Across the Bridge | Across the Bridge

At a glance:

Author: Mavis de Trafford Young
First Published: 1991
Type of Work: Short story
Genres: Short fiction, Domestic realism
Subjects: 1950’s, Maturation or coming of age, Family or family life, Traveling or travelers, France or French people, Love or romance, Sex or sexuality, Gender roles, Middle classes, Marriage, Paris, Emotions, Women’s issues, Women, Death or dying, Inheritance or succession, Canada or Canadians, Weddings, Christmas, Rejection
Locales: France, Paris, France, Montreal, Canada

“Across the Bridge” begins with the narrator, Sylvie, walking across a bridge in Paris with her mother, who carries the invitations to her wedding in a leather shopping bag. When Sylvie tells her mother that she does not love the man her parents have chosen for her to marry, her mother says that loving a man takes “patience,” like practicing scales. When Sylvie says she has thoughts of throwing herself off the bridge if she is forced to marry the family choice, Arnaud, and not allowed to marry her own choice, Bernard, her mother dumps the invitations off the bridge. The rest of the story is an ironic and comic treatment of the family's efforts to match Sylvie up with Bernard, who, it turns out, in spite of Sylvie's romantic idealizations, has no interest in her at all.

The story ends with Sylvie falling in love with her family's original choice after all. The key scene in the story is a dinner engagement Sylvie has with Arnaud in which their future life together is presaged. When Sylvie cannot eat the flan because the restaurant has mistaken it for a piece of quiche and put parsley on it, Arnaud scrapes off the parsley and begins to eat the flan for her—a gesture that convinces Sylvie that he must love her. The story ends in romantic poignancy as Sylvie takes the long way home after seeing Arnaud board his train, for she thinks it unfair to arrive home before he does. She says she will never tell anyone about this, that it will remain a small and insignificant secret that belongs to the “true life” she is almost ready to enter. This is the bridge crossing reflected by the title of the story, for these small and seemingly insignificant secrets are what give Gallant's stories life.

Bibliography

Gadpaille, Michelle. “Mavis Gallant.” In The Canadian Short Story. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988.

Grant, Judith Skleton. “Mavis Gallant.” In Canadian Writers and Their Works, edited by Robert Lecker, Jack David, and Ellen Quigley. Toronto: ECW Press, 1989.

Keith, William John. “Mavis Gallant.” In A Sense of Style: Studies in the Art of Fiction in English-Speaking Canada. Toronto: ECW Press, 1988.

Kulyk Keefer, Janice. Reading Mavis Gallant. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1989.

Simmons, Diane. “Remittance Men: Exile and Identity in the Short Stories of Mavis Gallant.” In Canadian Women Writing Fiction, edited by Mickey Pearlman. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1993.

Smythe, Karen. Gallant, Munro, and the Poetics of Elegy. Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1992.