Discuss the various characters in The Last Leaf.

Ans.

Sue

Sue is a young woman from Maine who shares an apartment with Johnsy. She is an inexperienced artist pav[ing] her way to Art’ through illustration work.

Much of Sue’s character is shown through her relationship with Johnsy. The two women have known each other for only about six month, but Sue is deeply devoted to Johnsy, whom she calls ‘dear’ and ‘goosey’. She is committed to maintaining a brave face for Johnsy in the face of the latter’s illness. “[crying] a Japanese napkin to: pulp” after the doctor’s initial prognosis but then “swagger[ing] into Johnsy’s room…whistling ragtime.” Her conversation with Johnsy is similarly carefree. She reacts to Johnsy’s prediction about the ivy leaf ‘with magnificent scorn’ and flips the doctor’s prognosis on its head, saying Johnsy’s chances of getting well real soon’ are ten to one. Sue tries to dissuade Johnsy from looking at the ivy leaves, but she is never able to disobey her friend’s orders to pull up the window shade so the vine can be seen.

Joanna (‘Johnsy’)

Joanna-referred to as ‘Johnsy’ throughout the story-is ‘a mite of a little woman’ from California who shares a Greenwich village studio with Sue. She is presumably an artist, like Sue, and she wishes to someday paint the Bay of Naples. She figures most prominently through her grave illness and her magical thinking regarding the ivy vine. The other characters in the story are developed through their caring for Johnsy.

As of the story’s beginning. Johnsy has contracted pneumonia. Lying in bed, she counts the leaves left on the ivy vine she can see through the window. She has ‘known’ for days that when the last leaf falls, she will die. Despite Sue’s attempts to draw her out of her morbidity, Johnsy is adamant: “I’m tired of waiting. I’m tired of thinking. I want to turn loose my hold on everything, and go sailing down, down, just like one of those poor, tired leaves.” After the last leaf has remained through two windy nights, Johnsy changes her mind. calling herself a ‘bad girl’ for wanting to die. Her health improves rapidly thereafter, and only two days later, the doctor says she is ‘out of danger’. Her magical thinking holds throughout, though the story ends with her learning of Behrman’s intervention.

Mr. Behrman

“Old Behrman’ is a painter who lives on the ground floor of the same building as Sue and Johnsy. He is over sixty years old, with a thick accent and a “moses beard curling down from the head of a satyr along the body of an imp.” Despite his long artistic career. he has never painted anything significant, though he talks of the masterpiece he will someday create. In the meantime, he makes a little money as an artists’ model and drinks gin ‘to excess.

Behrman considers himself “special mastiff-in-waiting to protect the two young artists in the studio above.” He is impatient with Johnsy’s ideas-“dot silly business,” he calls it-and blustery in his conversation with Sue, but he clearly cares about them both. “Some day I will paint a masterpiece, and we shall go away” he says, including the women in his dreams for a…