A Mercy

Florens is the main protagonist of A Mercy. Throughout the novel, she grapples with feelings of inadequacy and a profound fear of abandonment. This fear stems from Florens’s initial encounter with Jacob Vaark; as a young child, her mother gives her up to Jacob Vaark when she sees in him a kindness that was lacking in their master at the time. Florens is an enslaved Black woman. The text operates as a bildungsroman as it follows Florens’s life and journey to young adulthood and, eventually, also to her ultimate loss of innocence. Florens has always been eager to please since she first arrived at the Vaark farm. She follows after Lina and is eager for Rebekka to like her. One symbolic example of this softness is Florens’s feet, and her desire to wear shoes. As a result, Florens’s feet are sensitive, and nothing at all like those of her mother or the other enslaved people around her.

By the end of the novel, however, Florens has completed her long journey to the Blacksmith and back. Her emotional and mental state has likewise been altered significantly as a result. Due to the Blacksmith’s rejection of her, and her own trauma surrounding abandonment, Florens is no longer the soft, eager-to-please, and trusting young woman that she once was.