Cy Maitland Character Analysis

Cy Maitland is an American leucotomy surgeon who has an affair with Ella in the yellow notebook. He is energetic and boyish, attractive and proudly uncultured; Ella meets him on their rickety flight from Paris, and they sleep together a handful of times during his stay in London. Cy is sexually inept and unsatisfying, but impressed by Ella’s experience and emotional depth, which leads him to wonder what it would be like to marry “someone like you” instead of his wife. He disapproves of Ella’s communism, affairs, and independence, but feels that he learned from their time together. The tension between Cy’s professional success and juvenile personality reflects the pattern of men’s emotional and interpersonal underdevelopment in this book.