Helen’s Photograph Symbol Analysis

In Bonds, Helen’s photograph symbolizes the joy that Helen (or Mildred) finds in solitude and how Benjamin’s (or Andrew’s) innate selfishness encroaches on Helen’s joy. When Helen is young, she and her family live at a friend’s villa in Lucca, Italy. One day, Helen leaves the villa on her own to explore the nearby town. As she walks, Helen feels overcome with the joy of solitude and knows that she’ll spend the rest of her life seeking that same joy. She goes into a photography studio and has a picture taken to commemorate the moment. After Helen and Benjamin marry and Helen begins experiencing symptoms of mental illness, Benjamin goes through Helen’s notebooks and finds that photograph. He’s struck by the image and puts it in his pocket. As he leaves the room, though, he thinks better of what he’s done and returns the photo to the notebook.

The photo captures Helen’s joy in its purest form, which comes in solitude. In their marriage, Benjamin has, perhaps unintentionally, robbed Helen of that joy, as symbolized by his theft of the photo from Helen’s notebooks. Benjamin decides to put the photograph back, signaling that once he realizes what he’s done—stolen Helen’s joy—he attempts to give that joy back to Helen and atone for his role in her unhappiness. However, he later contradicts that gesture of humanity when, in a final act of irredeemable selfishness, he submits Helen to excruciatingly painful procedures that lead to her death. Andrew has a similar relationship to Mildred. While he may have genuinely loved her while she was alive, his selfishness and egotism destroy whatever remained of that love after her death. In his autobiography, he robs Mildred of her characteristic personality and happiness to burnish his image of himself as a mercurial and all-powerful financial genius. Andrew’s selfish decisions when writing his autobiography are akin to Benjamin stealing the photo from Helen’s notebook. Unlike Benjamin in that instance, though, Andrew doesn’t realize—or he realizes and doesn’t care—that he is subjugating Mildred for his own gain.