Honor, Decorum, and Restraint Theme Analysis

“A New England Nun” depicts people struggling with a conflict between happiness and virtue. Louisa Ellis, the story’s protagonist, is engaged to be married to Joe Dagget—but neither one of them really wants to be married to each other. They’ve been living apart for 14 years while Joe worked in Australia, and during that time, Louisa became accustomed to living alone and Joe fell in love with another woman. Nonetheless, Joe and Louisa initially remain loyal to their engagement, not because they want to be married, but because they feel that keeping their word is the honorable thing to do. This creates an odd tension: they can honor a promise that will make them both miserable or break a promise and be happy, but they insist on choosing virtue over happiness, so they stay together. 

Virtue and happiness are also in tension in Joe’s relationship with the woman he loves, Lily Dyer. While Joe and Lily have explicitly discussed their feelings for each other, they are both steadfast in their insistence that they cannot be together because they cannot disrupt Joe’s engagement to Louisa. Joe says that, morally speaking, he could never abandon the woman who waited for him for 15 years, and Lily says she could never love Joe if he broke his promise to Louisa. Because of this, they choose to forsake their love and happiness in order to behave virtuously.

Importantly, none of the characters are portrayed as silly or wrongheaded for putting virtue first, even as they’re pushing onward towards misery. Louisa is moral for putting Joe’s need for a wife before her own desire for independence, Joe is moral for putting loyalty to Louisa before his own desire for love, and Lily is moral for respecting Joe and Louisa’s commitment, even if it means forsaking her own happiness. Everyone is behaving honorably, which results in a surprise happy ending: Louisa overhears Lily and Joe talking about their situation, and she realizes that the kindest thing she can do for Joe and Lily is break up with Joe. This means that each character gets what they want in the end, but they do so without anyone behaving dishonorably or prioritizing their own needs over the needs of others. So in this way, the story suggests that virtuous behavior leads to happiness, even if it comes by a circuitous route.