Self-fulfillment

Although readers do not get many details about Marion's life, Rebecca suggests that her mother experienced the same kind of discontentment as does she. When she buys the devil postcard, Rebecca implies that Marion lived vicariously though her daughter's travels, ones that she, as a married woman during the 1950s and 1960s in the United States, could not enjoy. The suffering her mother endured causes her daughter twice to declare, “Poor Marion.”

Ironically, Rebecca experiences the same sense of meaninglessness even though she suffers none of the conventional restrictions that her mother faced. Rebecca appears to have the upper hand in her marriage when she convinces Tom that the time is right to have a baby and that Paris is the perfect setting in which to become pregnant. She also has been able to convince him to leave his home in California and relocate to the East Coast...