Can somebody please find Bobbie Ann Mason and get her to answer my questions!!? GAHH.

Bobbie Ann Mason’s “Shiloh” tells the story of a withered man and marriage—a man stripped of his masculinity and a marriage robbed of its marital bliss—or at least that’s how it begins. It is a story told through the eyes of Leroy Moffitt, yet it is a story that yields the evolution of his wife Norma Jean. As “Shiloh” progresses and we discover more about Norma Jean and her completely disjointed life from Leroy’s, a question arose in my mind that I simply cannot find a definitive answer to. In fact, I’ve changed my mind about the answer at least four times within the time it took me to write the first and third sentences of this blog, but here it is: does “Shiloh” tell the tale of a marriage gone sour after a family tragedy, or does it merely convey a wife’s realization of her indifference, or possibly resentment, towards the man she was forced to marry since her adolescence?
I cannot tell if Leroy is oblivious, or just lazy. The impression that I get of him is that he knows his wife is indifferent to him, and he knows that she thinks of him as a hindrance. And rather than growing up with her and witnessing her evolution into womanhood, he works. He is a truck driver, and he is never at home until he has a car accident and is no longer mobile enough to continue working.
This accident seems both a curse and a blessing: a blessing because it allows him to discontinue work and reconnect with his wife, and a curse because his homecoming is ill-received by Norma Jean and eventually leads to the disintegration of their marriage. Mason describes his homecoming as a time when Leroy is “finally settling down with the woman he loves,” but does he truly love her? The only evidence I could find to prove that he just might actually love Norma Jean is in his adoration of her beauty, her flawless skin, and her “frosted curls…like pencil trimming.” Of course, you can’t forget to mention that log cabin that he obsesses over. He claims that he’ll build this cabin for her, and that they’ll grow together in that cabin, and that that’s all it will take to get back those fifteen years he lost from his marriage. I’m hesitant to believe that this proves his love for her. In my interpretation of Leroy Moffitt, I believe he feels he has to love Norma Jean simply because they have been together so long, when really want he truly wants it to be happy himself. Norma Jean wants nothing to do with a log cabin; Norma Jean wants Leroy to get a job and, essentially, grow up. To love somebody is to want them to be happy at all costs. If Leroy truly loved Norma Jean, he would abandon his romantic yet unrealistic desire to build a log cabin and do what would make both as them—as a couple; as a team; as a unit—happier and more compatible. Instead he describes his love for her in his depiction of her physical beauty. He wants to reconnect with her, but it takes not but until “the oven timer goes off” for him to forget why he wants to do this. Is that love? Is that even friendship?
I wonder what affect the death of their first and only child had upon their marriage, but I’m also drawn to the notion that perhaps there was no loving, devoted relationship for the death to have impacted in the first place. Norma Jean did become pregnant as a teenager, after all, and Bobbie Ann Mason omits the specifics behind their marriage—whether it was imposed upon them by family values or they chose to get married out of love; perhaps this is purposefully done to add that opaque dimension of speculation to “Shiloh.”