Who Is Two-Faced In Ann Beattie's Janus

Andrea was a real estate agent. She was doing well in her job, but her personal life was not going well. She had a great year in selling houses. She was more successful and had more profit than she ever has. When she was in graduate school with her husband, she couldn’t afford what she wanted, but now they can buy the things that they want. Andrea’s personal life, aside from her successful job in real estate, was miserable. She had to pick her husband instead of her lover. The line in Ann Beattie’s “Janus” is related to the Roman god, Janus because of the god being two-faced, and I relate to it because, aside from being two-faced, Janus, looks in to the past and into the future. Andrea was two-faced because she kept on losing interest in her husband as time goes by, but instead she kept interest in her unnamed lover. She just has a shallow relationship with her husband. She did not let him in about her secret—her obsession with the bowl, and as they lost their interest in each other, they eventually had communication disorders. …show more content…
Janus looking in opposite directions symbolically means that he is looking into the future and into the past. Andrea holds on to her past but she wonders about her future. This is shown by choosing her husband over her lover because she chose her future, and the security of it. Meanwhile, she clings on to the past because in the last paragraph of the story, she was alone in her living room looking at her bowl, and as stated before the bowl was a reminder of her lover that she left. Andrea was two-faced because on the outside, she was happy, successful, and she “had such fine aesthetic sense and yet could also function in the real world,” but on the inside she was empty, unhappy, and unsuccessful in her own emotional matters according to