Maria has such little conflict and

Maria has such little conflict and so few varied experiences that the smallest details of daily living have become the focus of her energies, and these details deaden her life. For Maria, everything demands organization and precision. She fastidiously supervises the distribution of food portions at the charity, she prides herself on her neat and tidy body, and she repeatedly divides up the minutes she will schedule for traveling and shopping for the evening at Joe’s. Maria intends for her attention to minute details to create order and clarity in her life, but such rigidity actually encourages frustration and emotional reactions that are out of proportion to the situation at hand. When she realizes that she has misplaced the plum cake, she is so furious with herself and her carelessness that she almost cries. Unlike Eveline, who feels numb to the loss of her lover and a potential new life, Maria feels acute emotions over events that are far more trivial. “Clay” demonstrates that Maria’s responses are just as restraining as Eveline’s. Maria most likely focuses intently on life’s small details in order to avoid greater pains. Joe exhibits the same behavior: He covers up his mysterious, tearful reaction to Maria’s song by asking his wife to show him where an ordinary household item is. Preoccupation with such trivial matters helps to repress the more difficult aspects of life. The reader never knows what moves Joe, nor what Maria might feel on deeper levels.



The title “Clay” draws attention to Maria’s fateful selection of clay in the Halloween game and applies that symbolism of early death to the story as a whole. Rather than implying a literal death, the clay casts Maria’s uneventful, detail-oriented life as a metaphorical early death. Clay also suggests the state of Maria and her life up to that moment. Like the paralytic Father Flynn from “The Sisters,” Maria hovers in a state between living and dying where engagement with her surroundings cannot move beyond a superficial, material level. Like Farrington in “Counterparts,” she fails to recognize the tedious routine of her days, as her repetition of the song suggests. Maria does not actively shape her experience in significant ways, but instead she allows it to shape her. The image of her face collapsing into itself in laughter implies that Maria in her blind happiness is moldable and soft, like clay. Maria chooses the prayer book after the clay, which suggests she might find escape in the cloistered life of a convent. Whether Maria escapes or not, some part of her will die. She will lose her vibrancy to the dullness of routine, or she will lose the life she knows for one that is unfamiliar.