Summary
Narrated in the past tense by an unnamed third-person limited omniscient narrator, “The Painted Door” opens with a breakfast table conversation between Ann, the story’s protagonist, and her husband John. The couple live on a Canadian prairie farm and it is winter. John declares his intention to walk five miles to his father’s farm to help him with chores for the day, planning to arrive home by suppertime.
Ann, unhappy, breathes on the frosty windowpane. She says it isn’t right to leave her there when a storm’s coming in and that John himself saw the “double wheel around the moon” the night before. She says she surely must be as important as his father. He glances uneasily at Ann but reassures her that the animals have been fed and watered for the day and that he will be back by seven or eight at the latest. She breathes hard on the glass, clearing an oval shape in the frost with the heat. John repeats his reassurance. In a cold, sarcastic voice Ann asks, “What more could a woman ask for?”
John asks what the matter is and says she’s not herself that morning. She says to pay no attention, that she has been a farmer’s wife for seven years so she ought to be used to staying alone. Ann looks out the window, where the rising sun’s rays make the snow glitter, thus seeming to give off cold rather than warmth. The frozen prairie landscape is alien to life. Distant farmsteads serve only to intensify the feeling of isolation. Rather than standing as testimony to human hardihood, the farms seem futile and lost, cowering before the snow-swept earth and sun-chilled sky.
Ann turns to John. The brooding stillness in her face troubles him. He says that he doesn’t have to go today if she’s really afraid; he just wants to make sure his father is all right in case of a storm. She says she isn’t afraid and goes to start a fire. John reminds her he would never stay away: before they were married he would visit her twice a week no matter how bad the storms were.
The narrator describes John as a slow and unambitious man who is content with his farm and cattle and wife. He had once been bewildered that Ann cared for a dull-witted man like him. Now, after seven years, he feels an odd pride that she is still concerned about him being absent for a day. With John’s “trust and earnestness controlling her again,” Ann says that when he’s away she gets lonely. John says he will drop by his friend Steven’s on the way and maybe he’ll come over for a game of cards tonight. Ann glances up sharply and says stopping by Steven’s will mean walking another two miles. She then says she’ll paint the kitchen woodwork white with the paint they bought last fall. It will keep her busy. John says that she’ll feel safer knowing Steven is on his way over if a storm kicks up. John says she needs someone to talk to besides him.
Ann asks John to shave before he goes, because Steven will be shaved and she wants John to spend a little time on himself. John strokes his heavy stubble and says shaving would make the skin too tender when he has to face the wind. Ann nods and helps him dress in heavy wool garments. John says he will tell Steven to come over early, in time for supper.
From the bedroom window, Ann watches her husband walk a mile down the road. The fire goes out; a chill encroaches the house. Her movements are constrained as she gets the blaze going again. The frozen silence of the bitter fields weighs on her. She feels the silence is “lurking outside as if alive, relentlessly in wait, mile-deep between her now and John.” She stops listening to the silence and reminds herself aloud that she is going to paint to pass the time and “stave off the gathering cold and loneliness.”
Because the paint will peel off if she tries to paint the frosty walls, Ann knows she must heat the house up. She believes the heat will make her feel better too. She blocks the drafts on the windowsills and opens the wood-fire oven doors. She briskly paints the bedroom door, but suddenly she hears the silence again and grows self-conscious, as if the silence were watching her. She tells herself not to brood: all farmer’s wives have to stay alone. She reassures herself by making plans aloud, hoping to bake cakes to have after supper, and looking forward to playing cards with Steven and other young people to get her and John through the winter. She then thinks about spring with dismay, remembering images of being left alone in silence. The eagerness and hope that began the season were always undermined by the work that needed to be done, work requiring waking at half-past four and lasting until ten at night. She remembers the brute-tired stupid eyes John turns on her if she ever mentions going to town or visiting people.
The narrator comments that spring is drudgery. John never hires anyone to help him because he wanted a mortgage-free farm and then a new house and pretty clothes for Ann. Ann wonders if they shouldn’t delay the mortgage payments in order to have more time together while they still have their youth, but John is determined to work fifteen hours a day to give Ann the material objects he thinks she deserves. It doesn’t occur to him that he sacrifices his personality while working so hard. The extra work pays some of the mortgage, but the real difference is that Ann is deprived of his companionship while he becomes duller, uglier, older. What matters to him is not what his sacrifice accomplishes but the fact of the sacrifice itself—the gesture of doing something for her sake. Ann understands John’s desire to sacrifice himself to prove his devotion and fidelity. She keeps silent, only occasionally suggesting he hire someone to help.
During winter, their slack season, they sleep late and linger over meals. They read, play cards, visit neighbors. They are meant to relax and indulge but are fretful and impatient for spring. The spirit of labor compels them to feel guilt for their idleness. Ann sometimes asks herself why she sits trying to talk to a man who never talks, or who only talks of crops and weather and neighbors and cattle. Sometimes they go to dances in the schoolhouse and she dances with tired old farmers to squeaky fiddle tunes. John never dances. She once danced with Steven six or seven times in an evening and then she and John talked about it for as many months. It was easier to stay at home and stare at the bitter fields.
Analysis
The conversation between Ann and John that opens “The Painted Door” establishes the couple’s tense dynamic while simultaneously introducing the story’s major themes of fidelity, resentment, perception, and isolation. Although John believes it is reasonable for him to want to check on his aging father before the blizzard comes in, Ann perceives his desire to visit his father as an abandonment of her need for company and safety. Ann’s resentment is made clear in the line, “It isn’t right to leave me alone. Surely I’m as important as your father.” In this passage, Ann reveals that she is threatened by John’s loyalty being divided between her and his father.
Ann breathes against the window, feeling her sense of emotional isolation reflected in the frozen prairie environment, which she perceives as hostile to human life. Meanwhile, John looks upon her resentment with an ironic pride: even though she is treating him unkindly, she evidently depends on his company to stop her from being lonely. She values him enough, though he is slow and unambitious, to fight to keep him near her.
Despite the air of tension in their conversation, John reassures Ann that he will be home in time for dinner, or maybe a little later. In a line that foreshadows Ann’s eventual betrayal of John, John offers to send Steven over to keep her company and give her someone new to talk to—a decision that will precipitate her cheating. The mood softens as Ann accepts his need to see his father. She even reassures him she will be all right on her own, saying she will keep busy by painting the woodwork inside the house.
Left alone with her thoughts, Ann tries to keep herself preoccupied with painting and with stoking the fire. However, the silence of the desolate environment intrudes on her sense of peace. She has a heightened sense of her isolation, and reflects on the emotional isolation that she contends with on a daily basis living with John. His decision to leave her alone when a storm is coming in reminds her of how often he abandons her need for quality time and companionship. In this negative headspace, her resentment resurfaces and she looks upon their life together as nothing but drudgery and boredom. Although he believes he is proving his fidelity to her by working alone on the farm, John doesn’t realize that she would prefer delaying their mortgage payments so that he could have more time off work to talk with her.
However, even in the slack season when they are meant to relax he is distant, unable to talk to her about anything other than the farm. Her only means of escape from the doldrums of her life is the occasional barn dance. Attended by other local farmers, the dances often see her having to dance with old men in whom she has no interest. However, there was one night when she danced several times with Steven. This detail hints at Ann and Steven’s mutual attraction and foreshadows the coming rupture in Ann and John’s marriage.
