Bonds of Matrimony

   In Greene's The Heart of the Matter, the ball-and-chain analogy perfectly describes the marriage of Scobie and Louise. Both of them are stuck, but neither has the will or the opportunity to leave. "The danger of submarines ... made her[Louise] as much of a fixture as the handcuffs on the nail" (91). The image of chains is our first real description of their marriage, a rusty set of handcuffs that has sat, ignored, "like an old hat" (90), for many years. She cannot leave Scobie for anyone else, because she believes she “[hasn’t] got any friends—not since Tom Barlows went away” (101). She depends on him completely, but that doesn't mean she loves him. She isn’t wrong in her beliefs about her popularity, because, as she stands, she is not an easy person to get along with. She constantly patronizes strangers without realizing it, always using the wrong “intonation that alienated others” (105). She “could be the worst snob in the station” (104) when she believed she could get away with it, and because of this Scobie’s acquaintances look at him with pity and her with “malice and snobbery” (105).

Scobie, meanwhile, feels no romantic love for her. There is plenty of evidence to support the idea that Scobie and Louise did once love each other. Obviously, they married, but Scobie makes several references to “the days of anxiety and love” (96) and how “she wasn’t always like this” (105). However, after fifteen years, he no longer feels romantic love. Instead he feels an overwhelming obligation to her because he believes himself to be responsible for more than just trapping her in Africa. He created her current personality. "The experience that had come to her was the experience selected by himself… he had formed her face" (91). When he took the job, he decided by himself, for himself, and it had negative consequences for his wife. It made her into someone else, someone he could not love and did not need. Scobie is fully aware of this, and "the less he needed Louise the more conscious he became of his responsibility for her happiness" (96), but this line of thinking makes her seem like a burden, an obligation more than a person. He “never listened when his wife talked…he worked steadily to the even current of sound, but if a note of distress were struck he was aware of it at once” (100). He manages his marriage like a machine, a job. He goes about, doing his own things, always with the sound of the engine running in the background. He only turns to it when some alarm or other goes off, when it becomes a little too quiet or seems to need a quick tune-up.

Louise is not the only one changed by experience. When he reflects on the appearance of the black girl in his office, “fifteen years ago he would not have noticed her beauty…a white skin had not then reminded him of an albino. Poor Louise” (95). His experience has changed him, his wife no longer appeals to him sexually because of a change in his viewpoint, not because she has “let herself go” or anything.