Summary
Sue wakes the next morning, having only slept an hour. Johnsy is awake too, and staring at the lowered window shade. In a whisper, Johnsy orders Sue to raise the shade. Sue is reluctant, but she obeys.
They are shocked to see that, in spite of the night’s beating rain and fierce gusts, a single leaf stands out against the brick wall. It is the last on the vine. Dark green near its stem, the leaf’s serrated edges are tinted yellow with decay.
Johnsy says she thought it would have surely fallen during the night; but she thinks it will have to fall today, and then she’ll die. Sue implores her to think of their friendship as a reason to live, but Johnsy doesn’t reply. The narrator comments that a soul ready to die is the most lonesome thing in the world; the more Johnsy fixates on the certainty of her death, the looser her bonds to people and the earth become.
The day goes on. At twilight, they can see the lone ivy leaf still clinging to the vine. Through the night, wind and rain beat against the windows. Johnsy orders Sue to raise the shade in the morning. The ivy leaf is still there.
While Sue stirs chicken broth over a gas stove, Johnsy stares at the leaf. She calls to Sue and says that she has been a bad girl: Johnsy thinks something made the last leaf stay to show her she has been wicked, because it is a sin to want to die. She asks for broth and milk with port wine in it. She corrects herself—first she wants a hand mirror, then some pillows to prop herself up. An hour later, she tells Sue she wants to paint the Bay of Naples someday.
The doctor returns that afternoon and says Johnsy now has a fifty-fifty chance of surviving. He says he has to see a patient downstairs. Sue learns that Behrman also has pneumonia, but because he is old and weak, his case is more acute. He will surely die, but he may be more comfortable if he goes to the hospital today.
The doctor returns the next day and says Johnsy is out of danger—they’ve won. All she needs now is nutrition and care. That afternoon, Sue goes to Johnsy’s bed and puts an arm around her. Johnsy is knitting a woolen shoulder scarf.
Sue tells Johnsy that Mr. Behrman died today in the hospital after being ill only two days. The building janitor had found him on the morning of the first day helpless with pain, and Behrman’s shoes and clothing were soaking wet and icy cold. The janitor couldn’t imagine why Behrman would have been out on such a dreadful night, then he found a still-lit lantern, a ladder, some brushes, and a paint palette with green and yellow mixed on it.
The story ends with Sue asking Johnsy to look out the window at the last ivy leaf on the wall. Sue asks Johnsy if she ever wondered why the leaf didn’t flutter or move with the wind. Sue says the leaf is Behrman’s masterpiece: he painted it on the wall the night the last leaf fell.
Analysis
Despite Sue and Johnsy’s reasonable expectation that a night of wind and rain would have stripped the last leaves from the ivy vine, in an instance of situational irony, a single leaf remains. The descriptions of the leaf’s colors—dark green near the stem and yellow-tinted at the apparently decaying edges—foreshadow the revelation that Behrman has yellow and green on his painter’s pallet.
The miraculous leaf is not enough, unfortunately, for Johnsy to release her belief in her own imminent death; she tells Sue that she will die when the leaf falls off that night. However, Johnsy’s expectations are undermined once again; the leaf remains after another stormy night.
The leaf’s persistence leads Johnsy to reformulate her superstition: she now believes that a force greater than her has left the leaf on the vine to prove a point, namely that she was being sinful in her desire to die. Regardless of how she interprets the leaf’s symbolism, the fact that Johnsy waited to live only as long as the leaf persisted means that she has lived through the worst of her illness. When Johnsy asks Sue for broth, symbolic of health, it is clear that Johnsy has renewed her commitment to living.
Similar to the request for broth, Johnsy asks for a hand mirror—suggesting that she is well enough to worry about how she looks. Within this vein, the motif of the Bay of Naples arises again, suggesting that Johnsy’s rapidly improving condition and mindset have returned her to a place where she recalls her painterly ambitions. The optimistic reversal in mood doesn’t last long. With the doctor’s return, we learn that, as a parallel to Johnsy’s recovery, Behrman has contracted pneumonia and, because of his age, is swiftly deteriorating.
The story’s thematic concerns with willpower, superstition, art, and fate come together with the ironic twist ending when Sue reveals that Behrman painted the vine leaf as his masterpiece. In order to save Johnsy’s life, Behrman exploited Johnsy’s superstitious belief that her fate was tied to the vine leaves by painting a realistic leaf on the brick wall; because her will was set on dying when the last leaf fell, he used her willpower against her, prolonging her life through well-intentioned trickery. However, her superstitious belief that the last leaf was connected to death proved accurate, although the ominous final leaf foretold Behrman’s death rather than her own.
