40 pages • 1 hour read
Colleen McCulloughThe Thorn Birds
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1977A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Character Analysis
Meggie Cleary
When the novel opens, Meggie is four years old, and the novel follows her life as she lives into her sixties. For the first 20 years of her life, she is credited primarily as being beautiful and innocent; male characters often compare her to a doll, and her mother dresses her as one, curling her hair before each school day. Meggie becomes a mother figure early on in the novel, looking after her younger brothers faithfully and imagining herself as a mother when she is still only a child. When she meets Luke O’Neill, whom she eventually marries, he is gratified sexually by suckling at her breast like a baby.
Meggie’s independent nature stems from her early childhood, when she often had to find her way. Surrounded by brothers and ignored by her mother until later in life, Meggie receives little formal education. She learns about sex only after she has been married to Luke O’Neill. At times, her independent streak manifests in manipulation; she tricks her husband into impregnating her, and she keeps Dane’s true identity a secret from Ralph, revealing the truth only when she needs Ralph’s help. Meggie’s adult imperfections clash with the descriptions of her excessive purity, revealing her as a character capable of remarkable transformation and growth.
Ralph de Bricassart
As a round character, Ralph demonstrates both positive and negative qualities. Much like Meggie, one of Ralph’s most interesting characteristics is his remarkable attractiveness to women, an ironic description for a Catholic priest married to the cloth. Ralph’s emotional intelligence and ambition enable him to use his magnetism to achieve his goals. For example, Ralph is able to make the most of his dreary posting in Australia when he caters to Mary Carson, the widowed owner of Drogheda who has no heirs but a distant relative. He understands that her attraction to him could prove to be rewarding, and he lives falsely in order to receive his reward: Drogheda and Mary Carson’s vast fortune. Ralph’s nature is complicated, and though he is capable of feeling love for others, he tends primarily to his own ambitions. The Catholic Church rewards Ralph for his complex personality; various leaders of the Church value Ralph for his natural talent for diplomacy, which is a kind of interpersonal craftiness, and his fluency with languages, which involves verbal disguise.
Fiona Cleary (Fee)
Fiona was born into an aristocratic family in New Zealand, which explains her ability to demonstrate some touches of elegance and sophistication when the Cleary family move into the main house on Drogheda. Fee positions the portrait of her grandmother, an aristocratic, female figure, centrally, symbolically establishing the significance of matriarchal characters in the novel.
Throughout the novel, Fee occupies the role of overworked wife and mother. She rarely demonstrates affection to her children, but she understands her physical relationship with her husband Paddy as natural, never resenting him for his appetite for her. She does resent, however, having to raise a daughter among her many sons. Only when Fee finds some wisdom is she able to understand that her own sons, perhaps because of her dominion over them, are figuratively or literally impotent and terrified of women. She finds solace in her old age from her much-improved relationship with Meggie, having finally realized Meggie’s value and the similarities they share. After all, Meggie follows her mother’s example in two significant ways: Both women love men who can never belong to them, and both women minimize the needs of their daughters while tending to their sons.
