The Way Up To Heaven

Content Warning: This section of the guide contains descriptions and references to abuse and coercive control, accident, and death.

Mrs. Foster is the protagonist of the story. Her thoughts and feelings are the only ones that the narrator presents as known. It is through Mrs. Foster that the main thrust of the story’s action and ethical questioning is enacted. Her role in the story is to exemplify the potential roles and dilemmas of a woman in an unhappy marriage, especially one whose husband is cruel and coercive.

The story’s focus on Mrs. Foster’s inner life creates a sense of intimacy and allegiance between her, the narrator, and the reader. The narrator’s descriptions of her character enable the story to portray her as an inherently good woman, especially one who is exceptionally patient in the face of her husband’s constant provocation. She is “loyal and obedient,” “modest,” and “good and loving” (47). The story also emphasizes Mrs. Foster’s virtue in that her “only” weakness is an “almost pathological” fear of being late: Even her potential fault is aligned with politeness and punctuality (47). Though she is an obedient, dutiful wife who has “served” her husband well, he uses her one “foible”—fear of lateness—to “torture” her (47). A model of wifely self-negation, she tries to repress her feelings, though they habitually escape in the form of an eye twitch.

Mrs. Foster’s character development is gradual through the story and is a tale of awakening personal agency and self-determination. At first, the narrator shows her acceptance of a marriage where her husband’s abuse has been normalized: “[S]he had for years refused to let herself believe that Mr. Foster would torment her” (48), with only a slight glimmer of the self-assertion that “recently she […] caught herself beginning to wonder” (48). Even in her own mind, Mrs. Foster holds herself to her husband’s controlling standards of obedience, as she has “refused to let” herself and “caught” herself in the act of these suspicions. When, that night, Mrs. Foster realizes that her husband is toying with her and will likely cause her to miss her flight, she experiences a sort of vertigo or out-of-body experience where he seems “far off” beyond a “borderline” (53). Here the story expresses Mrs. Foster’s shock and disorientation as she begins to differentiate her needs from her husband’s. Her character becomes increasingly assertive from this point.

Although Mrs. Foster again waits for Mr. Foster the next morning, she this time expresses some frustration and, when he insists on looking for the comb, she openly protests. On finding the hidden present in the car, her manner changes again: She goes to fetch him, something that at the beginning she would “never dare” to do. The point where she waits and listens at the door is a turning point in the portrayal of her character. From this point on, she is calm and decisive, a deliberate juxtaposition to her earlier anxiety. The story thus shows that Mrs. Foster’s anxiety and timidity were the result of her husband’s cruelty, manipulation, and bad temper. This change in behavior highlights her increased happiness without him and asserts her individual rights. Her evident competence without her husband proves her to be a sensible and intelligent woman, revealing the signs of his masculine assistance—escorting her to the airport, ordering the car—to be acts of control, not help.

From the point of the key in the door, Mrs. Foster’s internal life becomes much opaquer to the narrator. The narrator described Mrs. Foster’s innermost thoughts and feelings at the beginning but now observes her outwardly only. This way, Dahl creates mystery around Mrs. Foster’s possible act of omission and makes the story enact her increasing autonomy as a person.