Astronomer’s Wife: the Plot, Symbolism and Point of View

The Astronomer’s Wife is a fictional story by Kay Boyle whose primary character is Katherine Ames. The entire story revolves around the lifestyle and experiences made by Ames as well as the way the character interacted with her husband. The plot, the setting, symbolism and a point of view on this story are the primary concern of this essay.

The plot of this story entails several events that define all the themes that the author presents to his audience. The author commenced the story by describing Ames as a character that occupies a valuable position in the society. Ames did what a reader may call “dirty” works to free people like her husband to gain time for thinking and to discover. The relationship between Ames and her husband relies on her understanding that her spouse is a man of the mind and spends most of his time studying, meditating and contemplating the heaven using his rooftop telescope. Another event that defines the plot of the story occurred when Ames led the plumber to the garden (Gale, 71). The character took the plumber to a room that was flooded, and the plumber suspected some damaged soil line. She demonstrated a lot of innocence and made every attempt that portrayed respect to her husband.

Regarding the point of this story, the narration of the tale is limited in the third-person. Boyle makes a narrative that is very close to the idea of Katherine Ames and makes a vivid description of her thoughts. It makes the center of the story after her realization that she developed a feeling on the way her husband stunted her emotional life. Moreover, Boyle wrote the story using a style that mirror’s Ames’s increasing recognition of her feelings about her husband. The narration describes Mrs. Ames’s thoughts using adjectives that reflect on the freedom she possessed in her mind (Hall, 96). However, the sentences shortened when the narrator started describing Mrs. Ames’s actions and her interaction with the plumber. The shortening of the sentences showed how the character felt constrained.

Symbolism is one of the stylistic devices used by the author to explain various ideas in the story. The author used the sewer to represent the gateway to Mrs. Ames’ transformation as a person. The sewer represents the vast differences between the astronomer and the plumber. The profession of the plumber requires him to descend to the earth while astronomer’s ideas focus on exploring the skies (Bell, 127). The story of cud is a symbol the shows the desire developed by the plumber to fix things. The plumber confronted all the problems with a lot of confidence and created a sense of trust in Mrs. Ames. It made Ames admire his quality as opposed to her husband.

The setting of this story emerged as a family based story that involved a woman (Mrs. Ames) and her husband. The whole story is located in a family, and the major concern of the author is to explain the daily life of the two characters. A garden is another set of the story that led to the inclusion of the plumber as the character of the narration. This makes Boyle be a thoughtful poet and a novelist whose ideas induce a lot of changes to the mind of many readers of the story. This makes Astronomer’s Wife be a hilarious story to read.