31 pages • 1 hour read
Nathaniel HawthorneThe Wives of the Dead
Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1832A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Literary Devices
Imagery
In “The Wives of the Dead,” the author creates a morbid mood by using visually descriptive language, or imagery. The story begins at twilight, a time of descending darkness, as the two widows fall deeper into their agony of loneliness. The evening settles in with fog and rain, as if the world were smothering the sisters’ home with sorrow. Outside, the visitor’s red lantern glows, “melting its light in the neighboring puddles, while a deluge of darkness overwhelmed every other object” (12).
Later, Mary hears a knock, goes to the same window, and looks out. The skies have parted, and the moon “shone upon broken clouds above, and below upon houses black with moisture, and upon little lakes of the fallen rain, curling into silver beneath the quick enchantment of a breeze” (18). The moonlight suggests a new hopefulness to accompany the good news brought by Stephen the sailor, but uncertainty sets in as Mary watches him leave: Her doubts “seemed stronger or weaker as he alternately entered the shade of the houses or emerged into the broad streaks of moonlight” (21).
Parallelism
The story is structured so that each widow has a nearly identical experience. Each belongs to a common family, and each suffers the loss of her husband at nearly the same time. Margaret, and later Mary, each answer a knock at the door with a lantern at the opened upstairs window. Each finds a man outside and is irritated with the interloper. Both, though, are mollified to hear good news about their husbands. Both watch briefly as the messengers walk away through the gloom, and both decide not to tell their housemate. This near-perfect parallelism suggests that many or most of the events are synthetic, perhaps dreamed in part by each woman, or possibly dreamed entirely by only one of them.
Surrealism
The story contains hints that part or all of the happenings might be mere dream fantasies of one or both sisters, who have suffered so terrible a tragedy that wish fulfillment may predominate in their minds.
After he delivers his good news to Margaret that her husband is still alive, Goodman Parker walks off into the night, and “his lantern gleamed along the street, bringing to view indistinct shapes of things, and the fragments of a world, like order glimmering through chaos, or memory roaming over the past” (14). These images bring to mind the shifting, sliding world of dreams.
Mary, too, hears good news at the window from her old suitor, Stephen. Stephen departs “while Mary watched him with a doubt of waking reality, that seemed stronger or weaker as he alternately entered the shade of the houses, or emerged into the broad streaks of moonlight” (21). This description coincides with that of Margaret’s view of Goodman Parker, in that both experiences are tinged with doubt—a doubt that would arise naturally in the mind of someone who has suffered a tragedy but is suddenly told the tragedy has been avoided, yet also a doubt about whether the good news is real or imagined.
Related Titles
By Nathaniel Hawthorne
