Letters Symbol Analysis

Isabella’s letters represent the futility of truly trying to know another person. Although both observation and imagination might be able to provide some clues into another person’s life, these tools cannot ultimately provide access into anyone’s innermost ideas or thoughts. The letters are delivered partway through the story by the postman, and initially the narrator cannot tell what they are just by looking at them. In the looking-glass, they appear to be more like “marble tablets” than letters. The narrator struggles to relate them to “any human purpose,” confusion that casts further doubt on the looking-glass’s ability to accurately reflect reality, showing how observation does not necessarily lead to truth. Upon finally realizing the object in the reflection is a stack of letters, the narrator decides that if one could only read these letters’ contents, everything about Isabella (and even life itself) would be revealed. But instead of opening the letters, the narrator simply imagines Isabella reading, picturing her taking the letters “one by one” and sighing as she pores over them “carefully word by word.” Yet—showing how imagination, like observation, is a flawed tool—this imagined scene could not ultimately be further from reality: when Isabella does come inside, she does not even open the letters at all. When Isabella does not open the letters immediately, the narrator decides that this correspondence is not letters as all, but rather bills. However, there’s not enough evidence for this claim to have credibility—there are many reasons that Isabella might not open an envelope, so the narrator’s inference that the letters are bills is tenuous. Given the narrator’s wildly different interpretations of what is inside the letters’ enclosed envelopes at different points in the story, the letters represent Isabella’s ultimate mysteriousness and the fact that she is unknowable, as much as the narrator tries to both observe Isabella and imagine deeper truths about her. Just as the truth about the letters’ contents cannot be known, the truth about Isabella cannot be known, either. And the fact that the letters are never opened adds to this sense of mystery, supporting the idea that neither observation nor imagination can ultimately tell readers anything about who Isabella truly is.