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The Singing Lesson
Themes and Colors
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Singing Lesson, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Despair and Cruelty
After her fiancé Basil leaves a cruel note ending their engagement, Miss Meadows despairs. She feels wounded and hopeless about the future, but mostly she dreads the judgment of others—people who will scorn her for being thirty and single once more. In her despair, she is cruel with her music students, who then begin to despair themselves, weeping openly in class. In this way, “The Singing Lesson” shows cruelty and despair to be interlinked—despair leads…
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Gender, Sexuality, and Social Pressure
In “The Singing Lesson,” Miss Meadows and Basil seem to be marrying not out of love, but due to social pressure. Miss Meadows is ashamed of being single at thirty, and Basil—who is implied to be gay—seems eager to appear heterosexual. Due to this era’s pressures on women to be married and its pervasive stigma against homosexuality, this pair seems willing to accept a loveless, unhappy marriage simply to avoid the cruelty and judgment of…
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Aging
After Miss Meadows’s fiancé leaves her, she sees evidence of her advancing age everywhere. While she is surrounded by young girls who appear to enjoy the autumn, she connects the cold weather and dropping leaves with her loss of youth and the diminishment of her future possibilities. The fact that she was finally engaged had protected her from the full sense of growing older, but once Basil ends their engagement, Miss Meadows must face…
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