Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Moving Finger, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Love, Obsession, and Control
Beauty and Objectification
Grief and Loneliness
Summary
Analysis
Mr. Grancy dies from his illness, and the narrator is named one of the executors of his estate. He must carry out Mr. Grancy’s wishes, which means informing Claydon that Mr. Grancy left Mrs. Grancy’s portrait to him. When Claydon retrieves the painting from the Grancys’ home, the narrator feels like Mr. Grancy’s presence has vanished along with it. He wonders if Mr. Grancy has followed Mrs. Grancy, and if one ghost can haunt another.
Mr. Grancy probably left Mrs. Grancy’s portrait to Claydon because he trusted his friend to keep his own “masterpiece” safe and honor Mr. Grancy’s wishes. But, given Claydon’s obsession with Mrs. Grancy and his guilt over defacing the painting, it’s likely that he won’t keep the portrait the way Mr. Grancy left it. The narrator, meanwhile, feels like Mr. Grancy’s presence has vanished after his death, unlike the way Mrs. Grancy’s ghostly presence seemed to linger in the Grancys’ house. This implies that Mrs. Grancy’s “ghost” only haunted the house because Mr. Grancy clung to her so tightly, whereas the narrator seems to be in a more stable headspace and is able to let Mr. Grancy go.
Themes
Over the next couple of years, the narrator doesn’t hear anything more about the portrait, nor does he see much of Claydon. Even though the narrator tries to tell himself that Claydon was kind to sacrifice his masterpiece in order to appease Mr. Grancy’s wishes, he still inexplicably resents Claydon for defacing the original painting.
Even though Mr. Grancy was the one who asked Claydon to change Mrs. Grancy’s portrait, the narrator blames Claydon for ruining his own “masterpiece.” Claydon previously asserted that “the portrait was Mrs. Grancy,” and the narrator seemingly agrees. In this way, both Claydon and the narrator seem to think that the portrait represented the essence of Mrs. Grancy—and that, as the artist who captured her beauty, Claydon has some level of ownership over her.
Themes
One day, the narrator and some of his friends attend Claydon’s latest art exhibition. As the narrator wanders around the studio looking at Claydon’s art and collectibles, he notices a curtained archway leading to a smaller room. Stepping through, he sees an ornate vase and a bronze sculpture, and then he finds himself face to face with Mrs. Grancy’s portrait hanging on the wall. The painting has been restored to its original youthful portrayal of Mrs. Grancy. The narrator realizes that Claydon arranged this room as a shrine to Mrs. Grancy. Claydon had loved Mrs. Grancy the woman, not Mrs. Grancy the portrait—and this, the narrator recognizes, is why he instinctively resents Claydon.
Claydon has restored the portrait of Mrs. Grancy back to its original form, and he’s created a shrine of sorts around the painting. This disturbs the narrator, who realizes that Claydon has been in love with Mrs. Grancy all along. But, in fact, Claydon doesn’t seem to love Mrs. Grancy at all—the shrine to her comes off as obsessive and violating rather than loving or respectful. Claydon’s feelings for her are based in an obsession with her beauty, to the point that he went against Mr. Grancy’s wishes and restored Mrs. Grancy’s portrait back to the way he wanted it to look.
Themes
Just then, Claydon comes up behind the narrator and taps him on the shoulder, and the narrator asks Claydon how he could do this. Claydon retorts, “How could I not?” and reminds the narrator that the portrait belongs to him now. He says that he supposes the narrator thinks he killed Mr. Grancy, and the narrator replies that he thinks Claydon tried to do something cruel. Claydon explains that he turned his real woman into a painting. He says that Mrs. Grancy gave him the gift of her beauty, which no one but him truly understood—and in return, he produced his masterpiece.
This passage further proves that Claydon wasn’t in love with Mrs. Grancy—he was merely enamored with her beauty. Claydon is adamant that he was the only one who truly appreciated Mrs. Grancy, and that she, in turn, served as his artistic muse. But by calling Mrs. Grancy “his woman,” whom he turned into a painting and placed at the centerpiece of a shrine, Claydon portrays her as an object to be admired rather than a person to be remembered. Additionally, Claydon guesses that the narrator thinks he tried to kill Mr. Grancy by making Mrs. Grancy’s facial expression look as though she knew Mr. Grancy was going to die. This suggests that Claydon was well aware of how much Mr. Grancy relied on Mrs. Grancy’s presence for stability, and that he hoped painting Mrs. Grancy in this way would cause Mr. Grancy to give up on his recovery and succumb to his illness.
Themes
Literary Devices
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Claydon tells the narrator that Mr. Grancy was a fool to think that Mrs. Grancy belonged solely to him, especially after seeing the qualities that Claydon captured in the portrait. When Mr. Grancy had called on him to alter the painting the first time, Claydon says, he initially couldn’t bring himself to turn the eternally youthful Mrs. Grancy into an old woman. He thought that no man who truly loved a woman should sacrifice her beauty for his own sake. But because Claydon had always been fond of Mr. Grancy—and because it seemed like the image of Mrs. Grancy was telling him that she wanted to abide by Mr. Grancy’s wishes—he agreed to change the portrait.
Claydon’s comment that Mrs. Grancy didn’t only belong to her husband is another indication that he and Mrs. Grancy may have had an affair. However, he may also simply mean that Mrs. Grancy wasn’t Mr. Grancy’s “prisoner,” as Mr. Grancy thought she was. Claydon seems to think that by capturing Mrs. Grancy’s beauty in her portrait, he had some level of ownership over her. In this way, both Mr. Grancy and Claydon saw Mrs. Grancy as their possession.
Themes
Literary Devices
Claydon tells the narrator that afterward, he felt like he’d done something unforgivable, which is why he never wanted to go back to Mr. Grancy’s house. But then, when Mr. Grancy was dying, he’d sent for Claydon again and told him that he felt like he’d aged 20 years and didn’t want Mrs. Grancy to be left behind. This time, when Claydon had looked at the portrait, it seemed to him that Mrs. Grancy wanted Claydon to let Mr. Grancy know that he was dying. After all, if she’d been alive, wouldn’t she have been the first to notice Mr. Grancy’s illness?
Claydon claims that he changed Mrs. Grancy’s portrait because it’s what Mrs. Grancy would have wanted, but it seems like he actually did so for selfish reasons. In reality, he wanted Mr. Grancy to become aware of his own illness and to feel like his wife was ushering him into death, so that Claydon could take the portrait once Mrs. Grancy was gone. Claydon’s fixation on Mrs. Grancy as his “masterpiece” was so strong that he was willing to sacrifice his oldest friend to get the portrait back.
Themes
This, Claydon says, is why he agreed to alter the portrait once more, changing Mrs. Grancy’s face to reflect her premonition that Mr. Grancy was going to die. He believes that this is what Mrs. Grancy wanted: for Claydon to keep her and Mr. Grancy together until Mr. Grancy died. But now, Claydon tells the narrator, “she belongs to me.”
Again, while Claydon claims to have been fulfilling Mrs. Grancy’s wishes, it seems that he only went along with changing the painting because deteriorating Mrs. Grancy’s portrait seemed to encourage Mr. Grancy’s own deterioration. Claydon’s ultimate goal was to get the portrait back for himself—and now that he has it, he feels that Mrs. Grancy “belongs to [him].” In this way, the portrait represents Mr. Grancy and Claydon’s obsessions with Mrs. Grancy. Both men claimed to have altered the painting because it’s what Mrs. Grancy would have wanted—yet, as it turns out, doing so was really their way of leveraging ownership and control over Mrs. Grancy, even after her death.
Themes
