All's Well

“‘Just because my pain is invisible,’ she pleads to the camera, ‘doesn’t mean it isn’t real.’”

This quote, from an advertisement Miranda watches, establishes the novel’s central theme of The Gendering and Invisibility of Chronic Pain. Miranda’s cynical dismissal of the “bad actress” reflects her own internalized fear that her suffering is perceived as a performance. The author uses this framing device to immediately position Miranda’s physical agony within a social context where such pain is delegitimized and must be persuasively “performed” to be acknowledged.

“She’s just not a very compelling heroine to me. She’s just … sort of pathetic, isn’t she?”

During a rehearsal mutiny, student actor Trevor critiques Helen, the protagonist of All’s Well That Ends Well. His dismissal of the fictional heroine mirrors the way Miranda is viewed by her students and colleagues. This blurs the distinction between Helen’s story and Miranda’s by suggesting that Miranda’s obsession with the play stems from her identification with a protagonist whom others dismiss as “pathetic.”

“Our remedies oft in ourselves do lie which we ascribe to heaven.”

One of the three mysterious men at The Canny Man quotes this line from Helen’s soliloquy in All’s Well That Ends Well. This literary allusion marks a pivotal moment, functioning as the direct offer of the novel’s central supernatural bargain. By invoking the play’s theme of a character taking proactive, almost magical, control of her fate, the man suggests to Miranda that a supernatural solution to her suffering lies not in external help but within her own will, initiating her turn toward a darker form of agency.