What are we to make of Hopper's Summer Interior?

 What to make of Summer Interior? 

I recently took in the Whitney exhibition and subsequently began revisiting all things Hopper. A good read for this is ‘My Dear Mr. Hopper: The Story Starts Here,’ at the Edward Hopper House Art Center in Nyack - The New York Times (nytimes.com)  " Highlighted in the story is a painting, a turning point of sorts for Hopper, called "Summer Interior." 

The Times reports: "In the painting, a despondent young woman slumps on the floor and leans against a bed."

That description hardly captures what is inescapable in the painting-- the red slash of what can only be blood near her groin and what appears to be bruising on her face and neck. These features are not always clearly visible in web photo reproductions, but they are there and evoke Egon Schiele.

As one commentator mentioned, one minute Hopper was painting cityscapes and houses and the next a traumatized woman, and the next, city scapes and houses.

This appears to be Alta, from the color of the hair, and the body shapes.

There is much one could speculate. I will speculate one thing:

His consciousness was stirred or something happened in his early twenties with a young woman, perhaps this one, which haunted him.

His paintings were echos of loneliness, isolated moments, and alienation. This is more than that.

Red slashes on the figure, red slashes on the bedspread.

Hopper was a symbolist. No question.
I believe he was also troubled. By himself, or others, or life, hard to say.

From this-- his work which speaks increasingly to more and more people in our troubled times. Because there is great healing there too.

Troubles, ugliness, beauty and hope, just like life.
This is why I love Hopper. He’s a realist— not a photo realist,—an emotional realist. We will never know exactly the genesis of this painting but what we do know is that this raw emotion will live for centuries.

Addendum: 1/11/22
Perhaps this post by the Van Gogh Museum is relevant here:
In his lithograph ‘Sorrow’, Van Gogh wanted to convey just how empty and unredeemable a heart can be. For this image of desperate human grief, he was inspired by a quote from the work of French historian Jules Michelet. Van Gogh was terrified of being the cause of such sadness, and used this in a letter to his brother Theo: ‘I do not want to deceive or abandon any woman’.

1.🌻 Vincent van Gogh, Sorrow (1882)
2.📝 Fragment from a letter from Vincent van Gogh to Theo van Gogh, The Hague, 14 or 15 May 1882

The quote: ‘Socrates was born a real satyr; and through his deep thinking, through the sculpting of reason, virtue, devotion, he remade his face so thoroughly, that on the last day, a God was to be seen there, by whom the Phaedo was illuminated.’