Bobbie Ann Mason's Shiloh

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By the end of the story, the graveyard in which they sit serves as a perfect metaphor for both the suppressing silence they lived in for so long and the inevitable the death of their marriage. Additionally, the blunt and messy way in which Norma Jean spits out everything she felt was wrong demonstrates how tired she was of the silence and the uncertainty.

The couple’s inability to grow together causes them to drift away from each other. Leroy still sees Norma Jean as his high school sweetheart; in fact, he adores her and watches her carefully trying to guess what she is feeling. However, Leroy has a clear disadvantage as Norma Jean is ready to move on with her life and he isn’t. When their son died, there was no reason for Norma Jean to care about Leroy anymore, but his constant absence made staying together an easy option to carry on with. I do think they cared each other when they were young; nevertheless, the death of the child drove them apart. At the beginning of the story, Leroy is naïve enough to believe they were lucky because their marriage had survived the tragedy, but he was blind to the truth.

For a better understanding of the place in which Norma Jean and Leroy’s marriage was, we can examine the poem Neutral Tones, particularly in the second stanza, where it almost seems like Thomas Hardy is writing explicitly about the couple’s relationship.

Your eyes on me were as eyes that rove

Over tedious riddles of years ago;

And some words played between us to and fro

On which lost the more by our love. (Hardy 5-8)

The poem illustrates the relationship in the way that Leroy’s coming and going distanced him from his wife (5) and contributed to the prevalence of silence, which led to uncertainty on who and what they were as individuals and as a couple (6). The emptiness of their conversations despite Norma Jean’s need of talking (7) and the unavoidable loss of affection that followed the flawed relationship (8).

By the end of the story, both Leroy and Norma Jean realize their relationship is doomed, when in reality it had been for years. There are several factors one can assume made Leroy and Norma Jean “waste” so much time of their lives in what seemed like a limbo, but in the end it all goes back to the death of their child and the silence that surrounded it. What seems like a long road had only been one big pause in their lives, and it isn’t until Norma Jean feels trapped by Leroy’s constant presence that she decides to discover who she is. This takes her further away from Leroy, and though he denies it, he knows he needs to do the same.

Works Cited

DiYanni, Robert. Literature: Reading Fiction, Poetry, and Drama. Sixth Edition,

McGraw-Hill Education, 2007.

Hardy, Thomas. Neutral Tones. DiYanni. 1103

Mason, Bobbie. Shiloh. DiYanni. 67-76