Prince of Tides

“My soul grazes like a lamb on the beauty of indrawn tides.”

Nature is revered by the Wingo siblings, especially the marshlands in which they grew up. For Tom, nature comes closest to a powerful deity. Here, he uses Christian imagery to reinforce that religiosity, the lamb being the symbol of Christ, purity, and the faithful. The mention of tides is evocative of the marsh country and the Wingo love for the sea. It also symbolizes Luke, the most powerful and tragic Wingo sibling, the Prince of Tides of the novel’s title.

“‘What was your family life like, Savannah?’ I asked, pretending I was conducting an interview.

‘Hiroshima,’ she whispered.

‘And what has life been like since you left the warm, abiding bosom of your nurturing, close-knit family?’

‘Nagasaki,’ she said, a bitter smile on her face.”

Tom pretends to be an interviewer when visiting Savannah in an institute after her second suicide attempt. As the exchange shows, both Tom and Savannah cope with their trauma through dark humor. The references to Hiroshima and Nagasaki also represent Tom and Savannah’s horror about the nuclear arms race, a prominent concern in the text. Since this conversation occurs early in the novel, it adds to the suspense around the dark childhood of the Wingos. The family secrets they are forced to hide are devastating enough to invite comparisons to nuclear war.

“‘Why do you cook anyway, Dad?’ Jennifer asked suddenly. ‘Mr. Brighton laughs when he talks about your cooking dinner for Mama.’

‘Yeah,’ Lucy added, ‘he says it’s because Mama makes twice as much money as you do.’”

One of Tom’s positions in the text is that patriarchy traps cis men in gendered roles as much as it does other people. This conversation between Tom and his daughters is a good example of societal expectations from Tom. In their innocence, the children reveal that Tom being a stay-at-home Dad is a matter of embarrassment for them.

“She hugged me suddenly, fiercely, and kissed me on the throat, but in the full flower of righteousness, I was both patriot and helot of the male ego; with the patriarchal rectitude of the scorned male, I could not return that kiss or retrieve any value for that moment of grace.”

Tom knows he is partly responsible for the crisis in his marriage, driving his wife to have an affair, but he cannot show his vulnerability to Sallie because of his notions about masculine pride. This passage shows that Tom is candid about his failings and is an astute observer of how gender norms affect the psyche. At this early point in the novel, Tom is still trapped behind a wall; as the narrative progresses, he will let go of his notions and express his feelings.

“It is an art form to hate New York City properly. So far I have always been a featherweight debunker of New York; it takes too much energy and endurance to record the infinite number of ways the city offends me.”

Tom hates New York perhaps for the same reasons that Savannah loves the city. For both, the city represents anonymity and crowds. While Savannah can craft a new identity in the city, Tom feels the city is trying to take away his place in the world. The city also represents the excesses of industrialization and materialism to environmentalist Tom. But his views about New York do not remain the same throughout the novel. Ironically, the city also affords him a chance to come to terms with his past and evolve.

“‘It scares me when she’s like this. I always want to run. To get away from her. She becomes someone else, someone I don’t know, when she starts talking to walls. Then she starts blaming it on the family. On Mom and Dad. If they were so goddamn bad why aren’t we seeing dogs on the wall? Why didn’t we get hurt the way she did?’

‘How do you know we didn’t Luke?’”

This passage contrasts Tom and Luke’s understanding of trauma and mental health. Luke cannot understand Savannah’s hallucinations or their connection to Henry and Lila. He assumes that their childhood couldn’t have been very bad since he and Tom are “normal.” However, Tom points out that trauma manifests in different ways in different people. He and Luke have been impacted by their trauma as well, but in ways that society doesn’t deem “crazy.”

“I’m sick of Savannah being crazy. I’m tired of all this Sylvia Plath bullshit.”

The poet Sylvia Plath is a literary icon who died by suicide. Although her poems are astounding, popular culture seems to fetishize her death, promoting the idea that artists, especially female artists, are doomed to tragedy. Tom presents a different perspective: the loved one of someone who attempts self-harm. Much as Tom loves and supports his twin, providing support can be exhausting for caregivers. Tom also abhors the narrative that female artists are bound to suffer.

“Man wonders but God decides / When to kill the Prince of Tides.”

Savannah’s dedication to Luke shows her gift for riddle-making, a family habit she has advanced to poetry. The Prince of Tides is, of course, her older brother Luke. Only God can decide when to end the Prince because Luke is a force of nature. God, symbolizing the power of nature, is strong enough to subsume Luke. Savannah’s poetic dedication may seem hyperbole, given that Luke is shot down by men, ex-army officers hunting him. However, as Tom remarks often, Savannah expresses the poetic rather than the literal truth. In Savannah’s version, it is befitting that Luke dies on the waters in his beloved Colleton, never being forced to leave his natural habitat. Since Luke’s conviction and integrity are at odds with the forces of contemporary life, his end is natural, decided by God. Luke also gets a final reunion with his beloved siblings on Marsh Hen Island, which wraps things up gracefully for him.

“‘No, I want you to eat a well-balanced meal.’

‘You are Jewish.’”

Tom makes a joke to Susan about Jewish mothers feeding people well. Tom often brings up the subject of Susan’s cultural identity, which can strike an off note. Sometimes, Tom tends to typecast people by their identities, such as “Jewish” or “woman” or “New Yorker.”

“There are no verdicts to childhood, only consequences, and the bright freight of memory.” 

Tom’s beautiful and enigmatic line captures the beauty of Pat Conroy’s prose. The wrongs done to children during childhood are seldom tried or punished, but children suffer their consequences all the same. No court will punish Henry or Lila for their physical or emotional abuse of Luke, Tom, and Savannah, but the grown-up children still live with the scars of that abuse.

“The story grew slowly and as it unfolded I began to feel an interior strength flicker into life.”

Telling one’s story is akin to a cleansing confession; the more Tom tells Susan about Savannah and himself, the stronger he feels. This reiterates the power of storytelling and speaking one’s truth. Tom here also speaks for the author Pat Conroy; for Conroy, writing stories is redemptive. This is especially relevant since The Prince of Tides was inspired partly by Conroy’s own difficult relationship with his father.

“There is such a thing as too much beauty in a woman and it is often a burden as crippling as homeliness and far more dangerous. It takes much luck and integrity to survive the gift of perfect beauty, and its impermanence is its most cunning betrayal.”

The beautiful, doomed woman is one of the tropes Tom often cites, using his mother Lila and his sister Savannah as examples. However, Tom’s views are questionable at best. The difficulties the women in his life face have more to do with the patriarchal forces that beat them down than their good looks.

“Naw, you’re a girl. Girls are always lovers. I don’t want you fighting. I want you all soft and sugary, all peaches and cream for your Daddy.”

Henry’s words smack of gender prejudice. While he tells feisty little Savannah she should be “all soft and sugary,” he bullies Tom for being too sensitive. The scene soon degenerates into violence, with Henry relentlessly picking on Tom and Luke being forced to defend his baby brother. Conroy illustrates how toxic views of gender roles inform Henry’s abuse of his wife and children.

“At night, secretly, in forbidden whispers, I prayed that his plane would be gunned down. My prayers bloomed like antiaircraft fire in the profound sleep of children. In dreams, I saw him coming out of the sky in flames, out of control, dying. These were not nightmares. These were the most pleasant dreams of a six-year-old boy who had suddenly realized he had been born into the house of his enemy.”

Violence begets violence, whether directed toward the self or outwards. Henry’s bullying and beating of the six-year-old Tom damages Tom permanently, opening up a vein of anger in him. Tom highlights the novel’s key theme of the devastation of childhood trauma. His descriptions of dreaming of his father’s violent death are deliberately graphic to convey the extent of his anger. Because a child is helpless against the domineering adult, they try to take control of the situation through fantasies of revenge.

“He grew out of the earth like some fantastic, grotesque tree. His body was thick, marvelous, and colossal. His eyes were blue and vacant. A red beard covered his face, but there was something wrong about him. It was the way he looked at us, far different from the way adults normally studied children, that alerted us to danger. The three of us felt the menace in his disengaged stare. His eyes did not seem connected to anything human.”

The children’s first sighting of Otis in the Callanwolde woods is compared to spotting a monster. From the children’s perspective, the seven-foot-tall man appears to be a veritable giant. However, what makes him extraordinarily threatening is his vacant eyes, denoting a lack of empathy, and the way he looks at children, filled with sexual menace. The lack of empathy and sexual menace make Otis an aberration of the natural order; even though he represents the unknown danger of nature, this danger is an inversion of all that is good and true and human. The static portrayal of Otis also shows that the trauma he inflicts is fixed in the psyche of the Wingo children since it is never acknowledged or discussed.

“But my grandmother brought back from her journeys a revolutionary doctrine: Love has no weapons; it has no fists. Love does not bruise, nor does it draw blood.”

The greatest gift Tolitha gives her grandchildren is the realization that true love can be unconditional and safe. Used to their father’s heavy beatings and their mother’s use of the hairbrush to discipline them, Luke, Savannah, and Tom think of parental love as inseparable from punishment. Tolitha loves them without emotional or physical abuse, which the novel suggests is the best a parental figure can do for a child. Tolitha here represents the maternal side of nature, free from the rules of patriarchy. Perhaps if Lila were not so stymied by Henry, she too could have been another Tolitha.

“‘I didn’t get a chance to say hello to my sister, Daddy,’ said Savannah, following him to the back porch.

He opened the top of the freezer and said, ‘Now’s your chance. Say hi. Say anything. It doesn’t matter, girl. Rose Aster isn’t nothin’ but dead meat. There’s nothing there. Do you hear me? She’s like five pounds of dead shrimp. There’s nothing to say hello to or goodbye to. Just something to plant in the ground when your mother gets home.’” 

Savannah is not allowed to mourn her stillborn sister or consider her a human being. Henry dismisses Rose-Aster as “dead meat.” Perhaps Henry is trying to distance himself from the death of his child, but to Savannah, it signifies a denial of her grief. The incident shows how the children are made to repress their feelings. In Savannah’s case, this worsens the mental illness to which she is already predisposed. Later, when Savannah hugs Rose Aster’s body, the family considers her behavior abnormal. However, it is clear that the Wingo adults themselves are causing Savannah to behave erratically.

“I shouldn’t be surprised if Lila attended galas with a rose hanging out of her mouth, snapping her fingers like a flamenco dancer. Her instinct for acts of questionable taste is unerring. I’d like to pull those flowers out of her hair and teach her how to do her nails.”

This comment by Isabel Newbury is especially devastating for Lila to hear since Lila wants to impress the very woman mocking her. Isabel’s statements shame Lila for her class, her aesthetics of wearing a flower in her hair, and her sexuality. Since Lila is acutely conscious about how the world perceives her, she gives up wearing flowers in her hair from that day itself. Symbolically, this marks Lila’s break from the natural world (flowers) and her desire to enter the world of materialism (manicured nails). This passage also shows the pressure Lila faces to fit into her social context. This pressure partly contributes to Lila driving her children to achieve impossible standards.

“When we walked half a block down the street, my mother, tipsy from both the wine and her half-hour of being entertained in the Newbury house, said, ‘I’ve always said to everyone who’d listen, the most successful men are always the nicest men.”’ 

Lila’s comment to Tom is dark in its unwitting irony because she doesn’t know Reese has just slapped and threatened Tom in his study. Reese is anything but a nice man, having humiliated and bullied Tom. Lila’s infatuation with Reese and his wealth make Tom doubt his beloved mother for the first time; Tom also begins to see Lila as a betrayer since she failed to protect him from Reese's anger. The plot involving the Newbury family is significant because it highlights the class conflict in the novel and contextualizes some of Lila and Henry’s frustrations with their lot in life.

“Because they just aren’t interesting animals, Tom. Not like Caesar. He doesn’t give of himself lightly. I like that. I really like that. He makes you earn it all.”

When Tom wishes his father had used a hamster or a puppy instead of a tiger for marketing his gas station, Luke disagrees. Luke has a natural affinity for Caesar, the tiger, since he identifies with the animal. Like Luke, Caesar is a symbol of physical strength and masculine power. Like Luke, Caesar is true to his authentic self, and like Luke, Caesar, too, is put in a cage by society. Luke doesn’t give his affection lightly and, like Caesar, doesn’t change his essential nature to be liked. The comparison to Caesar foreshadows Luke’s dark fate as Caesar is a wild animal out of his habitat. Caesar can only meet a tragic end.

“And when Benji Washington comes through that school door on the first day of school next year I want you to remember Anne Frank.”

Savannah forces Tom to see that discriminating against Black people is as terrible as the Nazis persecuting Jewish people. Dehumanizing a Black person like Benji is just a few steps away from committing violence against them; that’s why Savannah wants to nip Tom’s racism in the bud. She wants Tom to see that Benji Washington is as much of a person as Anne Frank, whose diary Lila made them read, and whom Tom idolizes.

“Rape is a crime against sleep and memory; it’s afterimage imprints itself like an irreversible negative from the camera obscura of dreams.” 

Tom’s powerful, disturbing statement sums up the trauma of sexual violence. Strikingly, “sleep” and “memory” are the sanctuaries this violence rattles the most. Sleep is synonymous with rest, while memories with nostalgia. Memories are also unbidden and uncontrolled and can visit one anytime. Thus, the unprocessed trauma of sexual violence disturbs the survivor to their very core. It is important to note that Tom is talking about trauma that is buried and repressed, and therefore irreversible. Trauma that is addressed and treated may be managed better.

“‘I feel about the South the way I feel about Nazi Germany, Tom,’ Herbert said. ‘I think of the South as evil. That’s what makes it interesting to me.’” 

Herbert's statement shows he, too, is guilty of generalizations and prejudice as much as the southerners he mocks. He approaches the South not from the perspective of understanding or empathy but from the perspective of a forensic expert. In the book’s moral universe, lack of empathy is the greatest shortcoming a person can have. Herbert’s attitude is also proof that people across the board can behave in entitled ways, no matter their class, status, or intellectual pursuit.