A hand (allegory)
“A hand” is an allegory of support. It is as clear as a day that G.H. needs someone she can rely on, someone who can comfort her in an hour of need. She is “inviting” our “presence,” for she is afraid of dying “alone.” For her, “putting her hand” into in someone else’s has always been a definition of “happiness.” During the time she is “writing and speaking,” the woman is going to have to pretend that someone is holding her “hand.” She simply needs to hold “this hand of yours.” As soon as she can do without it, she will go “alone.”
The telegraph (symbol)
“The telegraph” is a symbol of communication. The protagonist often complains that she has lost a connection to herself. She admits that everything she says is just to put off a moment when she will have “to start talking.” “The telegraph signals,” the world “bristling with antennas,” and here she is “receiving the signal.” However, she can do only “a phonetic transcription,” for she “lost” her head “three thousand years ago.” She is “blinder” than before. She shall have to raise her consciousness “of life outside to so high a point” that it would “amount to a crime” against her personal life.
Lost in the Fiery Hell (motif)
G.H. thinks that she is “lost in the Fiery Hell of a Canyon a Woman Desperately Struggles for Life.” The morning when she goes out of the dining room to the maid’s room, she has “no way of knowing” that she is step way from “discovering an empire.” Her “more primary struggle for more primary life” is about to open “with calm, voracious ferocity of desert animals.” G.H. is getting ready to leave that doomed Canyon soon. However, nothing she is doing gives “any hint” that she is going “to begin to exist.”
