19 pages • 38 minutes read
Anthony HechtLot's Wife
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 2001A 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 Senses
The five senses occur throughout the poem, making them motifs, while their presence in the poem as a whole symbolizes how humankind makes sense of the larger world. Actions that occur through smell, taste, touch, sight, and hearing send critical information to the brain. This process allows humans to orient themselves and navigate their surroundings.
Two additional senses, balance and spatial awareness, aren’t explicitly present in “Lot’s Wife,” but the case can be made for their implicit inclusion. When the rain in the poem renders the world “a steel engraving” (Line 8), the speaker further describes the rainy view as “soft fadings and faint distances” (Line 9). The changing landscape, and the speaker’s perception of the landscape’s details, suggests spatial awareness on the speaker’s part. Balance appears symbolically in the act of looking back, where indulging memories and looking back become a symbolic balancing act between the past and present.
Rain
The speaker calls rain a “graphite veil” (Line 7). This graphite turns the world into “a steel engraving” (Line 8), which suggests that the heavy rainfall captures the world—at least in this moment—like one takes a photograph or engraves a picture as a physical token of recollection. Steel engraving became popular in the 1800s, and steel quickly replaced copper as the preferred method for engraving plates. Steel lengthened the use of the plate and allowed engravers to add finer details. Steel engravings can appear silvery, as opposed to warmer, softer copper engravings. Hecht’s poem provides various memories in vivid detail, such as the graphite rain, comparing scenes to the beauty and artistry of a finely detailed engraving.
Proust
Marcel Proust was a French writer and critic who is most known for his lengthy seven-volume work In Search of Lost Time, published between 1913-1927. The first volume, Swann’s Way, describes the now famous scene in which the narrator dips a madeleine in tea. When he drinks the tea, it triggers childhood memories. The narrator describes the feeling of drinking the tea with the soggy madeleine crumbs as an “exquisite pleasure,” a description found in Hecht’s poem in Lines 1-2: “How simple the pleasures of those childhood days / Simple but filled with exquisite satisfactions” (emphasis added). When the narrator drinks the tea, he feels more than mortal. He taps into something greater than himself and realizes the source of this profound shift is within him and not in the tea. This connection implies that perhaps Lot’s wife, when recalling childhood and when looking back, felt something greater than her mortality. Perhaps she tapped into something greater than herself without God’s help and despite his immediate punishment for her so-called sin. Perhaps she realized that the source or spark of what can be called divinity was in her and not in an external source.
In a different scene, Swann brings an engraving to show his beloved Odette. While showing her the engraving, he views Odette as a work of art herself. He marvels at her artistic details, likening her visage to that of a Florentine master’s artwork. His fascination with these “postage-stamp details” (Line 15) appears in Hecht’s poem in the literal words “postage-stamps details” (Line 15), and in the scene where the rain turns the speaker’s view into a steel engraving.
Lot’s Wife
The Book of Genesis in the Old Testament situates Lot’s wife in a broader story about Christian faith. Believers should be faithful to God and His commands, and Lot’s wife’s rebellious nature symbolizes the punishment that waits for disobeying God. The Gospel of Luke in the New Testament references Lot’s wife as well to further remind the faithful to heed God’s warnings. Much of the Bible’s Old Testament forms the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh), while the new covenant—The New Testament—outlines modern Christian living. The story of Lot’s wife also appears in the Quran. These canonical texts share thematic threads in the story of Lot’s wife, despite larger differences.
In many contemporary English departments, students learn about the Bible as a great work of literature. This lens—the Bible as Literature—is often divorced from specific belief systems, from what many adherents hold are practical, present-day applications on how one should live one’s life by faith and works. For those who view these religious texts as a series of life lessons, however, stories such as the one about Lot and his wife are major lessons one should never forget. Literature, too, recognizes these lessons. Literary themes, devices, and symbols all underscore the human element of what was previously a strict religious element. Through this view of literature, Lot’s wife becomes a woman who defies the role placed on her and chooses to look back—to remember—even if remembrance means death.
