Unsheltered

“How could two hardworking people do everything right in life and arrive in their fifties essentially destitute? She felt angry at Iano for some infraction that wouldn’t hold up to scrutiny, she knew. His serial failures at job security? Not his fault. Plenty of academics spent their careers chasing tenure from city to town. They were a new class of educated nomads, raising kids with no real answer to the question of where they’d grown up. In provisional homes one after another, with parents who worked ridiculous hours, that’s where. Doing homework in a hallway outside a faculty meeting. Playing tag with the offspring of physicists and art historians on some dean’s lawn while the adults swigged cheap Chablis and exchanged companionable gripes about department heads. Now, without complaint, Iano had taken a teaching position that was an insult to someone with his credentials.”

The impact of Iano’s career journey on his and Willa’s children is implied here. The narration paints a picture of children making the best of upheaval, becoming self-sufficient and resilient by learning to make friends and do their homework without adult supervision. The futility of the journey, which has failed to deliver the stability and comfort that the couple had hoped, is alluded to by the words “destitute” at the beginning of the passage and “insult” at the end.

“Those trees had been planted by Rose’s father to honor his daughters, the beech for Rose, the oak for Polly. Not a rose and a hollyhock but trees that now reached for the sky, years after his death. No wonder they worshipped this sentimental man, exactly the type to be lured here by Landis’s elysian visions. The tale of two trees was a household favorite, and Thatcher always tolerated the words ‘planted by Father’ without comment. He’d dug many holes in his early life, irrigation ditches, even graves; he knew how it was done and by whom. Rose’s father would have stood on the grass in a clean frock coat, his pink hand pointing, directing the labor of others—a platoon of Italian boys probably, like those he’d seen this morning trenching earthworks along the rail line. If it came to pass that Thatcher should shake hands with President Grant, as Polly predicted, he would still be a man who viewed life from the bottom of the ditch, not the top. He had managed to rise a little and Rose to fall, arriving accidentally on a plane that accommodated their marriage. But the weight of their separate histories held the plane in uneasy balance.”

This passage reveals several layers of meaning that will shape the story and connect to its themes. First, the women of Thatcher’s household lionize their late husband and father, which annoys Thatcher—he cannot respect the man who profited from the labor of others, having been a poor laborer himself. The social disparity between Thatcher and Rose, which will ultimately lead to their divorce, is also explored through the use of the “planes” imagery at the end of the passage.

“Thatcher’s loyalties slid straight away from Dr. Treat toward his enigmatic other half. Here was mystery of the highest order: Mrs. Treat peering into the grass. Thatcher wanted to know what was holding her at attention on a hot August day. This woman belonged to his flank of humanity, those who would pick up the scalpel and cut open the pig. Investigators.”

Thatcher makes sense of the world, recognizing who will be his allies and confidants, by separating people into those who investigate (the “investigators”) and those who merely follow popular opinion (“sweeteners”). Thatcher’s placing of Mary into the former category foreshadows their close relationship and understanding of one another. Mary also eschews ideas of feminine propriety by laying face-down in the grass, contrary to mainstream requirements for the appropriate comportment for ladies, which indicates her status as an iconoclast.

“[Thatcher watched] a suspendered gang of working boys come down Sixth Street swinging their lunch buckets, picks on their shoulders, pausing at the corner of Plum for a loaded wagon to pass. Worn at the edges already, these boys, and so young. Thatcher wondered what manner of child in this town would be at leisure to attend high school.”

Thatcher observes first-hand Vineland’s labor dynamics as he watches the boys making their way to work. Having not yet begun teaching his classes at the high school, he can already foresee conflicts between work and school for his prospective students, a theme that will emerge more explicitly later in the book. He senses that the demands on the boys he sees will take a toll on them, as he notes that they are “[w]orn at the edges already.”

“Zeke was more practical than his father about taking care of business. But unlike Iano, she just couldn’t see this jackpot as some normal next step. Different as they were in temperament, father and son shared an unrealistic faith in good financial fortune. They expected it. In Iano’s first-generation immigrant family, they might as well have had a cross-stitched sampler on the wall saying ‘God Bless Our Capitalist Home.’ Something in his bones promised Iano he was going to get into the club, and he’d passed that on. Willa’s bones told her with equal conviction that the roof over their heads would not outlast the winter.”

In this passage, the differences between Willa and Iano become clear. Iano believes that everything will work out for the best, while Willa worries about things going wrong. The trust Iano, Zeke, and Nick place in the marketplace and in capitalism are expressed by the imagery about the sampler, a decorative object usually used to highlight some inspirational or important saying.

“He hated speaking of the war. He’d managed to slip his father’s noose and move with a regiment into Boston as a runner first, then as a medical assistant. The doctor who taught him to stanch wounds and bandage amputations took Thatcher into his home, put him to work, and eventually sponsored his education. War had wrecked the Union but worked the opposite for Thatcher, improving his life immeasurably. Leaving him with a moral debt no man could pay.”

This passage adds complexity to Thatcher’s character by describing the process by which he achieved an education and was able to rise to the middle class from his impoverished background. His reluctance to revisit that time suggests that he feels that his advantages came about in an unseemly way as thousands of his countrymen were being killed. Thatcher’s commitment to his ideals throughout the book could be understood as his way of attempting to overcome the “moral debt” referenced here.

“[Thatcher] looked around at a parlor full of sunlight and potted plants, half-read books lying open, botanical drawings set among the clutter of portraits on the mantelpiece, and no embroidery to be seen. He felt at home there. Had not felt that way entirely in any room, he realized, since coming to Vineland. He had thought himself at odds in a house of a women, but so was this one: a second pair of small muddy boots rested today on the hearth beside Mrs. Treat’s. He stared at the four little brogues feeling a strange pair of emotions, protectiveness and envy.”

The description of the parlor reflects Mary’s “eccentricity,” botanical accomplishments, and status as a single woman. Her rejection of traditional feminine ideals is suggested by the phrase “no embroidery to be seen,” since embroidery was considered a desirable pastime for girls and women in the 19th century. Thatcher’s feelings about seeing Mary and Selma’s shoes suggest his dissatisfaction, so far undeveloped, in his marriage to Rose.

“And Willa was falling frequently into cold sweats as she tried to stave off images of disaster. Zeke in a highway accident, the baby dead from SIDS. When these attacks came at night Iano sat up in bed holding her hand, peering at her face, asking if this was more of the menopause or something else. It was the something else, for which no words were quite enough. Unprovoked losses one after another—her mother, jobs, savings, Helene, the ceiling—had stripped Willa of the useful illusion that everything would be fine. It amazed her now to watch people walking through life with their ludicrous trust.”

Willa’s list of losses reinforces the emotional gravity of her situation. Nearly every semblance of security from her life before the family moved to New Jersey is gone, and with her already anxious personality, she can’t help ruminating about what else might be lost. She feels apart from those who can continue to be optimistic in a world that she feels has taken so much from her and her family. This passage continues Kingsolver’s characterization of Willa as the “worrier” of the family.

“To please their beloveds, some women faked orgasm; Willa faked composure. [Iano] thought a change of scenery would help, and couldn’t quite grasp that her problem wasn’t the scenery or the venue, it was the whole darn show.”

In keeping with her self-appointed role as the responsible, practical partner, Willa hides her fears about the family’s future from her husband. While Iano reduces their problems to a particular location and thinks they’ll be fixed by moving, Willa realizes that the issues they face are in fact more persistent. Her unhappiness is with “the whole darn show,” the myriad of circumstances that keep the couple from achieving the things she wants them to.

“Every year, but especially in this one with its two big storms, birds congregated en masse while they waited for good weather and the gumption to launch themselves out. Willa was amazed. She’d never given a thought to these little lives hurling themselves over the dark ocean, their tiny brains still big enough to dream of a warm jungle on the far side of a god-awful journey.”

The birds’ fundamental “optimism” about the outcome of their migratory journey contrasts with Willa’s generally pessimistic and despairing attitude about life. Her perspective is based on her own experiences and those of her family. The human–nature divide is emphasized as the narrator says that Willa had never thought about the perspective of the birds before.

“An editor at Harper’s Monthly had returned an encouraging correspondence, and Mary took all encouragement to heart. It was a quality Thatcher noticed because he lacked it. Rose hinted at his weak ambition, but the disease was more crippling than that: he distrusted praise, and took detractors at their word. Whenever he told Mary of his troubles at the school with Cutler, as he urgently wished to do today, he knew he was provoking her support so he might cement his little barnacle of confidence on that steady pier.”

Perhaps because of the lack of a maternal figure in his upbringing, and indeed lack of a significant female figure in his life until he meets Rose, Thatcher is especially eager to rely on Mary. This dynamic inverts the traditional gender norms of the 19th century, in which women were expected to rely on men emotionally, financially, and intellectually. Thatcher is aware that he is being somewhat manipulative of Mary by “provoking” her support.

“Thatcher saw he could never name his friend with one tree because she was many. The fossil ferns, ancient cedars, and flowering plants joined at the root to the different eons of their emergence: Mary was all these at once. She was phylogeny.”

This is the first of the botanical comparisons Thatcher makes in regard to Mary. Phylogeny is a generic term for how groups of organisms and species evolve over time. The order of the sequence of organisms named—ferns, cedars, and flowering plants—follows the evolutionary journey of plants from simple (ferns do not have many of the more sophisticated reproductive parts of plants) to complex.

“She called it research, but was dipping a whole lot deeper than necessary into the Mary Treat well. Willa had spent decades making short work of researching articles, priding herself on how efficiently she could skim primary sources or get in and out of an interview…And now she found herself breaking and entering, pulling open closets, trying on Mary Treat’s clothes and wishing she could sleep over. Willa had no explanation for why she felt herself so eager to inhabit another woman’s life. This was not exactly her own bucket list […] but it sure as hell beat fighting with the insurance company.”

The imagery of Willa in Mary’s closet evokes both a sense of intimacy, as when a close friend tries on another’s clothes, and violation, as suggested by the phrase “breaking and entering.” Willa, who prides herself on professionalism, is led to this deeply personal and intense obsession with Mary because it is a form of escapism from her own problems (“fighting with the insurance company”). This passage illustrates the emotional intensity with which Kingsolver has written Willa’s struggles, which are taking a toll on her.

“Thatcher thought of the riot he’d seen in the Boston square, the scarecrow Darwin hanging from a lamppost, the crowd terrified witless at the prospect of shedding comfortable beliefs and accepting new ones. If people were thus, Thatcher wondered why the shedding came so easily to himself and his friend. Perhaps they both had a tactical advantage: Mary, reared in her finishing school to behave as an empty vessel, and Thatcher, who began life in a grimy, unsheltering family with no proper philosophies at all, or a book to its name.”

Thatcher and Mary are able to question and reject some of the beliefs of their time because, in different ways, they are marginalized. Thatcher began life in poverty and without opportunity, and Mary was raised with the expectation that she would be nothing more than “an empty vessel” because of her gender. This dynamic makes them more likely to question power systems and the potential to reject them, since they have been situated outside of those power systems at various points in their lives.

“Tig fist-bumped her way into the crowd, much happier there than with her own family, Willa noted with the habitual pang. A thousand times she’d asked her mother after this wildling was born, could a mother and child just have bad chemistry? She’d spent years putting careful love letters into Tig’s psychic mailbox when what the girl seemed to want in there was birdsong, or a bucket of frogs.”

Willa feels that she has misunderstood her daughter and failed her as a mother. This belief drives much of her worry about Tig throughout the book. Her thoughts about “bad chemistry,” a situation that is difficult to correct, reflect Willa’s belief that she and her daughter are simply naturally incompatible with each other.

“You and Dad were always just worker bees to this quest for a bigger, better-paid life. Moving from this college to that college, new town, new house, starting over in school every time I started feeling happy with my friends.”

Tig’s words about the effect of moving frequently in her childhood confirm Willa’s worst fears about her parenting decisions. While Willa felt that she and Iano were chasing tenure in the interest of their children, Tig shares that it actually made her unhappy and insecure. Tig also rejects what she sees as the capitalist values behind “the quest for a bigger, better-paid life,” values that she turns against as she builds a life for herself and Dusty with Jorge.

“What say I [… to] the suggestion that our world is dangerous? I should call that stale news! Our nation bleeds itself dry! One in five of our young men died in the war and we are still riven, north against south, countrymen against immigrant, laborer against lord…We see black men rise up to threaten their former masters. Here in our own streets we have seen women in trousers! Desiring to lord themselves over men, turning against God’s own domestic harmony. All sense of order is sundered.”

This rhetoric, which comes from the 19th-century timeline, is spoken by Thatcher’s school principal as they debate science and religion. The principal upholds traditional American power systems as being part of “God’s own domestic harmony.” This mindset is echoed by Nick, the candidate he supports, and others like them in the 21st-century storyline.

“By no means was it a glamorous life—she recalled being naked around cockroaches—and yet they’d shared an exuberance that eventually suffocated under tenure applications and mortgages. This was not a new story. Maybe Iano still had access to that kind of joy, but she’d surrendered it as her half of the marital bargain.”

Once again, Willa upholds her identity as the practical, responsible partner in her relationship with Iano as she reflects on the early days of their marriage. She feels that she has “matured” more than Iano, to the point that she cannot access the enthusiasm or carefree attitude she had, while he is still able to. Willa has not made a conscious decision to become this way, as the involuntary nature of “suffocate” and “surrender” imply.

“Thatcher touched his hat but the Dunwiddies didn’t see him, as such men rarely did. The Pussytoes and the Toadflax, botanical names that pleased him so well he’d shared them with Rose. She was furious. She truly believed he envied her friends’ money and position, when in fact it was their slavering for these things that put him off. Thatcher did not pretend remorse for a disaffection that was mutual. Every hour Rose spent with the Dunwiddies was time outside her husband’s understanding. These hours were becoming many.”

One of the ways Kingsolver conveys the growing distance between Thatcher and Rose is through their reaction to the Dunwiddies. Rose’s near-constant presence with them, Thatcher’s distaste for what he interprets to be their values, and the Dunwiddies’ inability or refusal to notice Thatcher all foreshadow Rose and her mother’s eventual marriages into the Dunwiddies. Thatcher uses his characteristic botanical metaphor to compare them to toadflax (a common, introduced plant) and pussytoes (unassuming plants that lack the power and elegance of the plants Thatcher chooses for other characters).

“There was no reconciling her memories of last fall—Aldus of the puny disposition and endless howls—with this jolly boy in the high chair who opened not just his face but his whole being to Willa’s tendered grace. The mouth popped wide with every approach of the spoon. He was working on a rainbow coalition of Tig’s pureed vegetable cubes—beets, pumpkin, green beans would be a guess—plus a spoonful of peanut butter as per instruction. It all felt wrong to Willa, but the pediatric gospel had reversed again: modern advice was to throw the kitchen sink at babies, foodwise, as soon as they could chew and swallow. Even the allergy triggers, early and often. Willa as a young mother had been ordered to sterilize everything within a hundred yards of baby, hold back on solids, and avoid potential allergens, ideally until voting age. And now the doctors said: bring on the peanut butter. Put the babies on the floor, let them eat dog hair.”

Willa’s position as a caregiver who last raised children a generation ago is underscored in this passage. The more protective approach that Willa employed with her own children when it came to eating is mirrored by her protectiveness toward them. As she learns to adapt to a new style of feeding Dusty, Willa has also begun to relinquish symbolic control of her grandson to Tig.

“Willa would scrape off the food and liberate her charge [Dusty in his high chair]. Soon she would hand him off to Tig and pull off her own escape, disappearing into the thrilling possibility of a book. The arrival of a hero in her house had blown Willa’s passion for Mary Treat into a giddy disease state. These two iconoclasts living in one another’s line of sight, anode and cathode, had some current flowing between them that Willa had accidentally stuck a hand into. Now she lay awake nights hearing their conversations, seeing them in Mary’s parlor among her spider jars. Walking in the barrens. After a lifetime of meticulously detached journalism, this felt less like an assignment than an out-of-body experience. While executing all other duties—cooking, baby minding, even now, listening to Iano—Willa found herself fidgeting like a derby horse at the gate, impatient to get to her writing desk.”

As when she was first researching Mary, Willa’s interest has a personal quality, as implied by the words “passion” and “giddy.” Although she hasn’t yet discovered evidence of Thatcher and Mary’s relationship, she has a sense that there was a connection between the two of them. Her excitement about her project, which is uncompleted when the novel ends, indicates that she has almost reached the end of her journey, ready to take on her future.

“He was finished with declaring himself to a public without ears to hear his language. Without shelter, we stand in daylight, [Mary had] insisted once, and he had thought only of death. Simple man. He might sleep in a bed of cactus thorns or a tree under the stars, but he could choose the company he kept and it would not be this fearful, self-interested mob shut up in airless rooms. They would huddle in their artifice of safety, their heaven would collapse. His would be the forthright march through the downfall.”

The shelter metaphor is used here to express Thatcher’s sense of freedom now that he doesn’t have to appease Vineland’s influential leaders. He has come to appreciate the options open to him now that he has rejected the “shelter” of social approval. The imagery of being outdoors as opposed to “shut up in airless rooms” emphasizes the contrast between these two modes of being.

“[Jorge’s] protectiveness of his sister had smacked her across the heart. What she once would have dismissed as machismo now struck her as something she’d failed to teach her son. Zeke’s habitual gallantry made his treatment of Tig all the worse.”

Willa reflects favorably on the way Jorge shows loyalty to his family. Her reflections make Zeke and his derision of Tig appear badly in comparison, which Willa feels reflects her own mother skills—she attributes Zeke’s cruelty to his sister as something “she’d failed to teach” him. Ultimately, however, Willa can’t resolve the conflict between her children and decides to move on with her own life.