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Chapter 6
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Anchoress, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Rules and Freedom
Authority, Compassion, and Responsibility
Purity and Contamination
Life, Death, and Hardship
The Power of Words
Summary
Analysis
At Christmastime, Maud visits Sarah and describes the Christmas feast hosted by Sir Thomas and Lady Cecilia. Later, when Louise and Anna go off to celebrate the holiday, Sir Thomas lets himself into Sarah’s parlor. He has come to apologize for his anger during their last meeting. He says he wasn’t mad at her but at Sir Geoffrey for foiling his desire to marry her. Sarah retorts that she’s content in her anchorhold. Nearly choked with emotion, Thomas alleges that Sir Geoffrey became her patron less out of piety than to put her out of Thomas’s reach so that he’d be forced to marry Cecilia. Sir Geoffrey used her, in other words, to hurt Thomas. As he leaves, Scat jumps through the window with a dead bird in her mouth.
Sarah entered the anchorhold at least in part to put herself out of the reach of Sir Thomas. But he finds ways to impose himself on her. Her bid to avoid suffering by enclosure continues to fail. In this way, the bird in Scat’s mouth metaphorically represents Sarah at this point in her journey. In entering the anchorhold, she thought that she was flying toward freedom, but she still finds herself vulnerable to fear and suffering. Thomas continues to see and treat her as his prey because his wealth and social position give him the power to ignore the rules.
Themes
For days afterwards, Sarah can’t get Sir Thomas’s words—“I wanted you, not Cecilia”—out of her head, no matter how hard she tries. Even the sewing projects she does for the church, once so soothing, fail to calm her. Things get worse several nights later when a young couple sneaks into the church to have sex. Listening to them awakens Sarah’s own desires and makes her remember how it felt when Thomas used to touch her. She recalls the day when Thomas first came to choose cloth for a coat and Pa encouragingly left him alone with Sarah.
It slowly becomes clear that Sarah’s distress over Thomas arises at least in part from the fact that she had apparently genuine feelings of physical attraction toward him in her previous life. Her negative reaction to sexuality seems to arise from two sources: a fear of pregnancy and childbirth (given her mother’s and sister’s experiences), and an agreement with the commonly held belief that female sexual desire is sinful and wrong. And the fact that Pa tried to use Thomas’s attraction to help deal with his business debts adds to her feeling of being used and debased.
Themes
Memories of Thomas fill Sarah. She seeks comfort in the Rule and confesses her impure thoughts and desires to Father Ranaulf, but he only tells her to “pray and read” when she asks how to rid herself of haunting memories. This doesn’t work. Instead, Sarah yearns more and more for the touch of another human being. To drive her thoughts away, she turns to increasingly severe forms of fasting and penance under the guidance of Agnes’s voice. Sarah grows so malnourished that she stops getting her period. She thinks she sees the crucifix bleeding over her altar.
Eventually, Sarah has an out of body experience. She has the sensation of floating up to the ceiling. She feels like a bird and sees herself swooping through the air with Swallow. But then Swallow looks at her and tells her that she must land. And then she hears Louise’s concerned voice through the parlor window. Against her wishes, this pulls Sarah back into her body. Louise says that Father Simon has ordered Sarah to eat a little milk-soaked bread. If she refuses, they will open the door so Louise can tend to her. Reluctantly, Sarah eats.
Themes
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Father Ranaulf’s next visit happens sooner than Sarah expected. She tells him that Agnes has been guiding her fast, assuming that he will be pleased by her faith. Instead, Ranaulf reminds her that he is her confessor and guide and that she must obey him. He chastises her for the “nonsense” of listening to a dead woman’s bones. The anger Sarah hears in his voice cuts her to the core. But at the same time, she relishes his complete attention, something he’s not given her before. When he leaves, Scat jumps into her lap. Sarah tentatively listens for Agnes’s voice, but only hears Anna cleaning a pot in the maids’ room.
Themes
