Mildred is Guy Montag’s wife. She is very different from Montag. All day, it appears that Mildred is either
watching the family in the parlor or listening to her seashells. She, like so many other people in this book’s
society, has practically alienated herself from the world except for when she
occasionally has her friends come over to visit or she goes to visit them and
their family. “And in her ears the
little Seashells, the thimble radios tamped tight, and an electronic ocean of
sound, of music and talk and music and talk coming in, coming in on the shore
of her unsleeping mind. The room was indeed empty. Every night the waves came
in and bore her off on their great tides of sound, floating her, wide-eyed,
toward morning. There had been no night
in the last two years that Mildred had not swum that sea…” (Bradbury 5) She enjoys watching the family so much that
she refuses to turn it off or even down when Montag wants to talk to her.
Unlike Montag, she is not so caring
for others. When Montag told her about
the woman that set fire to her house, she replied, “"She's nothing to me;
she shouldn't have had books. It was her
responsibility, she should've thought of that.
I hate her. She's got you going
and next thing you know we'll be out, no house, no job, nothing." (Bradbury
24) This in a way foreshadowed what
would happen later, except that it was Mildred and her friend that informed
Captain Beatty about Montag’s books.
Once she felt like everything was over, when the house was going to be
burned down and Montag sent to jail, she swiftly walked, carrying a suitcase,
to a taxi and the only “goodbye” or “I love you” she gave was “"Poor
family, poor family, oh everything gone, everything, everything gone now
...." (Bradbury 52) Okay, so maybe
she didn’t say goodbye to Montag, but at least she told her precious family
that. This was the last time that
Mildred was mentioned. Who knows what
became of her.
Bradbury, Ray. Fahrenheit 451. New
York: Simon and Schuster, 1967. Print.
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