The portrait that Mr. Grancy’s friend Claydon paints of Mrs. Grancy symbolizes how the male gaze objectifies women and cheapens love. Mr. Grancy and his male friends value Mrs. Grancy solely for her physical appearance, and the portrait of her that Mr. Grancy commissions Claydon to paint is meant as a tribute to her beauty. However, Claydon’s painting of Mrs. Grancy portrays her as Mr. Grancy and Claydon (who both claim to be in love with Mrs. Grancy) see her—not necessarily how anyone else sees her, or how she sees herself. In this way, the painting objectifies her, in the sense that it glorifies the men’s romanticized idea of her rather than who she really is.
Furthermore, the male characters’ obsession with the painting overshadows Mrs. Grancy herself—that is, her personality and intellect. For instance, Mr. Grancy tells Mrs. Grancy that having her portrait means that she’s now his “prisoner.” That is, he feels that capturing Mrs. Grancy’s beauty is the same as capturing the woman in her entirety; there is nothing more to her than her appearance. Claydon, too, is so fixated on this image of Mrs. Grancy that, even when she’s in the room, he stares at his portrait of her rather than at Mrs. Grancy herself. The portrait thus represents how placing too much emphasis on a woman’s beauty can go beyond flattery, objectifying the woman to the point that her other qualities are unfairly overlooked.
After Mrs. Grancy’s death, Mr. Grancy has Claydon alter the portrait twice to make Mrs. Grancy’s likeness look older. He seemingly does this because he wants to keep Mrs. Grancy as a “prisoner” even after she’s gone; he’s afraid of being alone and growing old without her. In this way, the portrait represents how a relationship like the Grancys’, which seemed loving to others, can actually be rooted in one person’s desire to possess and control the other. The portrait becomes a way for Mr. Grancy to feel like he owns Mrs. Grancy, rather than a way for him to revere and honor her memory.
The Portrait Quotes in The Moving Finger
The picture was at its best in that setting; and we used to accuse Claydon of visiting Mrs Grancy in order to see her portrait. He met this by declaring that the portrait was Mrs Grancy; and there were moments when the statement seemed unanswerable. One of us, indeed—I think it must have been the novelist—said that Claydon had been saved from falling in love with Mrs Grancy only by falling in love with his picture of her; and it was noticeable that he, to whom his finished work was no more than the shed husk of future effort, showed a perennial tenderness for this one achievement.
“How I rejoiced in that picture! I used to say to [Mrs. Grancy], You’re my prisoner now—I shall never lose you. If you grew tired of me and left me you’d leave your real self there on the wall! It was always one of our jokes that she was going to grow tired of me[.]”
“For a week we two lived together—the strange woman and the strange man. I used to sit night after night and question [Mrs. Grancy’s] smiling face; but no answer ever came. What did she know of me, after all? We were irrevocably separated by the five years of life that lay between us. At times, as I sat here, I almost grew to hate her; for her presence had driven away my gentle ghost, the real wife who had wept, aged, struggled with me during those awful years…It was the worst loneliness I’ve ever known. Then, gradually, I began to notice a look of sadness in the picture’s eyes; a look that seemed to say: Don’t you see that I am lonely too?”
After that, for ten years or more, I watched the strange spectacle of a life of hopeful and productive effort based on the structure of a dream. There could be no doubt to those who saw Grancy during this period that he drew his strength and courage from the sense of his wife’s mystic participation in his task.
‘Ah,’ he said, ‘I’m an old man now and no mistake. I suppose we shall have to go halfspeed after this; but we shan’t need towing just yet!’
The plural pronoun struck me, and involuntarily I looked up at Mrs Grancy’s portrait. Line by line I saw my fear reflected in it. It was the face of a woman who knows that her husband is dying. My heart stood still at the thought of what Claydon had done.
Grancy had followed my glance. ‘Yes, it’s changed her,’ he said quietly. ‘For months, you know, it was touch and go with me—we had a long fight of it, and it was worse for her than for me.’
‘Pygmalion,’ [Claydon] began slowly, ‘turned his statue into a real woman; I turned my real woman into a picture. Small compensation, you think—but you don’t know how much of a woman belongs to you after you’ve painted her!—Well, I made the best of it, at any rate—I gave [Mrs. Grancy] the best I had in me; and she gave me in return what such a woman gives by merely being. And after all she rewarded me enough by making me paint as I shall never paint again! There was one side of her, though, that was mine alone, and that was her beauty; for no one else understood it. To Grancy even it was the mere expression of herself—what language is to thought. Even when he saw the picture he didn’t guess my secret—he was so sure she was all his! As though a man should think he owned the moon because it was reflected in the pool at his door[.]’
‘But now [Mrs. Grancy] belongs to me[.]’
The Portrait Symbol Timeline in The Moving Finger
