58 pages • 1 hour read
Louise PennyA World of Curiosities
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2022A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
The Basement
The home where Gamache and Reine-Marie live in Three Pines has a partially finished basement, which, like many basements, contains stored holiday decorations, canned food, tools, and the like. This particular basement also has a sealed and secured room where Gamache keeps his personal archive of files documenting the cases he has investigated during his career. There, evil is seemingly contained, until Gamache needs to access the files on Fleming, when he suspects that Fleming has escaped in a variation on the idea of the return of the repressed.
Thus, like the files in the basement, past traumatic events can be stored in someone’s psyche, and, as in the basement itself, they may be forgotten, but they still remain below the surface. In short, the basement is the equivalent of the subconscious or the repressed in the human mind: It is a dark, shadowy, seldom-accessed place, where the past is stored, perhaps even hidden away, but never completely dormant.
Hence, Sam’s sneaking into and poking around in Gamache’s basement, which is motivated by his desire for revenge for the past, connects to the unsettling effect he always has on the detective. Fleming also gets into Gamache’s mind, first as a recollection and then through actual manipulation of Gamache’s deepest fears.
If the basement represents the subconscious, its counterpart in the novel, the hidden room in the loft, symbolizes the superego. As the site of the painting, it is the center of Fleming’s devious plot, which controls most of the action of the novel, much as the superego controls one’s impulses. Because this plot is the product of Fleming’s obsession with the past and with revenge, it is fitting, in terms of the novel’s plot, that Fleming is killed in Gamache’s basement. The memory of the horrible events of the novel’s climax may never go away, but in killing Fleming, Gamache eradicates their source.
The Iron Ring
Penny’s novel alludes to the tradition of engineers trained in Canada receiving an iron ring when they graduate. The rings symbolize professional ethics and a responsibility to make sound decisions, since these decisions can cost people their lives. In the novel, when Gamache finds an iron ring in his basement, it becomes a key clue in his investigation of the sealed room and his eventual belief that Fleming is preying on Gamache’s sense of duty in engineering his elaborate plan of revenge. Thus, the iron ring, which Fleming obtained from one of his murder victims, becomes part of the chain of events that leads to Fleming’s undoing, even as it also alludes to the ways that Fleming himself has been enchained by his obsession with vengeance against Gamache.
The Branch
When Harriet Landers is running through the woods in terror and struggling to find her way back to Three Pines, she seizes a fallen tree branch as a makeshift weapon. Harriet holds on to the branch even after she makes her way to the Gamache household; when Agent Isabelle Lacoste arrives, she sees “a wild woman […] standing in the middle of the room, clutching a tree branch” (378). The branch symbolizes Harriet’s resilience and desire to survive; it is also a vestige of the moment of transformation she experiences in the woods, when she overcomes the fear and numbness that have paralyzed her for so long and decides to fight death rather than give in to it.
In this way, the branch alludes more generally to the resourcefulness of women and recalls the fact that Anne Lamarque was banished to the woods when she was accused of witchcraft, presumably to die there, like Harriet. But like Harriet, Anne finds an inner strength in the woods that enables her to survive and build a community of women who have been similarly outcast and who found strength in solidarity.
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By Louise Penny
