53 pages • 1-hour read
The Wife, the Maid, and the Mistress
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Symbols & Motifs
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of gender discrimination, illness, and death.
Maria’s Rosary
Maria’s rosary is a symbol of the trust and honesty between Maria and Jude. They need not always agree—as their disparate religious beliefs suggest—but they are always honest with one another, at least until it comes to Jude’s promotion. Maria doesn’t tell him that his promotion was the result of her asking the Craters for a favor, and he isn’t very forthcoming about the “strings” his job entails.
After she sees him plant evidence in the Craters’ apartment, however, the trust between them starts to erode. When Maria tries to talk to Jude about it, he becomes angry; she “stepped away, and he reached for her, imploring, but caught a fistful of blue rosary beads instead. Too eager, too desperate to make her understand, he yanked her toward him. The thin silver chain snapped in half and beads [spun] across the floor” (53). The thin chain symbolizes how fragile trust can be: It only takes one lie to damage it. The glass beads scatter in all directions, making it impossible ever to return the rosary to its original state.
Likewise, the trust between Maria and Jude can never be the same. Maria ends up keeping several secrets until her death, never revealing her involvement in Jude’s promotion or in Crater’s disappearance. Jude gets her rosary fixed, and though he asks for and is granted Maria’s forgiveness, things are different now. Jude may not realize it, but Maria knows. His honesty and their relationship is more precious to her now than ever, and she says of the rosary, “It’s even more beautiful than I remembered” (293), signifying her gratitude for their restored relationship.
Ritzi’s Wedding Ring
Ritzi’s wedding band, which she keeps hidden in an old sock, symbolizes her innocence and desire for love, despite everything that’s happened to her since coming to New York City. The ratty sock in which she hides the ring highlights the feelings she once had about Charlie and Iowa: The sock “held the one thing she couldn’t bear to part with from her old life, the one thing she had no intention of sharing. In recent months, she’d taken to sleeping with it, like a child who wouldn’t part with a filthy security blanket” (46). The comparison of Ritzi to a child highlights her innocence and vulnerability. Although Ritzi is wildly capable—more capable than any of the men in the text acknowledge—she is nevertheless exploited and abused in New York by men like Owney.
For Ritzi, the wedding band symbolizes the person she once was, the life and the love she gave up, and her desperate hopes it will still be there for her if and when she returns. She pulls out the “tarnished gold wedding band. She admired it, letting herself remember her first love and her former name and the man who once called her his wife. Ritzi slid the ring on her left hand [and she] was not prepared for the wave of regret that swept over her” (69). Her high valuing of the ring foreshadows how, at the end of the novel, she will choose to return to her old life and love instead of staying on in NYC.
The Women’s Restroom
The women’s restroom in the Morasco Theater is where Ritzi, Stella, and Maria meet after they begin making plans to provoke Owney Madden to kill Joe. This meeting, though it is initially presented as an accidental crossing of paths in the narrative, is later revealed to have been planned months in advance by the women. The bathroom proves to be a very useful spot to discuss their scheme because no man will observe them together or overhear their conversation. Thus, the women’s restroom embodies Female Solidarity as a Means of Empowerment and Survival.
At this first meeting, all three women treat each other with civility and even kindness, offering compliments, mints, and smiles to the others. Stella asks if Ritzi’s stomach is “Strong enough for what [she] need[s] to do” (109), and Ritzi confirms that it is. When Jude opens Ritzi’s letter to Stella, which Stella gives him in 1969, it reads, “After you went to Maine for the summer, Maria and I continued our monthly meetings in the restroom—just like we arranged that first night in April” (300, emphasis added), alerting readers to the fact that the first meeting was not only planned, but also followed by numerous others. They chose one of the only all-female spaces that exists for women who come from different social strata, somewhere that would not lead to questions about their relationship from onlookers. It shows how calculated and thoughtful the women can be, despite the men’s constant underestimation of their abilities.
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