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to attach itself to the Room, and not necessarily to René or Hester.
    In another sense, their marriage, descending as it does into depression, suspicion, and mutual accusation, is a microcosm of the global conflict raging outside the walls of their cell. The Hardings’ confinement is, the novel suggests, a phenomenon that ranges over the whole continent “like the Chinese toy of box within box within box. And these boxes were all of a piece, all cut out of the same stuff. They were part of the same organism, this new North American organism. Their cells would have the same response to a given stimulus” ( Self Condemned , 226). Hotel Blundell can be hived off from these containers as a “microcosm” of the world outside ( Self Condemned , 227) — a “highly unstable box” that contains and is contained by psychosis. The hotel is a site of constant violence; they overhear brutal domestic abuse, a beloved worker in the hotel, Affie, is murdered, and René himself is slugged in a tavern. This cramped space at first permits René to give vent to an increasingly misogynistic attitude to his wife. He casts himself in the role of mind, and she in the role of body; his frankly ugly fantasies that her only worth is as a sexual object slowly recedes to yield a new insight — “In the other world, Hester, I treated you as you did not at all deserve. I cut a poor figure as I look back at myself ” ( Self Condemned , 281).
    On the surface, René’s acknowledgment of his former brutality seems admirable, even romantic, as he concedes that “This tête-à-tête of ours over three years has made us as one person.... It is only when years of misery have caused you to grow into another person in this way that you can really know them.... I am talking to myself and we are one” ( Self Condemned , 281). But this rather banal declaration of love and vulnerability has a sinister undertone. The oneness he feels is simply another version of the egoism that drove them from England in the first place. As he begins the slow process of resuscitating his intellectual career, René’s smug sense of superiority revives along with it. In effect, their relationship is a tragic allegory of the global catastrophe from which they seek refuge. The disaster ends in marking the hotel itself; one blazingly cold winter night it goes up in flames, and in the aftermath of fighting the flames, the building is encased in a hollow shell of thick ice.

    The Tudor Hotel, the real-life Hotel Blundell, in Toronto after the fire on February 15, 1943.
    Increasingly frustrated by her isolation, Hester argues with René about the possibility of returning to England. He flatly refuses, obsessing over the self-imposed notion that “it was Momaco or nothing, and he began to know this hysterically, fanatically, almost insanely. For he knew quite well that it was a fearful thing to know” ( Self Condemned , 361). His career, he now believes, is absolutely tied to North America, and that any other choice — namely, Hester’s choice, London — would be death. Work, his latest muse, takes her place. And with traumatic consequences. René’s abandonment leads to Hester’s suicide: she throws herself under a truck, severing her head and legs from her body. In a brilliantly written, gruesome scene of identification, René encounters the gaze of death:
    Topmost was the bloodstained head of Hester, lying on its side. The poor hair was full of mud, which flattened it upon the skull. Her Eye protruded: it was strange it should have the strength to go on peering in the darkness. René took a step forward towards the exhibit, but he fell headlong, striking his forehead upon the edge of the marble slab.... As he fell it had been his object to seize the head and carry it away with him. [ Self Condemned , 425]
    How does one confront a scene like this? Hester continues to peer without seeing into the darkness. She looks at him, but she neither sees nor recognizes him. Just as