Knowledge and Denial Theme Analysis

On the surface, it seems as though Mrs. Ansley’s revelation at the end of the afternoon—that she had an affair with Delphin and became pregnant with Barbara as a result—upends everything Mrs. Slade believes about her marriage, her friendship with Mrs. Ansley, and herself. However, closer investigation suggests that hearing Mrs. Ansley’s version of events does not change Mrs. Slade’s fundamental understanding of her friend as a threat; rather, it strips away a fiction to which Mrs. Slade has clung for years, and confirms the troubling truths she has suspected—and suppressed—since her youth. Although she disparages Mrs. Ansley in her thoughts throughout the afternoon, Mrs. Slade admits that she has always been aware of and threatened by her friend’s subtle power. In a sudden moment of truthfulness, she tells Mrs. Ansley: “I was afraid; afraid of you, your quiet ways, your sweetness … your … well, I wanted you out of the way, that’s all.” Despite this understanding, Mrs. Slade’s powers of self-deception are powerful. She does not recognize—at least, not until Mrs. Ansley tells her explicitly—the depth and authenticity of Mrs. Ansley’s feelings for Delphin, or the ways in which their attraction to one another shaped her life.

The tension between knowledge and denial extends beyond Mrs. Slade’s understanding of her marriage and her friendship with Mrs. Ansley. Mrs. Slade admits she has a taste for drama. She misses the fast-paced life she shared with Delphin and seems unduly frustrated at the absence of scandal and adventure in the life of her daughter, Jenny, as if desiring a distraction from the sorrows and struggles of her life as a widow. Her desire for Jenny to “fall in love—with the wrong man, even” seems inextricably intertwined with the sadness and uneventfulness of her widowhood. She longs to live vicariously through her daughter so that she can avoid confronting her own loneliness and sorrow after having lost a partner. In addition to the difficult but expected death of her husband, however, is a profound tragedy that Mrs. Slade acknowledges only briefly: she refers, in her thoughts, to the “agony” of losing her son, who “died suddenly in boyhood” a number of years before the beginning of the story. Mrs. Slade observes how the grief she feels at losing her husband amplifies the grief she feels when she returns to the memory of her son: “after the father’s death, the thought of the boy had become unbearable.” In large and small ways, Mrs. Slade’s thoughts and behavior suggest that she is desperate to avoid confronting the painful realities of her life.