The title of “A Journey” alludes to both a cross-country trip by train and the spiritual journey the protagonist experiences in the course of the story. The unnamed woman, traveling from Colorado back to her New York City home, reviews her married life and the changes that have occurred since her husband became ill, and she arguably has an epiphany about her connection with him. At first, the relationship seemed to offer fulfillment for her, a broadening of her own prospects as her nature and her goals come to be in a symbiosis with his. With the onset of his illness, all of this has changed, and the man has become emotionally distant, an impediment to her happiness.

Wharton depicts this dynamic between man and woman ambiguously. One might ask if the relationship is emblematic of marriage in general, regardless of whether illness intrudes upon it. The disease from which he suffers might have brought into focus things that would have inevitably occurred anyway. Conversely, Wharton's point may concern the power that randomness holds in human affairs. A situation that was ideal, and could have remained so, is destroyed by chance. The husband's illness is never specified. This fact, too, is open to interpretation. That it is left unstated indicates a vast unknown governing the outcome of anyone's life. Yet in nineteenth-century fiction, the clinical evaluation of disease is, by later standards, rudimentary or nonexistent. Modern medicine was still in its infancy at the time, so one cannot expect an illness to be diagnosed with the exactitude normal in our day. But Wharton's silence on it could also indicate a reference to physical disease as symbolic of spiritual decay. To be sick, in the Victorian age, frequently tended to be seen as an adjunct to moral weakness. Wharton could be depicting it within the same framework of ideas around which earlier stories such as "La Dame aux Camelias" were written, with the difference, significantly, that now it is a man who is ill rather than a woman.

The woman, however, is the obvious focus of the story, traveling as she does in an arc from apparent happiness to misery, uncertainty, and death. At the same time, her journey is from west to east, from the (at that time) relatively untouched ground of Colorado to New York City, then, as now, the most populated place in the United States and the center of culture. New York is also the woman's home. The return is equated, as elsewhere in literature, with the journey toward death. It also can be seen as the reversal of the American dream and its constant westward movement, which Americans saw as the fulfillment of their destiny and a kind of salvation.

At first, marriage had meant life to the woman. Her career as a teacher had been unfulfilling and uninspiring to her. Married life, on the other hand, so long as her husband was healthy, meant activity, robustness, and a positive sort of journey, and the woman saw her husband as "gently masterful." When the man becomes ill, however, his temperament is one of irritability and judgment directed against her. Instead of being grateful he has a wife to care for him, he is annoyed at simple things, like her inability to hear his weak voice when he needs something. Illness, as well as perhaps being a metaphor of moral decay, also paradoxically symbolizes a power dynamic that often existed between men and women at the time, even when disease wasn't a factor.

If the train ride is a homeward journey to death, it is also one...