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Chapter 3
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Miss Lonelyhearts, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Religion and Morality in Modern Society
The Illusion of the American Dream
The Limitations of Love
Isolation and Madness
Summary
Analysis
Finding himself becoming “almost insanely sensitive” to the orderliness of things, Miss Lonelyhearts begins to feel frustrated and disgruntled. He despises the unevenness of the New York skyline, and when he touches things, they either break or roll away from him. Overwhelmed, he suddenly remembers Betty, the woman he proposed to two months ago and planned a life with—though he hasn’t spoken to her since. Nonetheless, Betty welcomes Miss Lonelyhearts when he appears at her doorstep. He forces himself to kiss her. They begin to converse, but Miss Lonelyhearts finds himself getting increasingly irritated and fidgety. Betty asks if he’s alright, which offends him. He responds that he has a “Christ complex” and is a “humanity lover.” The two tell each other they love each other, but Betty begins to cry and asks Miss Lonelyhearts to leave her alone.
While Miss Lonelyhearts’s heightened sense of stress and annoyance certainly stems from the emotional burden of knowing the extent of other people’s suffering, his overwhelm begins to manifest in odd and unexpected ways. With Betty, Miss Lonelyhearts acts in a particularly erratic manner, from neglecting to speak to her for two months after he proposed to exclaiming that he sees himself as similar to Jesus. In this way, Miss Lonelyhearts makes it evident that he doesn’t truly love Betty even though he claims that he loves both her and humanity as a whole. He also becomes less trustworthy as a character despite his empathy for other people’s suffering.
Themes
