The Wide Window

Fiction | Novel | Middle Grade | Published in 2000

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-4

Chapters 5-8

Chapters 9-13

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Tools

Beta

Discussion Questions

Symbols & Motifs

Lake Lachrymose

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of death and death by suicide.

Lake Lachrymose functions as a symbol of the danger and anguish waiting for the Baudelaires. Early in the novel, the lake plays an important role in establishing the novel’s mock-gothic atmosphere. “Lachrymose” is an unlikely and humorous name for a body of water, but the word also implies that excessive sorrow is part of the Baudelaire children’s very environment. Lemony Snicket’s descriptions of the lake stress its darkness and depth over and over, and the lake features sites like the “Wicked Whirlpool” and the “Rancorous Rocks” (149). It is the location of Curdled Cave, which is a terrifying vision with “jagged rocks all over it like teeth in the mouth of a shark” and twisted rock formations inside that look like “moldy milk” (152). Lake Lachrymose has already been the site of tragedy: Josephine’s husband, Ike, died there. The manner of his death is in keeping with the lake’s mock-gothic nature, as Ike was, comically and improbably, killed by vicious carnivorous leeches. In Chapter 2, the Baudelaires look down at the lake from the library window and feel a foreboding that “misfortune would soon befall them” (35). This foreshadowing is repeated in the very next chapter, when the narrative hints that the lake will soon be the location of yet another tragedy: After running into Olaf in the grocery store, the children look again at Lake Lachrymose and feel a “chill of doom fall over their hearts […] as if they […] had been dropped into the middle of its depths” (53). Later, their sense of foreboding will prove accurate when they are nearly killed on the lake—and their guardian, Josephine, very likely dies there.

Josephine’s House

Josephine’s house on top of the cliff over Lake Lachrymose represents the tenuous and temporary nature of any refuge adults construct for the beleaguered Baudelaire children. When the novel opens, the Baudelaires are on their way to live with their Aunt Josephine. She and her house are meant to be a safe haven for the children—a place where they can live comfortably and be protected from Olaf’s machinations. The children’s first impression of the symbolic house is not promising, however. It is “a large pile of boxy squares, all stuck together like ice cubes” (11), and they see that it “[hangs] over the side [of the cliff]” attached only “by long metal stilts that [look] like spider legs” (12). The very design of the house is ridiculously rickety, as if it is almost meant to eventually collapse. The adult who owns the house, and who has been placed in charge of guiding and protecting the three siblings, is similarly problematic and destined for a spectacular collapse due to her own unsteady foundations. Josephine’s fears and self-centered thinking will prevent the children from finding a comfortable and secure home with her, and eventually her flaws will lead to her own death in Lake Lachrymose. Similarly, her unstable house will finally fall into the lake when a lightning strike from Hurricane Herman compromises one of its metal stilts. The Baudelaire children will be left without a home—and without shelter from Count Olaf—once again.

Hurricane Herman

Hurricane Herman, like Lake Lachrymose, is a mock-gothic symbol of the terrible and unstoppable ordeals always headed for the three Baudelaires. The hurricane’s name utilizes the alliteration that characterizes many of the text’s other mock-gothic elements, combining the amusing sing-song sound of repeated consonants with macabre locations like Lake Lachrymose and Curdled Cave. “Herman” is a comically old-fashioned name, as well. The very idea of a hurricane occurring on a lake is absurd, as Klaus points out to the cab driver in Chapter 1—and yet Hurricane Herman is a very real danger, looming over the children from the very beginning of the story. The children cajole Josephine into taking a trip into town in Chapter 2, in order to get supplies in advance of the hurricane. This illustrates the ways in which the children try to take reasonable precautions against danger and is appropriate at this stage in the story, when the Baudelaires seem fairly secure in their new home and events have not begun to spiral out of control. By Chapter 6, however, after Josephine’s apparent death by suicide, the winds of the approaching hurricane have picked up, just as the winds of ill fortune have picked up in the Baudelaires’ lives. Throughout the subsequent chapters, the hurricane arrives, creating yet another source of danger and chaos as the Baudelaires desperately attempt to escape from Olaf’s attempt to take custody of them. Finally, the hurricane breaks, toward the story’s end, and the children are left battered by the storm but intact. This mimics the way that, in Chapter 13, the children will finally defeat Olaf’s latest scheme against them and be left huddled together on the dock, battered—but intact.