59 pages • 1 hour read
Sarah PerryThe Essex Serpent
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2016A 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
Faith and Reason
One of the novel’s central themes is the battle between faith and reason. This is best exemplified by the townspeople’s belief in the Essex Serpent. The mysterious creature, which can trace its history back 200 years, is blamed for the disappearance of children, adults, and animals. It is also credited with bringing a malign influence to the village of Aldwinter and casts a dark pall over the village that seems impossible to shake. However, few people can credibly claim to have seen the monster. Its existence and its nature become the primary battlegrounds for the conflict between faith and reason.
The way this conflict manifests in the text is unexpected. Here, Cora represents faith, as she wields the powers of natural science and the work of some of the era’s most important scientists in order to justify the existence of the Serpent. She cites living fossils discovered elsewhere, as well as the work of many of her forebears in the scientific world, in the belief that the Serpent could be real and could be lurking beneath the Blackwater. This creates an interesting internal juxtaposition. In the text, the sciences represent faith. Though evidence and proof might be the hallmark of the sciences, Cora wields faith in order to reverse engineer evidence of the Serpent’s existence. She has faith in her sciences and has faith that the creature exists. In this sense, science becomes almost an extension of the supernatural and one that many people are happy to entrust with their belief.
In opposition to the scientific faith wielded by Cora, Will and the church become the representatives of reason. Will is a member of the Church of England, a branch of Protestantism which abandons many of the more superstitious and metaphysical aspects of Christianity. Instead of representing religion and belief, the church in the novel represents order and institutions. In the village of Aldwinter, there are few examples of domineering and reliable institutions. The town church is one of the few institutions that exists in the area, and Will is its patriarch. He is the embodiment of institutional reason on a local level. The Serpent falls outside of the purview of the church; it is a manifestation of otherness, of strangeness, of the unknown, of the unordered. The church cannot explain the Serpent, and there is no evidence of its existence, so Will is willing to dismiss it as little more than superstition and rumor. He applies this to other phenomena. When he and Cora see a mirage on the horizon, he travels to London and spends the day researching in the British Library in order to find a scientific explanation. Though Will is technically a man of faith, he is the embodiment of reason in the novel and his careful, deliberate attempts to ward the townspeople off their superstition is eventually validated when the monster is proven not to exist.
Urban and Rural
There exists a thematic disconnect between life in the city and life in the rural areas. London, as it is portrayed in the book, is the quintessential city. It is an urban sprawl, packed with late-Victorian Dickensian flourishes that intrigue and appall in equal measure. Aldwinter, on the other hand, is little more than a handful of families huddled together on the misty shores of the estuary. The urban and the rural environments contain different threats and advantages. Despite being less than 20 miles from one another, Aldwinter and London seem worlds apart. The tension between the two worlds motivates characters and drives the narrative.
The London of the novel is not far removed from the London portrayed in many examples of literature set in the Victorian era. This is especially true of the slums around Bethnal Green, which are grimy, claustrophobic, crowded, and perpetually impoverished. Landlords drive up the rent to keep out anyone they see as unworthy, and disabled veterans play broken tunes on hand-wound organs to try and gather together enough pennies to feed themselves. There is, however, an awareness of the overbearing issue that afflicts the population of London. Martha is politically active and draws Spencer and Charles into her movement to construct better social housing in East London. There is a desire to change the social and architectural landscape of London’s urban environment, a tacit acknowledgement that there is something fundamentally broken and wrong about the way the city (and, by extension, urban living) is structured. Martha and Burton spend their evenings pouring over designs for new types of houses and new political ideologies that will add power to the inhabitants of the slums. The urban decay of London is acknowledged and is in the process of being addressed. Throughout the novel, the key factor about this urban environment is how much it differs from the rural Essex countryside.
Aldwinter is not the first representative of the rural environment in the text. First, Cora travels to Colchester. Though Colchester is a busy little town, positioned between London and Aldwinter, it is already different from the urban locations. Martha begins to feel uneasy and misses her city as soon as they arrive in Colchester. The area is still built up; there are people, buildings, and social institutions all over Colchester, and Cora and her group take advantage of these while feeling as though they have traveled to a more rural place. However, Colchester does not satisfy Cora’s yearning for the strange and the intriguing. Soon, they travel to Aldwinter, the purest representation of the theme of ruralness in the book.
Aldwinter is an empty, lonely place. It is beset by fog, which surrounds the inhabitants and makes them feel forever alone. Buildings are spread out from one another, and the only social institution is the church. Beyond the borders of the village is the great expanse of the estuary and the possible home of the monster that is bedeviling the locals. The rural location is close to the pale of humanity. It is the last outpost before the wilderness becomes wild and untamed. What few relics of civilization exist in Aldwinter fade away at the edges of town, where the fog, the Blackwater, and the Serpent wrest control of existence and eradicate the final traces of human society. While London can seem wild and violent, it cannot compare to the dread-inducing otherness of the country; the rural world is so far abstracted from the meticulous crowded civilization of the city that it becomes mysterious, strange, and uncanny.
As a result of this difference, there is a tension between the two worlds. The city is the home to science, reason, and civilization. When Cora and Will spot an illusion out on the estuary, Will travels to London to take advantage of the vast stores of knowledge. He seeks to impose the city’s civilized education on the untamed strangeness of the countryside. Attempts to replicate this with the Serpent, however, prove to be impossible. Likewise, the city offers people the chance to disappear. In the city, the nameless masses might seem claustrophobic and crowded, but their very nature allows people to vanish. Hall can lurk in the shadows and in the crowds without being recognized; he becomes one more face among millions. In Aldwinter, however, every single person knows everyone else. Cora’s arrival in the town spreads ripples across the social fabric and soon everyone is aware of her presence. Everyone knows her name and her story, robbing her of any chance of anonymity. If the city offers characters the chance to disappear, the countryside forces them into the spotlight and ensures that their presence is tracked and monitored at the same time. There are no secrets in the city; even people like Banks become aware of the potential affair between Will and Cora, even if they did not witness any of the relationship’s key moments. Thus, the tension between the two worlds becomes a driving factor in the plot. Characters move back and forth between rural and urban environments, trying to find the right place. The ability to resolve this inherent tension and understand one’s correct place in the world is one of the keys to achieving a satisfied existence.
Expectations and Reality
Throughout the novel, characters are forced to confront the differences between their expectations and reality. The truth of any matter is usually far removed from the actual nature of any situation, and few characters can reliably predict or expect anything. This difference becomes a theme in the novel; the way that characters deal with the space between their expectations and reality dictates their path throughout the narrative.
One of the best examples of this is the frequency with which characters are wrong about other characters. This is particularly true in the opening of the text, before many of the participants have been introduced. When she is first told about Will, for example, Cora predicts that he will be “some bull-necked country curate all Calvin and correction” (42). In turn, Will expects that Cora will be “entering the final stages of life bolstered by yards of taffeta and a half-baked enthusiasm for the new sciences” (48). Of course, neither of these predictions turns out to be true, and the two are so astonished by the difference between their expectations and the reality that a kind of intellectual curiosity forms the bedrock of their friendship. They are keen to be proved wrong, just as they are proved wrong initially.
It is also true that the expectations in these situations reveal more about the characters themselves rather than the person they are imagining. Cora’s expectations of Will, for example, reveal her opinion of religious people and her expectations of the type of people who inhabit the countryside. Meanwhile, Will’s expectations of Cora reveal what he thinks about women of her social class and that he considers “the new sciences” (48) little more than a fashionable hobby. Cora and Will’s prejudices are revealed and projected onto the fictional person they create in their head. That the reality should differ from these prejudices so starkly is just one of the reasons why they eventually fall in love.
Perhaps the most telling example of the difference between expectation and reality, however, is the Essex Serpent. The novel is replete with descriptions and drawings of the dragon-like creature. Occasionally, the Serpent is given new and monstrous powers. Not only does it snatch children and animals into the river, but it can deploy a malignant aura over the village. When the dead fish and the boat are eventually revealed, the people of Aldwinter must address the differences between the Serpent they expected and the two versions that posed little to no threat at all. In this case, they seem somewhat embarrassed by their expectations. The strange and wonderful serpents they conjured in their minds are now painful reminders of their own foolishness. They are driven back to the church and back to Will, who remained the one voice of reason and the one person whose expectation (that the Serpent would prove to be nothing) proved to be reality. His vindication arrives in the renewed trust placed in him by the villagers, even if Will’s concerns have moved on from a fictional creature.
