The house in its state of unnatural
immaculateness and order was as dreary as a tomb," and Lily turns from her "brief repast between shrouded sideboards" to the "glare of the drawingroom" to feel as though "she were buried alive.
Penultimately, it may be worth remarking that while Bergman's Autumn Sonata and Allen's Interiors alike are postulating the destructive consequences of perfectionism in life as in art, each film's director has, in his own way, been aesthetically pursuing the absolute or the ideal like mad: Bergman, the recreant preacher, with immaculate cinematic compositions that achieve their
immaculateness at the expense of worldly or natural conception; Allen, the derelict stand-up comic, by aspiring to place himself among the most mirthless geniuses of our era.
As the Virgin is at first disguised by her rags, so Maggie is disguised by her "shabby clothes" (VI, ii, III: 19) and by the colors seldom worn by GE's idealistic heroines--green, brown, lavender, pink, and blue--until late in the story when she wears black and white, signifying Mary's selflessness and
immaculateness.
