Nobody sees the women who are beaten up by their husbands. The longer they are in these violent relationships, the more they shrink until there is nothing left of them. They become a shadow of the selves they once were. They become invisible.
Laura in “Low visibility” by Margaret Murphy is one of these women.
She lives with a husband who slaps her if she just as much as moves. She is a puppet in his game, where he can, and does, change the rules whenever he feels like it. "She doesn’t know the right thing to say, because he changes the rules each time.” p. 9, line 42.
Once, she was a popular, respected girl, full of energy. “She was a girl who could set a whole room to laughter” p. 1, line 19. Then she married John, who was more withdrawn and he thought that Laura could change him into being more like her. “He thought, that her good humour would seep into him, breaching the walls of his defence” p. 1, line 20. Unfortunately, it came to be the other way around.
Laura is not mentioned by name until the very last sentence “Laura was unharmed.” p. 12, line 179. She is a tiny, little “she”, almost invisible. She has no identity. To John, she is also invisible through the whole story. He does not look at her until he needs her help, until she becomes important for him to survive. “»Give us your hand,« he has spoken” That is where we really see his egoism and the way he says “us” about himself just shows how much he feels that he is above her, even when he is lying down.
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