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This husband, Charley Abbott, is a carefree but brutal traveling salesman for a candy wholesaler who announces his returns to Lamptown with fairy-tale menace by sending postcards signed "The Candyman." Curiously, he seems incidental to Elsinore's cultivation of her adulterous desire, even as his jealousy carries the plot to its climax in murderous violence. Elsinore's most characteristic attitude is escapist reverie:
If she permitted Charles's slowly developing jealousy to worry her, then it might creep in her mind when she was dreaming of really vital things, of Fischer, for instance. There had never been a moment that Charles existed in her imagination. Charles— well Charles was. He was not real. His letters—his jealousy— these things were, and things that were could not enter Elsinore's mind except it gave her pleasure. She wondered if Fischer himself were as real as her thoughts of him.
When she sat fashioning a hat silently, there was no room in her for fretting over an absent husband's suspicion; there was room only to listen to the mechanical rhythm of Mr. Sanderson's piano thumping, there was room only to see Fischer at the Casino, or in the Palace, in Marion, or Akron, or Cleveland, demonstrating a pirouette with his shining patent-leather feet.
Elsinore is passive, even infantile, her erotic daydreams blinding her to the threat of her husband's escalating jealousy. Hers is an absolute withdrawal from reality into a world of self-gratifying desire, and Powell, who understood sex as well as any writer of her generation and was free from even the slightest puritanism, isn't condemning that desire. Rather, she is condemning Elsinore's regressive self-absorption. It is no accident that the climactic scene of violence between husband and wife occurs not during an encounter with Fischer (which never happens) but in the fevered aftermath of one of Lamptown's dances, as Elsinore retreats to her bedroom to recall, as if in a masturbatory trance, "the feel of his thick white hand grasping hers, the sensation was far clearer in memory than it had been in actuality":
In another minute she could think—she'd be alone....She pushed open the bedroom door and the noise of the fan made her catch her breath with the shock of reality....The lovely thing about to happen...she clung to its vanishing shadow, but everything beautiful was fleeing desperately, there was only Charles Abbott, collarless and red-faced, sprawling drunkenly over her bed. She put her hand over her eyes to dispel this bad dream. Charles awkwardly sat up, blinking at her with bloodshot eyes. It was terrifying, the spectacle of the immaculate Candyman with his starched striped shirt rumpled, his black hair tousled and hanging over his eyes, his thin mouth sagging loosely. His coat and hat trailed on the floor, his sample cases were open and bonbons spilled all over the rug. Elsinore shook with blind fury, she wanted to tear him to pieces with her hands.
Violence, Powell seems to suggest, is the inevitable outcome of such a stubborn retreat from reality as hers, along with the suffocating restrictions of small-town Ohio: Elsinore shoots Charley with his revolver. It had responded to her touch, Powell tells us, with "a vision of paradise of solitude and privacy forever." From a writer who often dreaded her own solitude, such a "paradise" offers ironic solace at best.
Of all of Powell's characters, Elsinore is the emptiest and most disturbing. Powell would never again imagine a character so eerily vapid, inhabited by a desire that is as abstract in its totality as it is ferocious in its physical possession. There are echoes of Elsinore in the heroine of Powell's next novel, Come Back to Sorrento, Connie Benjamin, who also withdraws into a haze of yearning that leads to death (in this case, her own). Here the characterization is softer, even sentimental, and Connie at least has a genuine history—not the summarily sketched past of Elsinore's submission to her husband but one defined by an exceptional if squandered talent for singing. "I studied in convents in the East, then I sang one day before Morini, who was to teach me," she eagerly confesses early in the novel. Unlike Thea Kronberg of Cather's The Song of the Lark, who transforms her talent through self-sacrifice and exile, Connie's abilities remain raw and untested. They ultimately slip away from her, except in memory, where the meeting with the "great man" who'd said she possessed "the throat of an artist" becomes the measure of her wasted potential. After Connie's pregnancy and abandonment by a circus acrobat, she had married a local boy to protect her reputation. The "seventeen years of kind numbness" that followed has led her to "bask in her own society without compunction." Occasionally she reprimands herself that she "must live more outside the family" for the sake of her daughters, whose classmates make them aware of their mother's eccentricity. But for the most part Connie, like Elsinore Abbott, has withdrawn into a private world.
Connie's emptiness and passivity cause her to become desperately dependent on Blaine Decker, the newly-arrived music teacher who gives her "a personality for herself, a beautiful role into which she gratefully stepped." Decker's own situation mirrors Connie's. He is unable to liberate himself from memories of a year of Parisian bliss with his friend and implied lover, a man named Starr Donnell. The two create their own world of fragile, rather defensive snobbery, as Connie hangs on Decker's every name-dropping anecdote of his life in Europe and his judgments about opera, wine, and fabled performers. Although they do not allow their bond to become sexual (Decker is homosexual, and probably exclusively so), his presence rejuvenates Connie's long-dormant sexuality, prompting her to place desperate ads in Billboard searching for the acrobat who had abandoned her nearly two decades before. Though Come Back to Sorrento is more compassionate than Dance Night, the two novels are remarkably similar in their portrayals of insubstantial heroines who respond to a sudden overwhelming desire with reckless and desperate submission.
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