The Lamp at Noon

Isolation is a compounding factor to all the difficulties the characters face. This isolation, in part, is physical. Each adult character is confined—or confines themselves—to separate rooms on the farm for much of the story. The baby initially stays contained within its crib, covered by a muslin tent. Up until the end, it is not possible to see the neighboring farms through the dust: “the lower of dust clouds made the farmyard seem an isolated acre, poised aloft above a sombre void” (1). In an emotional sense, the isolation is arguably even more severe. The two main characters’ minds are as battered and choked with dust as their farm, and they are unable to see each other through that their respective internal storms.

Because of their physical isolation, Paul and Ellen can only rely on each other for their physical and emotional needs. However, their ongoing conflict and intractability on the subject leads them to squander every opportunity to communicate effectively. As their emotional needs go unfulfilled, their sense of hopelessness deepens. For example, as the short story opens, Ellen is an unnamed woman waiting on the return of her husband. She is alone in the wind-battered house with their infant child. Dust permeates everything. After so much staring through the window into the storm, even knowing her husband is not coming yet, her eyes are “strained apart and rigid” (1), and she is unable to close them. She wishes to pick up and hold her child, but she fears he may contract pneumonia from the dust. She nearly runs to the stable to look for her husband, but she resists that urge as well. She “must stay quiet and wait” (1). Even before her husband arrives, Ellen is mulling over a fight they had at breakfast, anticipating his behavior before he arrives. She desperately wants Paul to comfort her, yet when he does arrive, “[t]hey looked at each other, then away” (2). Ellen strengthens her resolve, certain that she is “in the right,” and therefore, she must give no sign of capitulation. Ellen’s internal world is juxtaposed thereafter with Paul’s, and the reader learns that Paul is equally resolved to show none of his concern for Ellen’s wellbeing, as he perceives doing so would be to give ground in their argument.

The imagery throughout the short story helps to emphasize how all-consuming their fight has become. While Ellen sees things as they are, Paul is still living in his vision of the future, his plans. Their respective positions emerge in how they perceive the storm. Ellen, waiting alone in the house, observes how two winds seem to be fighting: “the wind in flight, and the wind that pursued. The one sought refuge in the eaves, whimpering, in fear; the other assailed it there, and shook the eaves apart to make it flee again” (3). Paul, even as the walls groan “as if the fingers of a giant hand were tightening to collapse them,” still focuses on the “tense and apprehensive stillness of the stable” (9). Unlike Ellen, who literally struggles to close her strained eyes at all, Paul finds “that often the actual present was but half felt, but half endured” because his plans for the future are “so vivid” (9).