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Chapter 9
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Something Wicked This Way Comes, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Good vs. Evil
Age, Time, and Acceptance
Love and Happiness
Fear, the Supernatural, and the Unknown
Summary
Analysis
Shortly after midnight, Tom Fury walks down an empty street. His bag of lightning rods is nearly empty, and he is completely “at ease” as he comes across the empty shop with the block of ice inside. From the street, he can see an incredibly beautiful woman encased in the ice. She is “as fair as this morning and fresh as tomorrow’s flowers,” and her beauty takes Fury’s breath away.
Mr. Fury sees a beautiful woman where Charles saw no one, implying that Mr. Fury can be tempted by the sin of lust. As a traveling salesman—one who has sold over 100,000 lightning rods—Mr. Fury has likely not been home (where ever that is) for some time, and he is clearly lonely.
Themes
Fury remembers his childhood and the beautiful women he saw carved out of marble in Rome and painted into masterpieces hanging in the Louvre, but he has never seen a real woman this beautiful. Even though the woman’s eyes are closed, Fury knows what color they are, and he thinks about melting the ice. He enters the shop and the door closes behind him.
The fact that Mr. Fury seems to inherently know the color of the woman’s eyes suggests that he is familiar with the sin of lust, or perhaps the woman appears to him as someone vaguely recognizable. It’s suggested that he does indeed attempt to melt the ice.
Themes
