The Painted Door Analysis

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To feel alone, completely, and utterly alone, can be a crushing sensation. It can destroy a person from the inside out, and drive them completely mad. And if you couple that with being confined, you have a formula that can only conclude in disaster. In The Painted Door, through Ann, we see that when one feels neglected, trapped, and alone, it can drive a person to do things outside of their normal behavior. And if one gives into cravings, consequences that may not have been imagined could be brought to fruition.
We can begin to see this in Ann after John leaves and she proceeds to undertake several chores in an attempt to distract herself by “performing each little task with careful and exaggerated absorption, binding her thoughts to it, making
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She was trapped in the house. She couldn’t leave. And with no company, she was also trapped in her mind. And in her mind, Ann began to think. And in her thoughts, Ann felt trapped another time, trapped in her life. She began to see being a farmer’s wife as a life sentence, a curse to be lonely forever. And that depressed her to no end. Three times over Ann felt trapped, confined, and dammed, never to be happy, and never to be free again. She feels cursed to forever be lonely despite always having someone with her, cursed for her life to always be governed by the labor of the farm, cursed to always be striving for an unachievable goal that she does not even want to achieve. Trapped in the life of the farmer’s …show more content…
At her first she thought about spring and that gave her hope, but slowly it began to turn on her, “for spring was drudgery again.” She thought of the hard work and how it would lead to John never being there and how it would lead to a different kind of loneliness, loneliness referred to as neglect. This led her to think more about her misery on the farm, and how, despite the fact that she loved him, she blamed and resented John for her life. For her despondency. She began to think about how even when they had company outside of just each other, each visit was the same; cards and gossip. And even on the rare occasion they did go out, John did not participate in any events; rather he just stood off to the side. He never talked; he never spent time with her, and he never listened to her. She began to resent John. And that began to be the center of her madness. But funnily enough it was also worry that ate away at Ann’s mind. Worry for John, who, despite all their problems, she did loved. She knew there was a bad storm coming, and eventually it did come. So she worried that John would get caught in it. She continuously tried to convince herself that he will be okay, saying that “he saw the double wheel” around the moon the previous night, and that he would take precautions and be safe, But she cannot save herself from worrying. And it chewed at her mind. Slowly, Ann’s own thoughts nearly drove her over the

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