At the beginning of the story, the narrator describes Susan in almost completely conventional terms—and almost completely as others see her. Susan and Matthew are well-matched, their friends believe, “[B]y virtue of their moderation, their humour, and their abstinence from painful experience, people to whom others come for advice” (2544). She has an appropriate education and a well-paying job at an advertising firm, which she willingly relinquishes in order to raise their children. She is a dutiful wife—even when Matthew engages in extramarital dalliances, she does not, and she attempts to forgive him for his transgressions—and a sensible, caring mother.

However, the story also depicts Susan, from the beginning, as a protagonist on a quest for meaning: She wonders what the point of her very existence is, and especially whether she has meaning beyond her roles as mother, wife, and member of a particular social class. She yearns for solitude, for creative retreat, and for access to privacy and her own space; these desires conflict with her prescribed domestic roles and cause irreconcilable tension in her marriage. She is haunted by a feeling of emptiness and an indefinable restlessness that she personifies as demons, lacking other language to articulate her dissatisfaction with female gender roles.