Interiors, Exteriors

A Hotel Room

When reading The Comfort of Strangers, I found myself making awkward, incredulous faces and yelling out loud, "What's wrong with you?!" Everytime the novel gets creepier, our main characters relax more, avoid more. "We're on holiday" seems to be a mantra for a fatal lifestyle, and the fact that they are on vacation, away from the reminders of daily life, seems to let them slip into an idleness, a laziness that lets Colin die.

Now that I think of it, I'm really finding a strong connection between death and traveling in this class - what is it about going away that kills all these characters?

Is it the ways in which they travel? Are Mary and Colin that different from Daisy Miller and others? If so, it is obviously in their strangeness and overt sexuality. McEwan throws in some weird stuff about gender and maturity/immaturity, and the travel connection is, we see again, what allows these characters to delve into these deep psychological ponderings, and to partake in pleasures spiked with fear and pain.

Setting this location in "what may or may not be" Venice is a way for McEwan to explore the weird insides of his characters. In specific, he constructs the hotel room as vehicle to sin. That is to say, traveling renders these characters vulnerable to expressing and exploring their sloth and lust. We gasp at Robert and Caroline's sado-masochism, but aren't Colin and Mary doing the same thing? When they wake up at Robert's house, naked and confused, they're hardly concerned. Instead, they accept further food and wine, allowing themselves to be literally and metaphorically drugged. When Mary wakes up frightened from her realization about the photograph, she's speechless, and they hardly discuss it. (I'd be at the consolate immediately!) Though it seems to creep her out, she lets it go. But, she's in a hotel room, a temporary place that supplies strong feelings of impermanence, and in a way the structure itself invites her to indulge in indifference. One might even suggest that she somehow takes pleasure in her fear. Smoking pot on their balcony, the two indulge in their apathy, even in a city that has so much to exlpore and offer. "On holiday," everything is done for you: your linens are cleaned by a maid, your food prepared by others (your entire vacation hijacked by a crazed, violent couple...) The fear Colin experiences swimming out to Mary on their one day at the beach subsides immediately; it seems like he should have been angrier or more tossled by the event. If we want to think of it this way, we can explore interiors as reflections of the exterior. Not to be in bad taste, but I can't help but think of Bobst library: does its open design almost invite suicide, or at least open an easier opportunity than other buildings might? Likewise, hotel rooms inspire lust and laziness, balconies a feeling of hope and escape (that work towards keeping Caroline trapped where she is), Robert's inherited house and furniture a constant reminder of his traumatic upbringing and therefore as violent, and generally, being driven by others in boats, taxis, etc. renders you trapped and without control of your destination.

Where to conclude? Should we never travel again? Do we have to be super vigilant and hyper-aware if we want to see Venice? Honestly, I think so, unless we want to invite the kind of "comfort" McEwan gives his characters, who have some intricate psychological issues (but don't we all?). I think I'd rather pay attention to not letting my surroundings get the best of me.