38 pages • 1 hour read
The Daughter Of Time
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Richard’s Portrait
Richard’s portrait symbolizes the mystery at the heart of the novel. Grant fixates on Richard’s features and facial expression to understand the man’s character. The detective has trouble defining the image even though he’s an expert at interpreting faces.
He asks everyone who visits him what they see in Richard’s face. The answers he receives have very little to do with the man depicted. Both nurses base their opinions on the myth of Richard, the murderer. The Surgeon, Matron, and Sergeant Williams all see something related to their respective occupations.
The portrait’s meaning changes over the course of the novel as it reflects the reader’s changing perception of the subject. By the end, when the Amazon admits it’s a nice face, the reader is inclined to agree with her.
Books
In The Daughter of Time, books are a recurring motif. They represent a lack of knowledge and act as a source of disinformation. Very early on, Grant reluctantly rummages through a pile of novels. He rejects them all with a “nauseated gaze” because they contain nothing of use and can’t relieve his boredom. He thinks, “It might be a good thing […] if all the presses of the world were stopped for a generation. There ought to be a literary moratorium” (14).
His irritation isn’t limited to fiction. Each time he gets his hopes up that the next volume of history brought to his bedside will help him, he ends up feeling disappointed. Not only do these books fail to offer useful insights, they actually interfere with his search for the truth.
Even though new books pop up in every chapter, Grant is forced to rely on court documents and his knowledge of human nature to solve the mystery. Books offer no help at all.
Faces
Faces become a central motif in the novel. Though it’s “not possible to put faces into any kind of category,” Grant insists “it [is] possible to characterize individual faces” (29). Each represents a person and a personality that drives behavior. While Richard’s portrait is the most obvious example, there are many others.
Grant sorts through a folder full of portraits before he settles on Richard. He speaks at length about his ability to identify a criminal simply by studying his face. Brent’s face intrigues him because it resembles a wooly lamb, as Marta said. Richard’s face fascinates him even more because he can’t quite define the meaning of its expression.
While faces are ubiquitous in the real world, they are entirely absent in history books. The surgeon says he might have been more interested in history as a student if the books contained more portraits.
Because Grant is so dependent on faces to form an opinion of a person’s character, he finds history books useless as an aid to his investigation. He frequently complains that historians fail to recognize the face behind the events they record.
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