a million fragments,” (124). Acknowledging that the window symbolizes their marriage’s longevity, the fact that Z shattered it foreshadows the destruction of her marriage in the way that the window was smashed. The ploce of “million,” therefore, reinforces the irreconcilability of the divisions between the two, while the “full trompe l’oeil” suggests the marriage was a certain type of lie: an illusion. Recognizing that Roddy’s piece reflects the reality he observed, as both Gavin and Bev understood, the titular image of a “trompe l’oeil” extends to their marriage, too. Despite the foreshadowing, whether or not Bev chose to shatter the window of her marriage, figuratively or literally, remains