The Mark on the Wall

The mark on the wall is the story’s central motif. It is literally the impetus for the story, and takes on several valenced meanings throughout the story’s course. Primarily, it represents a phenomenological stimulus which, by virtue of the external masculine and scientific modes of her society, the narrator feels compelled to categorize. Her rebellion against this compulsion, however, and temporary escape into a distinctly feminine mode of being and knowing—that of free association as opposed to deadening and definitive categorization—nonetheless keeps the mark on the wall as its focus and progenitor. The story’s final revelation that the mark on the wall is a snail also provides both the story’s climax and its anticlimax simultaneously. The narrator’s husband’s hapless interruption demonstrates the vulgarity of society’s modes of formalizing knowledge: the utter banality of a snail on the wall almost laughably pales in comparison to the heights of sublimity and beauty that the narrator was achieving while resisting the categorization of the mark on the wall. Too, the implication that a snail is dirty, and does not belong in any house that is well-kept by a woman, fully realizes the story’s thorny, albeit subtle, indictment of patriarchy: perhaps the narrator was simply resisting the mandate of being a good housewife all along.