Cake Symbol Analysis

Laura Brown spends much of her day baking a cake for her husband, Dan, and this cake symbolizes Laura’s conflicting feelings about the many burdens that society obligates women to take on as wives and mothers. Laura wakes up late on the morning of her husband’s birthday, partly because she was up late the previous night reading Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs. Dalloway, but also because she generally finds household work exhausting. Although Laura fears and perhaps even resents all the responsibilities she has, she nevertheless wants to succeed at them. She and her son, Richie, make a cake together in what seems to be a moment of triumph, as Laura bonds with Richie and teaches him about baking. But Laura is ultimately unhappy with the finished cake, feeling it’s too sloppy, so she throws it out and starts a new one. Laura’s dissatisfaction with the cake represents her complicated relationship to her domestic responsibilities. Though on resents and feels somewhat stifled by them, she simultaneously wants to succeed at them and feels like a failure when her efforts don’t pay off.

Laura eventually makes a second cake that comes closer to her ideal. But the stress that the whole ordeal propels Laura to drop Richie off with a babysitter and rent hotel room for herself in order to have a couple hours of uninterrupted time to read Mrs. Dalloway by herself. Laura’s need for solitude shows the degree to which baking the cake—and the pressure of performing her duties as a wife and mother in general—exhausts Laura. Later that evening, Dan says that Laura has given him a perfect birthday, suggesting that Laura’s efforts—however fraught—have paid off. However, when he accidentally spits on her cake as he blows out the candles, it suggests that doesn’t understand or appreciate all the work she does for him. Cake, in this way, symbolizes how much of the work that women do as wives and mothers goes unseen and unappreciated.