23 pages • 46 minutes read
William Dean HowellsEditha
Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1906A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
The Portrait
The portrait created of Editha at the conclusion of the story represents how Editha will forever live in the ideal. The artist’s capturing “Editha’s beauty, which lent itself wonderfully to the effects of a colorist” (11), suggests she is creating an idealized version of Editha, using “effects” to enhance her subject. This artist also dispels Editha’s “shame and self-pity” (11), from which she has suffered ever since being chastised by Mrs. Gearson over her romanticizing of war, by telling her she does not understand how anyone can criticize the war and that Mrs. Gearson is “vulgar” for having treated Editha so. Just as Editha, at these words, “began to live again in he ideal” (11), her portrait is a perfect frozen moment that depicts a romanticized Editha, who will never change despite the passage of time. It illustrates that Editha’s reverence of the ideal will never change.
Editha’s Letter to George
After George tells Editha he will consider enlisting, Editha gathers all the letters and gifts she has received from George and places her engagement ring in the center. Then, she writes a letter in which she tells him she cannot marry him until she is sure he “love[s] his country first of all” and that “[t]here is no honor above America with [her]” (4). She is pleased with her letter, thinking that “all had been implied and nothing expressed” (4). This letter demonstrates the ideal standards to which people are held.
In this letter, Editha links patriotism to obedience, and masculinity to patriotism. By hoping to merely suggest her desires, she also shows that femininity depends on passivity. Although she hopes to leave George “free, free, free” (5) to decide whether to enlist, Mrs. Gearson later tells her the letter did not leave him free at all. Editha’s letter represents the confines of standards, how they restrict us and ultimately how they endanger us. It also represents the exploitation of soldiers, who are enticed into war with romanticized sentiments so that they can bring glory to others.
The Empty Sleeve
George tells Editha that his father lost an arm in the Civil War and that as a result, his mother is against all war. When George enlists, Edith reflects that if George returns “with an empty sleeve, then he should have three arms instead of two, for both of hers should be his for life” (8). This sentiment is made shallow by her inability to understand “why she should always be thinking of the arm his father had lost” (8). The empty sleeve represents an empty ideal of glory and how Editha, as well as the newspapers, romanticizes war and soldiers while showing no concern for the actual soldiers who fight.
Later, Mrs. Gearson tells Editha that girls never think their men won’t return and that if they come back with “an empty sleeve, or even an empty pantaloon, it’s all the more glory, and they’re so much the prouder of them, poor things” (10). Mrs. Gearson, who has seen the grim realities of war and does not, like Editha, live in the ideal, chastises Editha for her hypocrisy, for exploiting George in order to bring glory to herself, and for failing to consider what losing an arm in war truly means.
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By William Dean Howells
