51 pages • 1-hour read
Tin Man
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Symbols & Motifs
Van Gogh’s “Sunflowers”
Van Gogh’s famous painting of sunflowers becomes a motif that reflects The Search for Identity and Belonging. Throughout the novel, several different characters perceive the painting as a symbol of escaping their current lives and creating a better one. This trend begins with Dora, who sees the painting as a reflection of her own desires to change her life for the better. As the narrative states, “The painting was as conspicuous as a newly installed window, but one that looked out onto a life of color and imagination, far away from the gray factory dawn and in stark contrast to the brown curtains and brown carpet, both chosen by a man to hide the dirt” (5). The imagery in this description of the painting reflects its status as a hopeful window in the dreary prison of Dora’s life. It offers a different view and enlivens her home as well, bringing color to a room in which she does not fit, designed as it was by the pragmatic, indifferent man whom she chose to marry. When Dora wants to contemplate what her life could be if she had the freedom she craves, she looks at the painting and tries to find herself in it.
In addition to Dora, both Ellis and Michael see the painting as special and view it as a means of contemplating their identity. When Ellis finally retrieves the painting from his father, years after his mother’s death, he looks at the painting and realizes, “The original was painted by one of the loneliest men on earth. But painted in a frenzy of optimism and gratitude and hope. A celebration of the transcendent power of the color yellow” (89). Van Gogh struggled with depression and loneliness throughout his life, but his burst of color in this painting reflects his hope of achieving a better life. When Ellis looks at the painting and thinks of Van Gogh’s own optimism, he draws parallels to his own situation. Like Van Gogh, he is lonely in the aftermath of Annie and Michael’s deaths, but as he begins to make changes to his life, he feels hopeful again. When he looks at the painting, he sees that hope reflected back at him and imagines a more positive vision of his future.
Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass
Within the context of the novel, Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass acts as a motif that reflects The Societal Constraints on Authentic Expression. The collection contains sexually explicit themes and content that led certain groups with an anti-gay bias to ban the volume at different times in history. However, the collection also contains poems in which men openly share their emotions and passion for each other. When Michael tells Dora that he is focusing on the poem “O Captain! My Captain!,” he draws a connection between the emotion of the piece and the entire collection’s history. He also mentions that “the book had been banned, once, on account of its sexual content” (98). Michael gravitates toward Walt Whitman because Whitman uses his poetry to show that men can be beautiful and share their emotions with each other. Just as Whitman’s work was sometimes banned, this element of social disapproval is reflected in Ellis’s own struggles to understand his true feelings for Ellis. Though Ellis loves Michael, he has been instilled with too much fear of social censure to live an authentic life with the man he loves.
Towels
The towels on the beach that Michael and Ellis visit in France are a symbol of their newfound freedom and authenticity. Away from their small hometown and the dire influence of Ellis’s father, Michael and Ellis are free to live as though they are truly a couple. Although their affection is largely expressed only behind closed doors, they find their relative lack of secrecy exhilarating, and this sentiment is captured in the contrast between their towels and those of others on the beach. As the narrative states, “We cycled straightaway into Saint-Raphaël to claim a modest space on a packed beach, our old gray towels embarrassed amidst the plethora of multicolored ones” (133). Because the imagery around them is so starkly different from where they come from, their own drab towels represent their colorless lives back in England, where they lead boring lives, steal bare moments with each other, and languish under the inability to freely exhibit their true connection to one another. The towels around them, creative and eye-catching, reflect the new life they are experimenting with in France, where they can be authentically themselves, not constrained by the pressures that Ellis’s father places on them. The scene is an example of how contrasting images can be used to draw abstract connections with the emotions and events of character’s lives.
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