Beauty and Objectification Theme Analysis

In “The Moving Finger,” Mr. Grancy—and all of his close friends—are enchanted by his wife’s beauty. The narrator (one of the Grancys’ friends) continually praises Mrs. Grancy’s lovely features, and Mr. Grancy even commissions his friend Claydon to paint a portrait of her. But while the male characters’ adoration of Mrs. Grancy’s appearance is meant to compliment and honor her, their attention actually ends up objectifying her and erasing her other good qualities. Through the men’s treatment of Mrs. Grancy, the story critiques the male tendency to objectify women and value them solely for their physical appearance.

The story’s men portray Mrs. Grancy’s beauty as a positive—even virtuous—characteristic that endears her to them. The narrator first describes Mrs. Grancy as a beautiful flower or tree that Mr. Grancy planted and cultivated. Introducing her character in this way implies that Mrs. Grancy’s beauty is her most important trait, and that it’s what Mr. Grancy tries to encourage and bring out in his wife. Through her beauty, Mrs. Grancy gives the men around her “what such a woman gives by merely being.” The narrator even claims that Mrs. Grancy’s beauty has the ability to “clear[] new ground, open[] fresh vistas, reclaim[] whole areas of activity that had run to waste,” restoring the confidence and happiness that Mr. Grancy lost during his miserable first marriage and opening up new perspectives for him. In this way, Mrs. Grancy’s physical appearance is praised as something virtuous and inspirational—it’s of great value to her husband and to the Grancys’ friends (like the narrator) who spend time at their home.

Yet for all the narrator’s glorification of Mrs. Grancy’s physical attributes, the reader never finds out anything substantive about her—the male characters focus on her appearance, which overshadows her personality and intellect. While the narrator certainly intends his praise of Mrs. Grancy’s appearance to be complimentary, it’s significant that virtually every description of her is centered on her beautiful, youthful appearance. This sends the message that Mrs. Grancy’s physical beauty is the most important thing about her—and perhaps the only thing worth knowing about her. Indeed, although the men who spend time around Mrs. Grancy enjoy her presence and marvel at her beauty, this seems to come at the cost of them knowing anything deeper about her. In other words, they objectify her looks more than they genuinely appreciate who she is. The objectification of Mrs. Grancy is clearest when Mr. Grancy commissions his friend Claydon to paint Mrs. Grancy’s portrait: Claydon’s painting of Mrs. Grancy portrays her the way Mr. Grancy and Claydon see her (and the way they want others to see her), rather than showing how Mrs. Grancy sees herself or who she really is. Although the painting is intended to honor Mrs. Grancy, it’s really an objectified version of her presented through the male gaze.

Claydon takes this focus on Mrs. Grancy’s beauty to the extreme: he falls in love with his objectified vision of her rather than with the woman herself. The narrator says that “when Mrs Grancy was in the room […] Claydon, averted from the real woman, would sit as it were listening to the picture.” This image of Claydon, gazing adoringly at Mrs. Grancy’s portrait while ignoring Mrs. Grancy herself, confirms that Claydon objectifies Mrs. Grancy: he values his own artistic vision of her beauty more than he values Mrs. Grancy herself. Indeed, another one of Mr. Grancy’s friends comments that “Claydon had been saved from falling in love with Mrs Grancy only by falling in love with his picture of her.” Years later, after Mr. Grancy’s death, he leaves the portrait to Claydon in his will. Claydon proceeds to reverse the alterations that Mr. Grancy had him make to the painting over the years, restoring it back to its original youthful portrayal of Mrs. Grancy. He then hangs the painting in a room full of other beautiful objects, creating a shrine of sorts with treasures “heaped […] at the feet of the woman he loved.” Claydon tells the narrator that he “turned [his] real woman into a picture.” But the narrator (and the reader) can see that Claydon’s shrine to Mrs. Grancy is possessive rather than flattering—it’s a violation of her and Mr. Grancy’s relationship, and it’s likely not what Mrs. Grancy would have wanted to become of her portrait. Claydon’s fixation on his own vision of Mrs. Grancy’s beauty obscures who she really was, which objectifies her rather than honoring her.

As a female writer at the turn of the 20th century, it’s likely that Edith Wharton was acutely aware of male contemporaries who portrayed women as men wanted to see them—not necessarily as they actually were. “The Moving Finger,” then, perhaps reflects Wharton’s own frustrations with real women being objectified and portrayed two-dimensionally, their personalities and intellect diminished under a male gaze that only saw their physical beauty.