The Girl in His Shadow

The frequent references to Nora’s hair reveal that its relative unruliness symbolizes her unconventional nature. The more disorderly her hair in any given moment, the more uncontrolled her behavior is by society’s standards. At the beginning of the first chapter, for example, Nora battles a “wayward curl” while she attempts to hire a discreet household servant who will turn a blind eye to her work. Nora’s difficulties on this morning revolve around her need to protect the secret of her unconventional role in Croft’s practice, and her untamed hair reflects her defiant approach to the world. Additionally, on the night that Daniel and Croft lose Emily, Nora asks Daniel what happened, “her tired curls falling against her pink cheeks” (44). It is the middle of the night, she is in her nightclothes, she and Daniel are alone, and she is asking for information that society would consider inappropriate for a lady’s ears. In this scene, Nora breaks a range of social rules, and the greater disorder of her hair reflects this fact.

When Nora conducts her experiment with pig dung, her hair is “loose and falling into her face” (183), and this much more openly messy appearance highlights the fact that Daniel now knows of her unconventional work, and she does not need to hide it. The effect is heightened immediately after Prescott’s surgery, when her face is half-covered by “loose strands” of hair that escaped confinement far “more than usual” (215). She has just performed her most unconventional action so far: executing an extremely risky surgery just above a man’s groin while using an untested anesthetic and having never before operated on a living person. Thus, the mayhem of her hair reflects how completely her behavior defies convention. Perhaps most tellingly, when Daniel and Nora share their first kiss, his hands slip into the “untidy twist of her hair” (229). As these subtler aspects of description reveal, the more Nora defies social convention, the messier her hair becomes. Nora’s refusal to restrict her actions according to social conventions is mirrored in the way her hair cannot be contained by its pins.