ABSTRACT
True to its unpretentious title, “The Story of a Day” presents itself as a most unassuming tale relating the tragic story of a young Acadian woman whose premarital bliss was shattered twelve years earlier by the mysterious disappearance of her fiancé in the treacherous marshlands of the bayou. And yet nowhere is King’s remarkable mastery of the interplay between excess and restraint more strikingly exemplified. Durrans suggests reading the tale as an incest narrative and focuses on King’s development of a modernist aesthetics to serve her terrifying investigation into social ills as she probes the inner world of her silent character.
