44 pages • 1 hour read
The Cloisters
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Symbols & Motifs
Diana
The first original tarot card Ann Stilwell discovers, the one that launches her onto a new stage in her journey, features Diana, Roman goddess of the hunt. The novel relates Diana to the Popess card, also known as the High Priestess. In tarot, this card is associated with divine wisdom, intuition, and female leadership. Its appearance and prevalence in Ann’s life symbolizes her shift toward knowledge and intuition, and her ultimate step in taking control of her own life. Later, the card becomes the key that unlocks the constructed language of the cards: “But translations without a key were impossible. The card, I realized, was that key—an image of Diana as the huntress, and the word, spelled out in the same strange way, was something we could use” (144).
Diana was the Roman equivalent of the Greek goddess Artemis. Both women were symbols of power, the natural world, and chastity. Their chastity was not enforced or embraced as a demonstration of subservience; rather, the goddesses adopted chastity as a sign of independence and agency.
Prior to discovering this, Ann had been fairly passive, working to maintain her position and allowing events to happen around her. From this point forward, she begins making choices that shape her own fate. As a leader and an unmarried, unattached woman, Diana also foreshadows Ann’s eventual solitude and sacrifice of human connection.
Material Wealth
Although the novel deals chiefly with the acquisition of knowledge, tangible, material wealth underscores events. In particular, wealth highlights the divide between Ann, Rachel, and Leo. Ann visits both Rachel and Leo’s apartments, which are presented in stark contrast:
Leo was bent over the kitchen table, scribbling in pencil. There were clothes and bits of weed and sticky specks of resin, but also a worn collection of Sam Shepard plays, a few loose-leaf essays by David Mamet on the coffee table, a scattering of Playbills with dates scrawled on their covers (121).
Leo’s apartment is chaotic, lived in, and gives the impression of being in disrepair. Rachel’s living space is the opposite:
Her room was white and tidy, bed made neatly, folded clothes on a chair. […] there were rare books too, some manuscripts, a miniature book of hours, each in a brown plastic box to protect them from the sunlight. I tried to imagine what it must be like to have so much money that I could afford to purchase the objects I studied (221).
On several occasions, Ann becomes aware of displays of wealth, such as when visiting Patrick Roland’s house, when meeting Rachel’s live-in staff, and when visiting the antique shop with Patrick and later Rachel. On each occasion, Ann’s sense of otherness and isolation is heightened. Later, she learns that Leo is much wealthier than she believed due to his thefts from the museums. However, he relies on stealing to facilitate experiences and creation, rather than to acquire material possessions. By the end of the novel, Ann sells the antique tarot cards for a sum “large enough that [she] could breathe in New Haven, knowing [she] wouldn’t need to take on extra jobs or loans to sustain [herself] as a graduate student, perhaps longer” (295). While her journey was never in pursuit of wealth, she does come into material fortune as a cumulation of her experiences.
Transportation
In the novel, transportation reflects stages of Ann’s journey. When she first begins her role at the Cloisters, her commute is chaotic and leaves her sweaty and breathless on arrival. By contrast, “Rachel, of course, emerged untroubled from an unobtrusive town car that deposited her at the top of the upper driveway, in front of the metal gate, every morning at nine” (39). Ann quickly learns of a more convenient shuttle to the museum, which parallels how she’s becoming more comfortable in her environment. Once she starts living with Rachel and building real relationships with those around her, her transportation methods mirror her upward trajectory: “It was better, arriving at The Cloisters in a town car. And I quickly forgot what it was like to worry about being jostled on the subway, coffee in hand” (167). When the two women’s fates become even more heightened and intertwined, their transport moves from a town car to a helicopter.
Ann’s father’s death embodies the novel’s most notable use of transportation. It was through driving that Ann’s life was inescapably changed forever. While this happened shortly before the novel’s events, it was not revealed until almost the end; in this way, Ann’s driving becomes a framing device for the choices that she makes along the way.
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