The Veil
The ultimate metaphorical meaning of the title is not completely revealed until nearly the end of the novel. The narrator is describing the look on the face of his detested wife at the moment that he, she and a physician sit in wait for a dying woman to finally succumb:
“…across those hard features there came something like a flash when the last hour had been breathed out, and we all felt that the dark veil had completely fallen.”
What is Life?
After a prolonged illness as a young man, the narrator is suddenly blessed or cursed with a new ability not previously possessed: he can see visions of future which come to fruition as later reality. Given enough time and enough visions, this ability allows him to construct a fairly decent portrait of a person’s entire existence. This information affords him a new existentialist perspective of the metaphorical meaning of life:
“the intermediate frivolities…suppressed egoism…struggling chaos of puerilities, meanness, vague capricious memories, and indolent make-shift thoughts, from which human words and deeds emerge like leaflets covering a fermenting heap.”
Self-Portait in Repose with Metaphor
The narrator offers a self-portrait in prose conceived in the image of himself as seen through the eyes of his wife-to-be during a vision when younger of a moment in life to come later. And if that sentence seems confusing, try the metaphor-laden self-portrait to which it refers:
“I saw myself in Bertha’s thought as she lifted her cutting grey eyes, and looked at me: a miserable ghost-seer, surrounded by phantoms in the noonday, trembling under a breeze when the leaves were still, without appetite for the common objects of human desires, but pining after the moon-beams.”
The New Maid
The hiring of a new maid by the narrator’s wife charts the course of the narrative in a new direction. Before even meeting her, he confesses to having a fear that one day a vision would reveal her to be an evil genius. Meeting her does nothing to improve his state of mind as his description of her could almost be transferred word for word to a James Bond villain:
“She was a tall, wiry, dark-eyed woman, this Mrs. Archer, with a face handsome enough to give her coarse hard nature the odious finish of bold, self-confident coquetry.”
Bertha No Longer Beguiles
The narrator has a vision of his life in the future in which his brother’s fiancé has become his wife; a wife urging him to kill himself. This can only happen as a result of a purely accidental fall from a horse which takes the brother out of the picture. The narrator pursues Bertha with all his desires intact even though he already knows how things ultimately turn out. Possessed with the soul of poet—or so he fancies—he is able to reconcile the blackness which awaits with the passion which ignites. Until they actually get married and live together as husband and wife. And then, in a moment of pure clarity, reality smacks the narrator upside the head as he and Bertha sit face to face across from each other and a:
“terrible moment of complete illumination had come to me, and I saw that the darkness had hidden no landscape from me, but only a blank prosaic wall.”
