Frederick and Miranda both want something they can’t have--Frederick wants Miranda to love him, and Miranda wants Frederick to set her free. Miranda decides to act as though she loves Frederick by seducing him, but this plan backfires because Frederick sees through her motives--she is only trying to make him free her. Frederick realizes this while Miranda is seducing him, and he stops her, using his sexual dysfunction as an excuse. Frederick becomes very upset, realizing that Miranda will never truly love him. Miranda too becomes upset, because she realizes that no matter what she does, Frederick will never free her.

Frederick’s use of fragments and comma splicing in his sentences shows his anxiety and his chaotic state of mind. Frederick thinks, “Well, we lay for some time still and I felt she was despising me, I was a freak.” The way he connects “I was a freak” to the rest of the sentence with a comma shows that Frederick is uncomfortable with this thought; he does not want it to stand on its own. He does not want to call attention to the statement. It is only an afterthought of the self-pitying remainder of the sentence. The structure is interesting because it lays the blame of Frederick’s being a freak on Miranda’s despising him, showing how much Frederick’s self-worth is dependent on the nonexistent approval of Miranda. Frederick is very uncomfortable with Miranda in this scene, not only because of his sexual dysfunction and the realization that she will never love him, but because his ideas about her become completely inverted. Like Shakespeare, Frederick saw his Miranda as the epitome of all that is innocent and untainted. In this scene, Miranda seduces Frederick and defies all of his standards of purity and virtue that he had bestowed upon her. Miranda’s actions bewilder and offend Frederick, because he is simultaneously disgusted by and attracted to her. He chooses not to focus on her and shows his confusion by thinking about her in sentences that use polysyndenton, as not to put the focus on any one of her actions. “In the end, she got up off the sofa and kneeled beside me and stroked my head” he thinks, not describing Miranda’s action with any loving detail. He thinks, “She went back by the fire and put her housecoat on and sat there watching me,” which is a sterile and nervously phrased sentence.

Miranda becomes flustered when she realizes that Frederick never intends to let her go, no matter how much she pretends to love him. The sexuality of the situation doesn’t bother her, because, as she explains to Frederick, “sex is just an activity, like anything else. It’s not dirty, it’s just two people playing with each other’s bodies.” However, when Miranda does get upset, she resorts to the usage of euphemisms for sex, the way Frederick does all of the time. “What kind of doctor told you you could never do it?” she asks Frederick, using “do it” as a euphemism for “have sexual intercourse.” The reader can also infer that Miranda is ashamed of her actions. “Why do you think I did it? Just to escape?” she said to Frederick, summing up her manipulative seduction in the word “it.” “You must realize I’ve sacrificed all my principles tonight.” Miranda’s nervousness is also shown by her choppy sentence structure towards the end of the passage. “Like dancing. Like a game,” Miranda tells Frederick, trying to make him share her feelings about sex. “And--well, I think you owe me something” she says euphistically, flustered because she realizes that Frederick really won’t give her what he owes her--freedom.

The reason the dialogue between Miranda and Frederick is so effective is because their voices are both different in this pivotal point of the novel than they are throughout the rest of the book. Frederick usually does think in fragments and grammatically twisted sentences, but he does even more so in this passage. He usually is a befuddled and disturbed character; in this scene he only becomes more of what he normally is, because he realizes that Miranda will never love him. Miranda, on the other hand, speaks clearly and intelligently through most of the book. She does not entirely change her speech patterns in this section, but her euphemisms and awkward phrasing illustrate her devastation at the discovery that she will never be set free. This scene’s diction and syntax is poignant because it helps to show that both characters realize that they have the one thing the other wants, and that they both will remain needy forever.