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Isolation In The Painted Door

724 Words3 Pages

The Warmth of Desire The natural landscape and the winter storm in “The Painted Door” serve as a metaphor for Ann’s sense of isolation. Ann feels “furtive and constrained” in her relationship with John, as if there is a “frozen silence of...bitter fields and [a] sun-chilled sky...between” them. John never talks about more than the “crops and cattle, the weather and the neighbours” and he “never dance[s] or enjoy[s] himself” and she feels as if he has “[deprived] her of his companionship”. Ann’s relationship with John is silent; they rarely talk much and comparatively when Ann is spending time with Steven, they have things to talk about as well as do things such as dance. Ann and John’s relationship, much like the “surrounding snow and silence”, …show more content…

The setting in this instance is a metaphor for Steven being a threat to Ann’s relationship with John because later as Ann looks at Steven’s “smile...there [is] a kind of warmth and sympathy”. In comparison, John is the silence and Steven is the fire; the fire is crackling at the silence of the room. As Ann was waiting for Steven to arrive, she began to get more lonely and her emotions became more melancholic and just like the storm, her feelings “tossed for a moment angrily, and then subsided again as if whipped down to obedience and restraint” but as she waited for Steven to arrive her feelings once more gathered around her “already [in their] press and whimpering there strummed a boding of eventual fury...[but] she had not felt the storm yet”. When Steven arrived though, she felt “a sudden sense of lull and safety” when he embraced her and “gradually the storm began to spend itself”. Ann and Steven hang blankets over the door and Ann notices some smudged paint of the door and thought that she “smeared the blankets coming through”. This is a metaphor for when she commits adultery. She spends the day trying to paint the door, to try and fix her relationship with John but then when Steven comes over, she cheats on John with him and thereby smudges her innocence and

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