59 pages • 1-hour read
What She Left Behind: A Haunting and Heartbreaking Story of 1920s Historical Fiction
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Symbols & Motifs
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of gender discrimination, mental illness, death, suicidal ideation, physical abuse, ableism, and child sexual abuse.
Water
A water motif appears throughout the novel, from Seneca Lake to ice baths, and extends into Wiseman’s figurative language. The lake plays the dual role of a holiday spot for vacationers and a method for transporting patients to Willard. This dichotomy heightens Clara’s emotional anguish, as freedom is tantalizingly close yet seemingly unreachable. It also foreshadows the role the lake will play in her own attempt to escape Willard. At the beginning of the novel, Izzy notices that “sailboats bobbed across the waves” (1). Clara, while a prisoner at Willard, also notices how a “teakwood boat cut a white line through the waves” (149). These boats anticipate the rowboat that Clara and Bruno hope will ferry then from imprisonment to freedom. However, Bruno and Lawrence die in the water, transforming the lake from a symbol of freedom to one of tragedy and loss.
When Clara is experiencing suicidal ideation after Bruno’s death, she still sees the lake as a morbid place. She thinks, “If she broke the window and squeezed through the pane, then ran as fast as she could toward the lake, she could make it into the water before anyone caught her. She could put an end to this” (280). Though Clara decides not to use the lake as a suicide method because she wants to be reunited with her daughter, her thoughts represent a dark twist on the lake’s former association with freedom; it still represents escape, but only through death.
Water also functions as a method for controlling people, developing the theme of the Institutional Control of Women’s Bodies. One of the so-called treatments at Willard is putting patients in ice water baths and keeping “them there until they [lose] consciousness” (189). It is a form of torture: a cruel experiment for those who do have a mental illness and a way to take bodily autonomy away from those who do not.
Lastly, Wiseman uses water imagery when describing Willard’s destruction and ruins. Willard floods at the end of Clara’s narrative in 1946. This keeps her from being subjected to electroshock therapy but kills many patients and staff. This water symbolism here has biblical echoes; Willard is a sinful place, and its destruction is a form of cosmic retribution, the effects of which linger decades later. When Izzy visits the wreckage of Willard, Wiseman uses a water simile: “grayish-green paint hung from the walls in ragged flaps, like crustaceans clinging to underwater wreckage” (187). The image of Willard as a submerged wreck recalls the boat imagery and the deaths in the lake, suggesting that Willard has met the same fate it inflicted on others.
Letters
There are two sets of symbolic letters in What She Left Behind: Clara’s letters to Bruno and Joyce’s letters to Izzy. Clara’s letters are not delivered, as Henry pays Willard to take them out of the mailbox. This interference represents Henry’s patriarchal control of Clara. However, when Clara leaves the Long Island Home, a nurse, overcome with guilt, gives Clara her letters and sends a new letter to Bruno, suggesting the possibility of solidarity between women. Underscoring this point, the letters end up in Clara’s suitcase, which Peg and Izzy investigate. They thus become a connection between the two narratives, emblematic of the novel’s interest in Intergenerational Trauma and Resilience.
Izzy has her own collection of unopened letters. While the “envelopes in Clara’s trunk [are] missing stamps and post office marks because they were never mailed” (81), the letters from Joyce were delivered to Izzy. However, Izzy is afraid to open them, worried they contain “the insane ramblings of a crazy woman” and will “edg[e] her down the slippery slope toward madness?” (81). Izzy’s fear of mental illness coincides with her repression of her father’s abuse. The letters symbolize this repression, as when Izzy opens them, she learns the truth: that Joyce killed Izzy’s father because he was molesting her.
Cages
Cages are a motif that develops the theme of institutional control of women’s bodies. Cages range from small “caged ceiling lights” to the “wire cages” around Willard’s fire escapes (245). The smaller cages show the pervasiveness of imprisonment: There are reminders everywhere that the patients aren’t free. The various cages that would trap patients trying to escape in an emergency show that imprisonment is more important than the patients’ lives.
Izzy and Clara also encounter cages near Willard’s morgue. There is a stone room with walls that are “lined with iron cages made of two-inch thick metal, the bars riveted together in a crisscross pattern […] Inside the cages, metal cots [are] bolted to the floor and chains and cuffs [hang] from the wall” (191). The cages are abandoned when Izzy sees them, but Clara sees patients in them. These are a method for torturing patients; they represent the institution’s power over the bodies within it.
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