death mask

The death mask is Eileen Dunlop’s name for a face she deliberately trained herself to wear: composed, unreadable, and apparently resilient. At Moorehead, it helps her hide the sensitivity she fears will be visible to others. In later encounters, the same expression protects her professional standing and disguises her insecurity, but its repeated use also shows how much of her life is organized around concealing rather than expressing feeling.

Origin and Practice

Eileen’s model for the death mask comes from a book she found in the public library. It showed plaster casts made of Lincoln, Beethoven, and Sir Isaac Newton after their deaths. Rather than accepting the casts as accurate images of death, she saw in their faces an appearance of calm endurance. She practiced in a mirror, consciously relaxing her features while trying to preserve that quality of composure.

The practice begins as a response to Moorehead. Eileen describes herself as young and very sensitive, surrounded at work by misery and shame, yet determined not to reveal how deeply the place affected her. The mask is therefore not simply an expressionless face: it is a learned defense against being seen in distress. She recalls that she did not run to the bathroom to cry, presenting that restraint as evidence of how successfully she held herself together, even as the need for such discipline suggests the emotional cost of the job.

A Face for the Workday

At Moorehead, the mask becomes part of Eileen’s routine. Before visiting hours, she drinks sweet vermouth and eats mint chocolates, which she regularly steals from a drugstore in X-ville. She says her controlled expression has helped keep clerks and shopkeepers from noticing her excitement or fear while she shoplifts. The same face serves a different purpose at work: it helps her meet the imprisoned boys’ mothers despite feeling nervous about receiving them.

Her duties require a calm, procedural manner. Eileen records visitors’ names in a ledger and directs them to wait in the hallway on molded orange plastic chairs. Since Moorehead has no female guards or officers, she also administers the security checks for women visitors. She describes the women as sad, passive, and remorseful, and recalls that the routine offered her a rare sense of contact. With Randy nearby, however, she sometimes redirected her thoughts toward him, a man who seemed barely to notice her. The image of herself as a pair of nervous hands captures the contrast between her physical presence in the room and her sense of social invisibility.

Composure and Institutional Rules

The mask supports Eileen’s compliance with Moorehead’s procedures, even when she recognizes the harm those procedures cause. During one visit, a young boy begins crying when he sees his mother. His mother offers him a handkerchief, but Randy blocks the exchange and says it is not allowed. Eileen knows that her explanation of the rule is false, yet she follows the institution’s restrictions. She later understands that the ban on gifts was meant to keep the boys desperate.

Eileen’s outward obedience coexists with a private life that contradicts the moral identity she tries to project. She is a shoplifter and a liar, but no one at Moorehead knows this. Enforcing the rules helps her persuade herself that she is good and lives by a high moral code. The mask thus belongs to more than an occupational routine: it helps her sustain a public self built out of punctuality, procedure, and apparent self-command, even when she sees the institution’s rules as cruel.

Social Performance and Insecurity

Eileen also prepares the death mask for encounters outside her routine duties. Before seeing Rebecca, she practices a face of perfect indifference, with still eyes and a slightly furrowed brow. She wants Rebecca to think well of her and worries that she will appear provincial and foolish. Eileen believes that withholding her opinions until Rebecca offers hers first will make her seem worldly or radical. In retrospect, she recognizes the pose as a way insecure people try to avoid exposure; beneath it, she was unhappy rather than confidently detached.

The mask returns when Eileen compares herself with Rebecca in Randy’s presence. She feels envious and believes that Randy would choose Rebecca over her. Instead of showing that hurt, she puts on the familiar expression, concealing shame beneath apparent composure. The recurrence connects her social performance to her earlier workplace defense: in both settings, the face keeps others from reading feelings she experiences as humiliating.

Appearance and Significance

The practiced expression exists alongside Eileen’s intense dissatisfaction with her actual face. Before going to a Christmas pageant in the chapel, she checks her appearance in a mirror, smooths back her hair, applies lipstick, and blots it before leaving. She recalls persistent skin problems and says that, at the time, she hated her face. Looking back, she says she likes her appearance now, while noting that rosacea and facial redness have continued into adulthood. The contrast distinguishes the mask she can consciously arrange from the face she once felt unable to accept.

Across these episodes, the death mask shifts from a tactic for surviving Moorehead to a broader method of managing how other people perceive Eileen. Its stillness hides fear from shopkeepers, nerves from visitors, and shame from Rebecca. Yet the narration repeatedly reveals what the expression conceals: sensitivity, unhappiness, longing for Randy’s attention, and awareness of the rules’ cruelty. The mask therefore signifies both control and its limit. Eileen can train her face not to disclose her feelings, but the recurring account of that effort makes those feelings central to the reader’s understanding of her.