An Interpretation Of Stone Mattress By Margaret Atwood

How to Get Away with a Murder: An Interpretation of Margaret Atwood’s Stone Mattress “Stone Mattress” is a title story about “how you might murder somebody on a boat in the Arctic and get away with it” as noted by the author, Margaret Atwood, in an interview for the Trillium Book Award of 2015 (“Margaret”). The main character of the short story is a woman named Verna Pritchard, whose life was completely shattered at the age of fourteen when she was raped, impregnated, and slandered by a seventeen year old boy and his best friend (Atwood). Verna went on to marry and kill four men, and she blamed her murderous actions on one of her rapists, Bob Goreham (Atwood 212). After murdering her fourth husband, Verna decided to take a vacation where she

Verna developed a methodical plan to carry out the murder of Bob Goreham. She contemplated her few options and found her inspiration when there was a modification in the itinerary of the cruise ship they had both boarded. The ship made an unscheduled stop where the passengers were allowed to view the “world’s earliest fossilized stromatolites” (Atwood 216). These stromatolites are significant to the plot of Atwood’s “Stone Mattress” and, most indubitably, Earth’s history. The word stromatolite comes from the Greek word stroma, meaning mattress and the root for the word stone (Atwood 216). This “fossilized cushion” was formed by strata of blue green algae, also known as cyanobacteria, and it is responsible for the very oxygen all humans use to live (Atwood 216). This historical formation symbolizes the layers of pent up rage that motivated the very action Verna committed. While the passengers of the ship explored the samples of stromatolite, Bob and Verna wandered to the second ridge of the formation where Verna discovered a wedged fragment of stromatolite. She studied the strata of what she had unearthed and took note of the colors that designated each year of its formation. “Black, grey, black, grey, black, and at the bottom the featureless core” (Atwood 218). The core, of the stromatolite Verna discovered, represents her fourteen year old self, the young, shy, introverted, and undeveloped person she was before she was raped. Each layer thereafter represents the dark years that came after Verna was robbed of her innocence, the cold, bitter, and angry women she became. Verna’s character used this stromatolite to murder Bob Goreham. After killing him, Verna’s character hides the murder weapon in plain site. Verna takes the wedged stromatolite back to the cruise ship and places it with other the samples where it would be touched by so many other