Julie G's Reviews > Blindness

We don't know what year it is, we don't know what city it is, all we know is that one minute a person can see, the next minute they can't. It's a white blindness that obliterates all vision immediately and is assumed to be highly contagious.

An early band of affected citizens is sent to a mental ward, in the hopes of containing this sudden epidemic of blindness. Only one among them can see, a woman as unnamed as anyone else in the story, but we come to know her as “the doctor's wife.”

And, since some 14,000 reviews already exist on Goodreads for this disturbing classic, I'm not going to summarize the plot, I'm not going to look up literary criticism and spit it out. . .

I'm going to write about my new favorite character: the doctor's wife.

The doctor's wife is an educated woman in her late 40s; a childless woman who's married to an ophthalmologist and seems to be both his intellectual and emotional equal. They're a “power couple,” so to speak, the types of pillars of society that have the mayor over for dinner.

This woman is devoted to her husband, so much so, she feigns blindness to be transported to the “holding tank” of the asylum while all others around her are actually afflicted with the condition.

This woman becomes the “eyes” for her husband and the band of people placed in her ward, and she simultaneously becomes the “eyes” for the reader. We see everything through her, and we quickly see her conundrum as well. If she reveals her advantage, she may be forced to abandon her blind husband and she may be misused for ill gain. If she conceals her advantage, she can not communicate to others the bad shit that's taking place all around them.

And by “bad shit,” I mean bad shit. I was visibly shaking and unable to sleep after arriving at page 163. It's a scene I'd like to rub right out of my mind, perhaps with sandpaper?

You see. . . it turns out, people kinda suck. They don't want to properly ration the food or be fair. They don't want to share their blankets or their hairbrushes. And, once they've been relegated to living like animals, they want to act like animals, too.

A particularly bad band of men emerges, thieves and criminals who were probably bad before they were caged like animals. Now they want to take and break everything in the asylum, including the women.

The doctor's wife sees everything, and she is in the best and the worst position of all. She sees what needs to be done, but she must do it alone, and do it while the men sell-out her and every other woman in their ward (MEN OF WARD ONE—YOU SONS OF WHORES, I WILL NEVER, EVER FORGIVE YOU).

As the devil himself paws at the doctor's wife with his cloven hooves, wanting to do great harm to her, he concludes, “This one is on the mature side, but could turn out to be quite a woman.”

Truer words were never spoken, Motherfucker.

From that point in the story, I was so focused on revenge, I became the goddamned Count of Monte Cristo. I couldn't be with my family at dinner without discussing the pitfalls of the white blindness, I couldn't stop pestering my buddy Pedro, who got me into this mess in the first place, and I haven't had a decent night's sleep in a week.

I wanted to reach out to the doctor's wife, tell her I was here for her. I could not believe she was tasked with being the only one who could SEE the problem, and I could not believe how much had been laid at one woman's excrement-covered feet. I wasn't surprised when she privately wished for the blindness to strike her, so she wouldn't be asked to show up and save the world.

The doctor's wife reminded me of so many women I have known who have been abandoned by their partners. So many women who have had to shoulder up and do the job of both woman and man, both mother and father.

For anyone who has ever had the revelation at the end of the day that this world is full of too many cowards. . . I offer up to you: the doctor's wife.

I prayed that I should never be assaulted, for I knew I would strike back, even though I would have to pay for it with life itself. --Gerda Weissmann Klein