Catholicism
Religion—and most importantly anti-Catholic bias and prejudice—plays a major role in the narrative and acts at a thematic layer stretching across the entire book. Leonora’s Catholicism excludes her from the possibility of divorce and that is a very important aspect of plot. Knowing this puts metaphorical observation like the following suitably into context:
“Continental Papists are a dirty, jovial and unscrupulous crew. But that, at least, lets them be opportunists.”
Horrible Loneliness
John, the narrator, is married to a woman with whom he’s never had sex in a marriage defined by the fact that husband and wife sleep in separate rooms. The narrator is lonely and alone and at one point gives voice the emotional emptiness of an existence he has just described as horrible in a rather unique figurative construction not likely to be found in too many other books, if any:
“No smoking-room will ever be other than peopled with incalculable simulacra amidst smoke wreaths.”
Blind Love
This entire novel stems from a metaphorical blindness. The narrator is blind to the reality of his marriage and when it explodes before his very eyes over the course of just a few days, he is paralyzed by the realization that entire years passed by without his being capable of seeing things as they were. In recalling a marriage that clearly wasn’t, he offers this recollection of what he assumed it was:
“We were, if you will, one of those tall ships with the white sails upon a blue sea, one of those things that seem the proudest and the safest of all the beautiful and safe things that God has permitted the mind of men to frame.”
Crossing the Road
The narrator recollects his falling in love with future wife Florence. The passage of time and the revelation of incident have empowered him to use metaphor as self-awareness and self-revelation:
“I was as timid as you will, but in that matter I was like a chicken that is determined to get across the road in front of an automobile. I would walk into Florence's pretty, little, old-fashioned room, take off my hat, and sit down.”
Shuttlecock
After Edward commits suicide in the wake of Nancy heading off to India, Nancy apparently “goes mad” to the point of being able to articulate little more than the word “shuttlecock.” According to the narrator, Leonora has said that Nancy has said that she felt like a badminton shuttlecock being passed back and forth between Edward and herself and then also said that Edward felt like he was a shuttlecock being passed back and forth between Leonora and Nancy. So the meaning that the narrator provides is subject to questioning at best, but the fact that she is left alone and mad as the result of being a plaything of others from a higher class does serve to underscore her ultimately limited vocabulary as a metaphor for being a plaything of British imperial tendencies.
