The Letters Symbol Analysis

John’s letters to Mary symbolize her loss of vulnerability due to grief. While the letters contain evidence of Mary’s past vulnerability with John, who was her lover before and during World War I, they also represent the way her grief impedes her ability to trust again. John’s letters depict Mary as a vulnerable young woman, far removed from the closed-off personality that the protagonist (Mary’s nephew) knows. Remembering the summer day at Ballycastle when they first kissed, John describes Mary’s open, trusting body language. He remembers her shirt that “opened down the back,” “the clean nape of [her] neck,” and the way she lay beside him with her “hair undone.” These intimate moments soften Mary’s normal austerity, revealing parts of herself that she usually conceals. Additionally, the final letter, in which John breaks up with her to become a monk, reveals that she is capable of being hurt. In this way, the letters carry evidence of Mary’s vulnerability as a young woman.

Years later, the letters, and the bureau that holds them, come to represent Mary’s unprocessed grief and inability to trust her family. By locking the letters away in the bureau, Mary literally keeps her family members from seeing the evidence of her vulnerability. The frail rubber band that contains the letters shows that even Mary herself does not frequently revisit this vulnerability, as it’s lost its elasticity with disuse. For this reason, the bureau’s organized interior, “divided into pigeon-holes, all bulging with papers,” mirrors Mary’s emotional interior: she compartmentalizes her grief about her failed relationship into a “pigeon-hole” in her mind just as she compartmentalizes John’s letters, ignoring it rather than sorting through it. But this mental state is precarious, since her emotions, like the letters, “bulge” out of their “pigeon-holes,” ready to spill out at the slightest provocation. Thus, when the protagonist betrays her trust, he triggers Mary’s volatile emotions, causing the letters to “[spring] out in an untidy heap.” In the final scene, the protagonist’s mother burns the letters, thereby symbolically freeing Mary from her unprocessed grief in death.