The Invisible Hour

When Mia returns to her own time, she retreats into The False Security of Invisibility to avoid facing the loss she’s experienced, illustrating how invisibility and isolation can be coping mechanisms for grief. She stays home and watches the world from her window, escaping into her dreams and sleep; the window is both a literal and symbolic barrier between Mia and the rest of the city, allowing her to see passersby but not engage with them. Although she hides from the world, Joel finds her and renews his threatening presence in her life, indicating that even in isolation, Mia cannot escape from her past. Mia believes that the only solution is to return to Nathaniel’s time and become his invisible lover: “Mia didn’t care if she remained at the edges of his life, in a cottage in the woods, hidden away and invisible” (205). She travels back in time, prepared to embrace invisibility for security, but Joel follows her both to Salem and then back in time. Her desire to become invisible repeatedly fails to provide the safety she believes she will achieve.

Not only does Mia’s retreat into invisibility through isolation and escape fail to protect her from Joel, but it also results in her ignorance of her pregnancy, thematically connecting Choice’s Risks and Rewards with the false security of invisibility. When Elizabeth first approaches Mia outside the house, Mia defends herself by saying that she had no choice but to come back. However, the risk of that choice is that she might derail Nathaniel’s entire life and his body of work. Mia’s insistence that choices are often so limited that there is essentially only one option is convincing to Elizabeth, but it also results in Elizabeth’s most compelling argument about the necessity of Mia’s departure: Mia’s daughter will have the same limited choices as Elizabeth. Choosing to stay in the past risks Mia’s daughter’s future, which negates the reward of invisibility’s security and the joy of Mia’s romance with Nathaniel.

Mia’s pearl necklace is an allusion to The Scarlet Letter, emphasizing The Invisible Hour’s intertextuality. Sarah gives Constance’s pearl necklace to Mia as a goodbye when she flees from Joel. Mia then gives the necklace to Elizabeth. The pearls represent an imagined freedom to Elizabeth, and as she wears them, she imagines the alternate lives she could have if she lived in another time. Hester Prynne’s daughter, who represents the ability to live outside of society’s rules, is named Pearl. The necklace therefore creates a direct connection from Elizabeth and Mia to The Scarlet Letter and to broader reflections on the value of a daughter’s freedom.

Nathaniel’s reawakening ability to write is focused on individual words, highlighting The Liberating Power of Literature. Until he goes fishing with Robert Manning, Nathaniel has lost the ability to write and has fallen out of love with words. The solitude and freedom inherent in the natural world represented by the river and the woods begin to heal Nathaniel. The sign that he is recovering from his heartbreak is his return to writing and literature. To liberate himself from the sense that he is not alive, he turns first to nature and then to language. He writes down lists of trees at the end of Chapter 7, which indicates a return to the intellectual and emotional freedom he found in reading and writing before Mia came into his life.