Who Is Maud Dixon?

“She had never liked girls with Amanda’s high confidence. They were the same girls in high school who had taken Florence under their wing for a week and paraded her around like a rescue dog before losing interest in the game. Florence knew that to them she was nothing more than a prop to be used in their performances. And if she didn’t cooperate by playing the grateful protegee, they had no use for her.”

This quote exemplifies Florence’s insecurity as well as the obvious advantages that Amanda has over Florence. Since Florence has never felt equal to people with more social currency, she deflates around them when she does not understand social cues.

“Florence had haunted the library, desperate for glimpses of lives unlike her own. She had a penchant for stories about glamourous, doomed women like Anna Karenina and Isabel Archer. Soon, however, her fascination shifted from the women in the stories to the women who wrote them. She devoured the diaries of Sylvia Plath and Virginia Woolf, who were far more glamourous and doomed than any of their characters.”

Florence’s interest in novels and the lives of authors emphasizes The Tension Between Reality and Fiction. Rather than understanding the complexities of authors such as Plath (The Bell Jar) or Woolf (To the Lighthouse), or characters like Anna Karenina and Isabel Archer (from The Portrait of a Lady), Florence conflates the authors with the nature of their characters’ lives.

“In Florida, Florence had grown used to being the most sophisticated person in the room. But in this grubby bar, she felt inadequate—stupid, really—for the first time in her life. She had been blithely walking around thinking she knew more than everyone and all of a sudden, she realized she didn’t know a thing. If you’d asked her that morning, she would have said that red roses were just about the most elegant thing she could think of. And she hadn’t realized that maligning Hemingway was even on the table.”

Florence experiences insecurity for the first time when she moves to New York City. Rather than regaining her confidence and aiming to hold onto her individuality, Florence deflates and feels too embarrassed to be herself, which invokes The Complexities of Personal Identity and Reinvention.