In “The Moving Finger,” Mr. Grancy and Claydon are enamored with the same woman: Mr. Grancy’s wife. But although these men believe that they’re in love with Mrs. Grancy, their affections are actually based in an obsessive desire to possess and control her. Edith Wharton’s complicated portrayal of these two men suggests that although love and obsession are very different feelings, the line between the two is blurry, and people often mistake one for the other. Furthermore, the story illustrates that when someone obsessively tries to control another person, their obsession itself can end up controlling them.
Initially, it seems that Mr. and Mrs. Grancy’s relationship is genuinely loving. The unnamed narrator explains that “Mrs. Grancy’s niche was her husband’s life” and compares her to a tree that “gave [Mr. Grancy] rest and shade at its foot and the wind of dreams in its upper branches.” Mrs. Grancy is a source of support, comfort, and inspiration in Mr. Grancy’s life, and Mr. Grancy also makes Mrs. Grancy happy: she appears to light up with love and joy in her husband’s presence. All of the Grancys’ friends pick up on this as well, and they admire the couple’s relationship as something to aspire to.
But while Mr. and Mrs. Grancy seem to adore each other, Wharton plants clues throughout the story that Mr. Grancy’s feelings are rooted in obsession rather than genuine love. The Grancys are happy on the surface, and Mrs. Grancy certainly brings value to Mr. Grancy’s life, yet there’s no mention of how Mr. Grancy tangibly benefits Mrs. Grancy in return. It seems that their marriage isn’t necessarily based on love and mutual support, but on what Mr. Grancy can get out of the relationship. Indeed, although Mr. Grancy’s friends admire the couple’s seemingly happy relationship, Mr. Grancy’s affections for Mrs. Grancy seem to be rooted in obsession and possessiveness rather than genuine love or respect. After he commissions his friend Claydon to paint a portrait of Mrs. Grancy, he tells her, “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!” The Grancys’ friends view the couple’s relationship as romantic and idyllic, but Mr. Grancy actually thinks of Mrs. Grancy as his “prisoner” rather than his partner or his equal—a dynamic that’s obsessive and controlling rather than healthy and loving.
Even after Mrs. Grancy unexpectedly dies at a young age, Mr. Grancy remains obsessed with her and becomes fixated on controlling her memory. In his grief, Mr. Grancy is only able to regain his happiness when he resorts to imagining that Mrs. Grancy is still alive and “interested in what [he] was doing.” His memory of his second wife isn’t centered around anything substantive about her, like her personality, but rather how she served and validated him. Mr. Grancy even calls on Claydon to alter Mrs. Grancy’s portrait in order to make Mrs. Grancy look older, so that Mr. Grancy doesn’t have to feel alone as he ages—a prospect that terrifies him. Rather than honoring his wife’s memory, Mr. Grancy wants to control and alter it: he’s so distraught at the idea of no longer having someone to control that, in the absence of the real Mrs. Grancy, he resorts to keeping the painting of Mrs. Grancy as his “prisoner” by making her age alongside him. Again, although Mr. Grancy seems devoted to Mrs. Grancy, the root of his devotion is obsession and dependency, not genuine love.
Claydon, too, is enamored with Mrs. Grancy. But, like Mr. Grancy, Claydon doesn’t love her for who she is—he’s merely fixated on her image. This is clearest when, after Claydon paints Mrs. Grancy’s portrait, he becomes obsessed with the painting. Another friend of Mr. Grancy comments that Claydon “had been saved from falling in love with Mrs Grancy only by falling in love with his picture of her.” This suggests that, just like Mr. Grancy, Claydon is fixated on a romanticized idea of Mrs. Grancy—he’s obsessed with the image he painted of her, not genuinely in love with who she is. And, also like Mr. Grancy, Claydon’s seemingly innocent affections are revealed to be more sinister after Mrs. Grancy’s death. Claydon feels like he’s “commit[ed] murder” after fulfilling Mr. Grancy’s request to make Mrs. Grancy’s portrait look older. His opposition to Mr. Grancy’s wishes for his wife’s portrait suggest that Claydon, too, feels that he’s a gatekeeper of sorts over Mrs. Grancy’s memory—he still wants to control how others see her. After Mr. Grancy passes away and leaves the painting to Claydon, Claydon changes the portrait back to its original youthful portrayal of Mrs. Grancy and tells the narrator, “now she belongs to me.” The narrator thinks that “it was the woman [Claydon] had loved and not the picture,” yet Claydon’s possessive language again suggests that his fixation on Mrs. Grancy isn’t based in love at all, but in obsession and control.
Mr. Grancy and Claydon are both fixated on Mrs. Grancy and set on controlling her, yet their mutual obsession with possessing her is ironically what possesses them, plaguing both men and motivating virtually all of their actions in the story. Thus, story’s title, “The Moving Finger,” perhaps alludes to Mrs. Grancy’s influence: a pointing “finger” that directs Mr. Grancy and Claydon even from beyond the grave. With this, Wharton implies that possessiveness is no substitute for genuine love—and that, when one person is obsessed with controlling another, that obsession can, in turn, end up controlling them.
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Love, Obsession, and Control ThemeTracker
Love, Obsession, and Control Quotes in The Moving Finger
We had seen [Mr. Grancy] sinking under the leaden embrace of [his first wife’s] affection like a swimmer in a drowning clutch; but just as we despaired he had always come to the surface again, blinded, panting, but striking out fiercely for the shore. When at last her death released him it became a question as to how much of the man she had carried with her. Left alone, he revealed numb withered patches, like a tree from which a parasite has been stripped. But gradually he began to put out new leaves; and when he met the lady who was to become his second wife—his one real wife, as his friends reckoned—the whole man burst into flower.
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[.]’
