Mrs March Ending Explained: What Happens?

Question

Saw the Mrs. March movie first but was stunned by the book's ambiguous final pages. Could the protagonist's descent into paranoia end in fantasy or reality? Just can't decide.

Marian Tanega Vales · Answer

My reasons for ending ‘Mrs. March’ as I have are numerous and could be explored in some detail but essentially I have tried to leave her fate and sanity an ambiguous and unsettling question. The majority of the novel is played out in a fairly gilded cage and the tension of a wife’s mental collapse is well explored in ‘The Wife He Left Behind’ which follows the days after a husband’s disappearance from his home and family. The wife has to search through the remnants of their life together and try to make sense of her husband’s secrets, all under the scrutiny of the outside world who are desperate to know whether she is a murderer or simply a neglected wife.

Kai · Answer

Mrs. March's descent into paranoia is a real psychological whirlybird, that makes you worry for her in the final scenes. You are left to wonder if she really has uncovered some dark secrets about her husband, or if it is all just the product of her increasingly unhinged mind. It is cleverly left ambiguous, and you are left with the impression that some things are better left unknown. Are her husband's literary successes down to something supremely evil, or is he just very nice, and Mrs. March is lonely and needs company?

It’s very mirroring to human perception. We see a vase slowly falling to the ground. We wonder whether it’s been pushed or whether it’s just fallen. There’s no answer. The book is a mirror to our distrust. After finishing the book, I spent days talking about it with friends and we all arrived at very different conclusions. That, I think, is what makes a great story.

Amelia · Answer

One of my favorite things about Mrs. March is how it ends with a muted and devastating slam, rather than a flourish. The entire book is tension building as to whether the husband of the protagonist is having an affair and assaulting women, and in the end it is kind of left as a question of whether or not Mrs. March has finally become the obsessed and paranoid wife that she suspected her husband of writing. The book is pure psychological horror, and the way that Mrs. March accuses her husband is more of a whisper than a scream. His denials are almost palpable and he certainly doesn’t inspire any confidence in her sanity.

Of course it makes me think of Gone Girl but it’s so much more intimate and suffocating. After finishing it I went back to the start of the book to search for clues that I must have missed along the way. The ending is so open and doesn’t give any closure. Instead it leaves you with this permanent stain that you cannot wash off. That’s a really great book.

Zane · Answer

'Mrs. March' is a gorgeous read that ends with a fabulous gut punch. The novel explores the story of a woman who has spent years constructing an idea of her husband and goes on a journey of obsessive discovery to find out the truth. We are left with her in a state of doubt in the final pages. The ending is clever in that it leaves us to wonder whether or not she has discovered the horrible truth about her husband or if she has just imagined it all. Either way the ending is fabulous because it so perfectly reflects the way in which the protagonist’s identity has been slowly eroded as her suspicion of her husband has become the reality of her life. In the end she is left a hollow shell of a person and the reader is left with the story of how the stories we tell ourselves to try to make sense of our lives can end up destroying us. I loved this book so much.

Diana Sanchez de S · Answer

I was left in the dark needing to scrape my brain matter from my theater seating after watching the final scenes unfold. The ending does not pose to the audience as a problem to be solved by some clever aha! moment. Instead, it serves to illustrate a crisis unfolding before our eyes in the decay of Georgina March’s world. Her esteemed New York apartment is replaced by the cabin’s tight, stagnant space of rot and dust. Rather than an investigation of the disappearance of the young girl or the rat, we are presented with the final transformation of the woman. She sheds her skin of ‘Mrs. March’ (performative, jealous, and high-strung social anxiety-ridden wife) and is left a monstrous and feral creature, completely coated in the same white dust that fills the cabin. It is a birth – and one that is hideously monstrous. She has finally broken free from her husband’s quaint but suffocating story of herself as well as the suffocating confines of her own delusions regarding her place in society. But in breaking free from these burdens, March has succumbed to madness in all its repulsive freedom.

Brandon Prevost · Answer

I think this is a really brave choice for writing – most stories are about the search for truth and then we get the answer. But this story is about how unreliable truth is, especially when it’s been filtered through one person’s very fractured perspective. And so the ending of the story is a very consistent version of that idea – we don’t get any kind of objective truth because Georgina no longer has it, and we are stuck in her point of view. To then give the reader an omniscient reveal would be to betray the whole premise of the story as we’ve read it, and that would be frustrating. As it is, it’s frustratingly, brilliantly consistent.

Oriana Bernal · Answer

Most of the movie was somewhat engaging, but her aimless, anxious wandering through her apartment in the middle was kind of dull and had me drifting off. The ending, however, was great in a somewhat unexpected, spooky way. The only thing she actually accomplished was to show something not happen, in an artsy sort of way. This wasn’t my cup of tea, but again, my heroine was fine, in a sort of spastic, fussy way. I’m more of a clear-cut mystery sort of person. Moss was good, though.

Laura Arnette · Answer

Much of the film’s ambiguity can be dispensed with — I think it’s fairly clear that Catherine has the capacity for violence, perhaps even that she has committed it. The film is quite Clear about the knife, about her jealousy, about her fantasies of hurting her husband’s lover. Her horror at the sight of the rat in the hole suggests that she’s aware of something primal in herself. And the ‘nest’ she builds in the woods, which the film establishes as a calm vignette after long perturbation, may be just that — or a monument to some hidden action. The real ambiguity isn’t about whether Catherine is dangerous and how, rather how far her danger has gone.

SweCanMia · Answer

The story goes from a vertical setting (the high rise apartment and the hierarchical society) to a horizontal setting (the wide, flat woods and a cabin on the ground). The main character is grounded in this new setting. She is literally buried in the earth of her new home. This is the end of her fall from social grace and her transition to a more primitive and unstructured form of life. She has fallen from the penthouse, but rather than dying there, she has landed in a new place where she can grow and become a different person. This new earth is dark and hopefully richer than her previous life.

Rachel Sutjiono · Answer

It’s also a metaphor for the creative process gone horribly wrong. This writer is using the woman in the painting as inspiration for his own writing, rather horribly misusing her as Muse. The woman’s descent into madness is her attempt to regain control of her own life as Muse and to write her own novel instead. Her ‘novel’ is her own physical, tangible manuscript of her own trauma, and in the end of the painting she has sat herself inside the nest she built out of her husband’s written pages – she has published her own novel, using her husband’s own words against him. It’s a darkly creative act of writing her own story instead, rather than being written about by another as subject. Instead of being written about as subject, she is the creator, the artist, writing her own horror story – and she is the main character who dies in it.

Mrs March Ending Explained: What Happens?

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