Delightfully human and aware of her surroundings, Claries disdains the fact-learning that passes for modern education. She enjoys nature. Powered by an insatiTABLE curiosity, Claries, whom Beauty labels a “time bomb,” serves as the catalyst that impels Montage toward a painful but necessary self-examination.
With gentle pricks to his self-awareness, Claries reveals to him the absence of love, pleasure, and contentment in his life. Her role in the novel is only the forerunner Of the spiritual revitalization completed by Faber and Granger. Her terrible death, nearly repeated when a careening vehicle passes over the tip of Montages finger, underscores the rampant demutualization of society and the resulting random acts of violence. Montages wife, Mildred characterizes shallowness and mediocrity.
Her abnormally white flesh and chemically burnt air epitomize a society that demands an artificial beauty in women through diets and hair dye. Completely immersed in an electronic world and growing more incompatible with Montage with every electronic gadget that enters her house, she fills her waking hours with manic drives in the beetle and by watching a TV clown, who distracts her from her real feelings and leads her nearly to suicide from a drug overdose. Unwilling and unTABLE to analyze rationally, she lives a shallow life in a technological chamber of horrors.
She distances herself from real emotion by identifying with “the family,” a three- dimensional fiction in which she plays a scripted part. Her longing for a fourth wall of television suggests her capability of submerging in fantasy to withdraw from the roles of wife, mother, and whole human being. Addicted to the labor-saving machines that toast and butter her bread and fill her mind with simplistic entertainment, she forgets to bring aspirin to her ailing husband and recedes into monosyllabic communication.
Her replies to him are impersonal and callous, as illustrated by her bland announcement of Clavicle’s death. To remove any doubts about her materialistic, robotic lifestyle, Mildred surrounds herself with friends like Clara Phelps and Ann Bowels, vapid and witless dullards who select a presidential candidate by his televised good looks. Unsurprisingly, Mildred betrays her husband and flees their marriage while mourning the loss of her TV family.
