The Clean House

Fiction | Play | Adult | Published in 2004

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Summary

Act Summaries & Analyses

Act I

Act II

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

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Symbols & Motifs

The House

Lane’s house is a metaphor for her life and her marriage. It is sterile, white, and clean. The house represents Lane’s and Charles’s financial and professional successes as doctors. It demonstrates Lane’s elite social status. White décor is particularly difficult to maintain, so a white house is a show of wealth. It requires either a hired cleaner or a spouse who earns enough money to allow the other spouse to keep the house full time. White must be perfectly clean, as the smallest amount of dirt is impossible to hide. Lane presents herself as impeccable as well, from her white clothing to her impossibly clean white underwear. Pure white suggests a setting that is cold and emotionless, designed to be viewed but not touched. As Matilde neglects her cleaning duties, Lane becomes anxious because the dirt of her life spreads visibly through her house.

Charles does not appear in the house or onstage until the second act. Even before his affair is revealed, Charles is absent from his marriage and Lane is alone. When Matilde and Virginia discover Ana’s underwear in the laundry, Virginia is horrified at the speculation that Charles might have brought another woman into the sanctuary that is the house he shares with his wife. But whether or not Charles has crossed that boundary, the house clearly belongs to and reflects Lane. After Lane learns about the affair, she is furious when Charles has the audacity to bring Ana into her house because the destruction of her seemingly perfect marriage is the most humiliating stain on her perfectly white house.

In the second act, Ana’s balcony appears onstage above Lane’s living room. In contrast to Lane’s cold, white house, Ana’s balcony is small and quaint, overlooking the sea. It is romantic and bohemian; it holds a living fish and juicy apples. As Lane deals with the fallout of her husband’s betrayal, the balcony of Charles and Ana’s love nest is a constant shadow hanging—in the play’s stage directions—literally over her head. The refuse of their romance (Charles’s shirt, Ana’s bitten apples, an exploding spice bottle) rain down on Lane’s head. But to grow and heal, Lane moves past her bitterness and invites Ana herself into her house, offering generosity to a woman who caused her pain. With the four women present in the final scenes, the house becomes lively, warm, and more cluttered, changing as Lane changes.

Jokes and Ritual

Beneath the character descriptions in the play’s front matter, the playwright states, “Note: Everyone in this play should be able to tell a really good joke” (7). In this play intended to display humor, however, there are not many moments explicitly designed for hilarity. Ruhl’s humor is much like the comedy in plays by Russian playwright and short-story writer Anton Chekhov: Audiences may laugh, but through their tears, at the absurdity of tragic situations. It would be possible for a director to interpret The Clean House with many drily humorous lines, or without humor in the same lines. An interpretation without humor might be bleak and torturous to watch, a story about depressed and isolated characters who grieve, die, and want things they do not have. Even delivered with humorous intent, the jokes in Ruhl’s play are not always joyful. Some are cutting and hurtful, some dark and disturbing. Some incite pain as well as laughter.

Matilde, the play’s expert on humor, recognizes that jokes are not simply innocuous or innocent fun. For instance, Lane’s humor is angry and sarcastic, arising out of her bitterness and sense of self-preservation. Virginia attempts to control her humor because she is afraid of her own laugh, but it bubbles out in dark jokes about suicide and self-deprecation. Most comedy has at least a hint of cynicism and cruelty. Jokes tend to mock the sacred and ridicule ritual. But to Matilde, jokes are sacred. They are powerful religious rituals. Laughter can purify the spirit, but a joke that’s too potent can be dangerous or even deadly. Mathilde remembers when, at the age of eight, she heard her mother tell a dirty joke to her father. Her mother refused to explain the joke to Matilde because she was too young. Jokes have the power to build intimacy in a couple, but also the power to corrupt children. Her father’s joke even had the power to kill her mother.

Although Matilde tells jokes throughout the play, she constantly protects the audience by speaking in Portuguese or whispering to another character. Ruhl asks that actors who play Matilde, however, deploy the rhythmic shape of a joke and the ritualized response of laughter in a recognizable form. Matilde’s mother, who was reportedly even funnier than her father, taught Matilde that creating a good joke requires recognizing that one’s individual problems are very small when compared to the problems of the entire world. Humor can heal and alter one’s perspective. But the perfect joke is dangerous. It evokes a transcendent experience. Matilde offers her perfect joke as a gift to Ana, performing a ritual that eases Ana into death with the joy of laughter.

Apples

Apples hold symbolic significance in many works of Western literature. In a Biblical sense, they represent the temptation of Eve in the Garden of Eden. Eating the forbidden fruit (which was not historically likely to have been envisioned as an apple, but which has become one through repeated folklore) gave Eve instantaneous knowledge of good and evil in the world, which she immediately shared with Adam. Because Charles is married and Ana (who, Charles points out, has a short and palindromic name like Eve) is his patient, their relationship is forbidden. But when explaining themselves to Lane, they describe their meeting as an instantaneous knowledge and recognition of bashert, the Yiddish word for “destiny,” which is often used to mean “soulmate.” By describing their love as a divine revelation, they link it to the Bible story in which an apple brings sudden new knowledge.

Once they have spoken to Lane, Charles and Ana’s first endeavor as an open and official couple is to go apple-picking. Apple-picking is a stereotypically whimsical and romantic activity for young people in fresh relationships, and Lane mocks them for acting like the youthful lovers in a foreign film, reminding Charles that his aging eyes won’t allow him to even watch foreign films without getting a headache from the subtitles. But with their belief that they have found their predestined soulmates, Ana and Charles insist that they have acquired new selves and renewed energy to pick apples and even to climb Machu Picchu. To Lane, Charles says, “I want to share my happiness with you” (68). Lane replies, “I don’t want your happiness” (68). Here, apples indicate a tension in their conflicting feelings and values.

After the apple-picking excursion, Ana sits with Matilde on her balcony surrounded by bags of apples. Ana comments that they have more apples than they could ever eat, just as the optimism of her new relationship with Charles makes their happiness seem limitless. At Matilde’s suggestion, she and Ana begin taking a single bite of each apple and then throwing them away into the ocean if they aren’t perfect. The apples they toss land in Lane’s living room, inadvertently and surreally flaunting Ana’s happiness. Ana and Matilde do not notice that Lane is burdened with their leftover trash. When Lane visits Ana to give her an exam, Ana finally gives her a whole apple, although Lane hesitates to take it, since Charles might have picked it and she has already refused to share his happiness. Ana brings the remaining apples when she moves in with Lane. Like the apples, Ana’s love is inexhaustible. She shares her love with the other women who, after Ana’s death, share it with the grieving Charles. Imperfect growing things from the organic outside world, the apples that follow Ana into Lane’s home also represent the human and emotional messes that Lane is learning to live with.