Hands: windows into the soul

Is it just me, or do heavily arthritic hands remind anyone else of ginger roots, and vice versa? No? Alright.

Well anyway, these ginger roots particularly reminded me of Mary's hands. The overlapping knobs and knolls made me think of her hands, kneading, fretting... nervous. Mary's hands are the windows into her soul--or perhaps it would be better to say her lack thereof, as in her opinion, "everything comes between what you are and what you'd like to be, and [you lose] your true self forever" (61). But what is the "everything" that causes her to become essentially nothing? It is Benjamin's "catastrophe piling wreckage upon wreckage," the passage of unproductive time. It is the agonizing hours Mary spent in lonely hotel rooms expecting a better future, but unable to change neither Tyrone's past habits nor the way society is used to regarding her husband's profession as an actor. She is helpless like the angel, and carried, too, by "storm blowing from Paradise...what we call progress," brought into a future that materializes much less satisfactorily than she would have wished. 

And somewhere along the way, her "true self" gets lost. Frozen in the form of youth, she embalms it in morphine and stores it away in a place unreachable to lucidity. Perhaps that is what her hands are searching for as they "[flutter] over the bosom of her dress, up to her throat and hair, with a distracted aimlessness" (89). They are trying to recall the contours of her youth and feeling of her "true self," of her soul. 

Although these hands wander with a mind of her own, Mary cannot bear to look at them. When she does see her hands, she first "stares...with fascinated disgust." (104). Then she denounces them as "maimed and crippled! You'd think they'd been through some horrible accident!" (104). Finally "thrusts her hands behind her back" to avoid them because "they're worse than the foghorn for reminding me-" (104). Not only are Mary's hands the instruments of her own destruction as necessary accomplices to the act of shooting up, and even an excuse for the morphine prescription, but they are also a relic of a past when her hands wove dreams of a pianist's concert hall, and an ugly reminder of the contortion of that dream, too. 

I feel bad for Mary. Hands can be such beautiful things. The things they do define their owners. How must it feel to consider your own hands traitor to yourself? This, more than anything, makes me understand Mary's retrogression over the course of the play.

-Becca