Summary
A chiaroscuro of domestic martyrdom, John H. Collins’ 'Flower of the Dusk' navigates the labyrinthine psyche of Ambrose North, a patriarch shrouded in both literal and metaphorical darkness. Tormented by the suspicion that his late wife, Constance, sought the cold embrace of suicide to escape a loveless union, Ambrose exists in a state of perpetual emotional stasis. The narrative pivot rests upon a sealed missive, intended for their daughter Barbara’s twenty-first year, which reveals the devastating reality of Constance’s infidelity and subsequent despair. In an act of profound filial piety, Barbara—herself a victim of physical infirmity—constructs a benign fiction to preserve her father's fragile equilibrium. As medical science intervenes to restore Ambrose’s vision, the vindictive Aunt Miriam attempts to weaponize the truth, leading to a hallucinatory climax where the boundaries between memory and reality dissolve. Barbara, assuming the spectral guise of her mother, facilitates a final, blissful delusion for the dying Ambrose, ultimately reconciling the sins of the past through a union with the son of her mother’s paramour.
Synopsis
Blind Ambrose North is tormented by the suspicion that his wife Constance committed suicide when their crippled daughter Barbara was only two, because she did not love him. Before her death, Constance wrote Barbara a letter for her to open on her 21st birthday, but when Barbara opens it and learns that her mother killed herself to escape a doomed love affair with Lawrence Austin, she invents a different story for Ambrose, knowing that the truth would hurt him too much. When a surgeon restores Ambrose's sight, Barbara's aunt Miriam, whom Ambrose loved before he met Constance, decides to gain her revenge by giving him the letter, but in his eagerness to read it, he removes the bandages too soon. Barbara, whom the doctor also cured, tries on her mother's wedding gown, and in his delirium Ambrose believes that she is the spirit of Constance returning to assure him of her love. He dies happily, and later, Barbara marries Lawrence's son Roger.
