As young adults they marry men and raise families, but remain in touch with one another and share the details of their personal lives.
Maura is disturbed by these declarations, but admits to herself that these missives exceed those she had wished to receive from ardent male lovers in her youth.
Each subject is figuratively a knife of the times, a painful fact of the heterogeneous life in Depression-era America that challenges social definitions of love and family and upsets preconceptions of normalcy.“ James G. Watson in “The American Short Story: 1930-1945” (1984)[5] Literary critic James G. Watson asks the following rhetorical question regarding the story’s theme and William’s approach to literary art: Knife-like itself, the story cuts away the easy affirmations and surface assumptions of the times to pose the same question that Maura asks herself.
Given the importance of life in its essential qualities—not stereotypes—why not be true to the imperatives of intimacy, in life and in art?”[6]Biographer Robert F. Gish places the story into the larger context of homosexuality as a topic in 20th century literature: One “knife” in the story is the knife of long-repressed sexual desire and desire to be free of society’s expectations and conventions.
“Why not” as Maura announces it, is at once a cry of liberation and a leveling of self-restraint in the face of larger instincts.”[7]Gish adds that “The Knife of the Times” though “quaint’ by today’s standards “allows the reader insights into just how far in the history of the short story the freedom to deal with the issue of homosexuality has extended.