Essay Questions

How does the author use a dash to make subtle implications?

Atwood turns the simple punctuation mark of the dash into a weapon throughout the narrative as a way of making points without explicitly stating them. This recurrence commences in the very first line of the story when the narrator writes of James that his wife did not accompany him to Denver because “she could not leave the children—that is what he said.” What the dash is precisely implying here is open to interpretation: either he may be lying about the reason she wanted to stay behind or he may be lying about who actually wanted her to stay behind. In the next paragraph, the same effect is achieved when the narrator writes of the reasons given by Ellen and Adelaide for their husbands staying behind, incorporating a dash to specifically set off the “that is what they said.” A third example—but not the last—is when Ellen makes her move to shift the responsibility of caring for their mother over to James. “I should think you could make her more comfortable than either of us, James—with your big house.” The slight pause indicated by the use of the dash here is fraught with implications regarding Ellen’s feelings toward her brother’s success and lifestyle.

How often does the word “duty” appear in the narrative and why is it significant?

“Duty” pops up eight times over the course of the story. It appears both in narrative description and dialogue. The unusually robust occurrence of this single word reaches its zenith when Mrs. McPherson reveals the point of its overuse: “I did my duty by them, and they did their duty by me—and would yet, no doubt. But they don’t have to. I’m tired of duty.” The very first use of the word is applied to why Ellen and Adelaide have shown up for their father’s funeral in the first place. They are there not out of any overwhelming emotional attachment to their father—or their mother—but simply because they feel the burden of fulfilling family obligations. The subtext of the entire story is one that subtly questions the conventional wisdom of familial bonds. The recurrence of the word “duty” to explain the fulfillment of being a wife or child or mother becomes a corrosively ironic subversion of the word “love.” The story suggests that many families remain tied together because of societal expectations rather than emotional bonds.

What is the significance of Mrs. McPherson’s change of attire?

Mrs. McPherson makes a dramatic entrance into the narrative by wearing her widow’s weeds: a black cloak and face covered by a black veil. After informing her children of the alterations to their father’s will and her own part in making money for herself, she moves over to a window and raises the shade. Bathing in the sunlight, she strips off the black veil, shrugs off the black cloak, and reveals that she is wearing a “well-made traveling suit.” This scene is a symbolic version of the caterpillar coming from its cocoon as a beautiful butterfly. Another metaphor would that it is a striptease, implying that her whole life up to this moment has been a performance and now that the performance has reached the end, she is ready to go offstage and actually live her life rather than merely faking it to meet the desires of others. The stage drama of this scene also suggests very strongly that her children have never actually known the real woman that was their mother. She is revealed as having much deeper layers than they ever suspected, including a very sharp rebellious streak.