48 pages • 1 hour read
Mary NortonThe Borrowers
Fiction | Novel | Middle Grade | Published in 1952A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Importance of Family in the Struggle for Survival
The solidarity of the family unit is one of the central themes at work in The Borrowers, for until they meet the boy, Pod, Homily, and Arrietty have no one to rely on but each other. Each member of the family has their own flaws, but they are consistently loving and supportive of each other. For example, although Pod is highly cautious after what happened to his brother’s family, he quickly recognizes Arrietty’s need to get out of the house and supports his wife’s decision to let her accompany him on his borrowing missions. Homily, meanwhile, has a tendency to worry and become agitated when Arrietty or Pod does something that she perceives to be foolish, but she is quick to forgive them as they all realize that they are in a tough situation together. Although Arrietty often resents her parents for not allowing her to live a free life, she appreciates the love they show her and the concern they have for her safety. This dynamic first becomes apparent when Arrietty meets up with Pod after her encounter with the boy. Although the boy is not harmful, she feels a constant sense of nervousness in his presence that she does not experience in the presence of her family, for unlike with Pod or Homily (or indeed, any other Borrower), she does not know anything about his human boy and has no guarantee that he will not choose to reveal her family’s presence to more malicious humans. In sharp contrast with this unsettling encounter, seeing her father’s kind face finally makes her feel fully calm, for she knows that she is back in the presence of someone whom she can trust completely.
Home is also an important theme. This factor is sometimes presented quite literally, especially when it comes to Homily’s views on the topic of emigration. She prides herself on keeping a cozy, comfortable home, even though as Borrowers they have to build almost everything out of items that the larger human family will not miss. Pod shares his wife’s desire to create comfort, digging down into the floor to make the rooms of their house more spacious and building walls out of creative materials like cigar boxes. When considering the possibility of emigration, both Pod and Homily (unlike Arrietty) see their cozy nest as a much more valuable asset than the adventure that the larger world would provide. The family also values home in a more abstract sense, for every time Pod and Arrietty arrive home from borrowing, they emerge from the dark, dank passageway into the living room where Homily waits for them smiling, often with a delicious meal already on the table. This sense of togetherness is very important to the Clocks and allows them to feel like they have plenty, even though they live in a tiny hole.
Survival and Adaptation
The Borrowers are the ultimate survivors, having lived for generations undetected in a house with constant threats from humans, cats, floods, and other problems. Although this could be said of all Borrower families, the Clock family appears particularly adept at survival, as they are the last Borrowers remaining in the house at the time the story occurs. Although Arrietty believes that the world is made for the benefit of Borrowers rather than for humans, the boy (and Norton’s readers) know that the tiny family has actually developed an incredible ability to adapt to a world that is actually centered around the needs of human beings. Examples of this ingenuity abound throughout the story and compel readers to see mundane items in entirely new ways. The Borrowers use hat pins as climbing tools to reach higher shelves, blotter paper as carpet, coins as silver plates, and thimbles as cooking pots. When they are unable to borrow something specific to their needs, Pod usually makes it out of items in their storerooms, a hole full of random materials that he has scavenged in earlier borrowing trips. Signs of adaptation can also be seen in the other Borrower families as well. The Harpsichords, for example, learned to forage for their food extremely quickly and stealthily because they lived in the drawing room where the only source of nutrition was the afternoon tea that was only placed there for a brief period and usually attended by many humans.
The Hendreary family, the only Borrowers shown to have emigrated to the outdoors, are never directly seen in the novel but are thought to have adapted to life in a badger den. While Homily cannot imagine how they survive without access to a house, Pod reminds her that many Borrowers have lived outside and that the Clock family lives a life of relative luxury compared to their forebears. At the end of the book, the Clocks are forced to leave the house, and Mrs. May describes their new life, in which they eat nuts and berries, make elderflower tea, and get meat and fur from animals killed by stoats and other predators. It is implied that Mrs. May gets this information from finding a piece of writing by Arrietty and that the Clock family were able to not only survive but also thrive in the world beyond the house.
Imagination Versus Reality
The frame story of The Borrowers establishes that the tale of these tiny people may or may not be real. It is an old story, taken from Mrs. May’s memories of when she was a child, and it is also a secondhand account, for Mrs. May is only relating the tale of her brother, whom she admits often made up stories to fool his sisters and who is no longer alive to confirm or deny her claims, as he was killed in World War I. This unanswered question about the story’s truth gives the novel a whimsical edge, and although the main story is presented as if it were a series of true events, the reader is often left wondering whether it is all just an elaborate fantasy.
The theme of imagination appears more directly in the story as well. Everyone who has seen a Borrower, other than the boy, either does not believe their own eyes or is accused by others of making the story up, thus strengthening the mythical aura surrounding the Borrowers and further emphasizing Norton’s implied connection to the “fae folk” of traditional British folklore: the invisible elves and fairies that cause mischief in the human world but are never actually seen. Great Aunt Sophy, for example, believes that Pod emerges from her bottle of Fine Old Pale Madeira after she has had too much to drink. When Mrs. Driver sees the Borrowers’ home, both Crampfurl and the policeman suggest that she is also experiencing the hallucinatory effects of drinking too much alcohol. Prior to the main events of the story, even the maid who saw Uncle Hendreary was later accused of making up a story about a tiny man in order to conceal her thefts of the house’s goods and valuables.
Other types of fantastical thinking appear in the story as well. For example, when the boy tells Arrietty that he thinks she is a fairy, she laughs, saying that fairies are not real. However, right on the heels of this denial, she tells the boy that her mother thinks she saw a fairy once and that it was much tinier than a Borrower and had wings. This establishes Arrietty’s resentment in the boy’s belief that her species is the same as a mythical creature. To her, Borrowers are more real than regular-sized humans, for the Borrower world is all that she has ever known.
At the end of the book, when Kate states that she believes in Borrowers, Mrs. May reminds her that it is possible that her brother made everything up. After all, no one but him ever actually talked to a Borrower, and although she smelled their cooking and saw what she believed to be their tea pot and Arrietty’s writing, her very intention of setting out to find the Borrowers means that she was determined to take any evidence as a sign that she had located them. In the end, the reader is left wondering if it matters whether the boy’s story is real or not and whether things disappear from houses because of human carelessness or because Borrowers continue to exist.
