Theme Of Love In Winter Night

The philosopher Erich Fromm once said, “Mother’s love is peace. It need not be required, it need not be deserved.” The idea that motherly love provides children with “peace” is thoroughly explore in the short story “Winter Night”, by Kay Boyle. “Winter Night” follows the story of a seven year-old girl named Felicia who lives in an apartment overlooking Central Park in New York City. Felicia's mother, who is frequently going on dates, provides Felicia with the necessities she needs to live like food and shelter but rarely spends any time with her. Because Felicia's mother is always on dates, she hires sitting parents who watch over her. One of these sitting parents provides love for Felicia by spending time with her and showing genuine

Felicia has “four school dresses” with “little buttons shaped like hearts and [a] white collar”(182) as well as the privilege to always have “milk in her glass”. (180) Despite Felicia having all of these inanimate objects to make her life more pleasurable, she is still unhappy because she is lonely and feels unloved. While Felicia is alone and waiting for her mother to return home, “...the New York apartment in which Felicia lived was filled with shadows, and [Felicia] would wait alone in the living room…”(Boyle 178) Despite Felicia living in a luxurious apartment, it is filled with shadows when her mother isn’t around. Kay Boyle uses imagery like these “shadows” to help the reader understand that when a child’s mother is not around, the child’s world is shrouded in darkness even when they are otherwise satisfied with objects like “[books] of fairy stories”(181). When the sitting parent that takes Felicia into, “[a] sphere of love and intimacy”(183) arrives at Felicia's apartment, the shadows in the apartment, “were suddenly bleached away”. All of the food and material items that Felicia has access to do nothing in order to illuminate the darkness of Felicia's world. What does illuminate the darkness, however, is the loving presence of a mother figure: Felicia's sitting parent. Because of the material object’s ineffectiveness to “suddenly

The winters were freezing cold at the anniversary girl’s concentration camp, and the few “coats of golden fur”(181) that she did have “did not keep her warm enough”. Felicia, on the other hand, get to “put her pajamas on”(181) when she gets cold but is still often unhappy proving that having one's physical needs meant does not necessarily lead to happiness. At concentration camps such as the camp that the anniversary girl was forced to stay in, people starved because they were denied adequate servings of food and “the children were the hungriest”(182) The Anniversary girl “was hungry all winter”,(182) yet her hunger seems an insignificant issue when compared to her biggest problem: a lack of a mother in her life. The anniversary girl explains to the sitting parent that, “...[the children] are not crying because they want something to eat. They are crying because their mothers have gone away.”(182) The children do not cry because they lack warmth, food, and comfortability, but rather because they have nobody to provide them with warm, motherly love. The children cry just as babies cry when they need milk from their mothers. (Ask Mr. Moffat about connection between infants, mothers, and milk.) By showing how unhappy both Felicia and the anniversary girl are in their opposite environments due to them