44 pages • 1 hour read
Dodie SmithI Capture the Castle
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 1948A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Part 3, Chapters 15-16Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 3: “The Two-Guinea Book: June to October”
Chapter 15 Summary
A week has passed since Cassandra returned from London. She writes in Mortmain’s office in the gatehouse. After returning from London, Stephen packs his things and says goodbye, intending to move to the City full-time to pursue acting. Cassandra receives a telegram from Rose asking her to “please try to understand” (293) without revealing that she has run away with Neil.
Cassandra worries about her father’s mental health and questions whether she has been making enough of an effort to be close with him. She realizes she’s afraid of him but doesn’t know why. She confronts Mortmain in his office about what he’s been working on. He becomes irritated and tries to force her out, violently throwing her across the room. His anger vanishes when he realizes he has hurt her. He confirms that he has been working, collecting materials and inspiration, but that his creative process requires secrecy. She sits quietly in his office as her mother used to, which comforts him as he has lost confidence in his writing ability.
Mortmain goes to bed, after which Cassandra plans to lock Mortmain in Belmotte Tower as an inducement to write. Cassandra hopes that it will psychologically reverse any fear that his incarceration created in him. While thinking of this, Cassandra is surprised to find she can envision her mother’s face after years of feeling disconnected from her memory. Thomas agrees to the plan, and they furnish Belmotte Tower with the bare necessities Mortmain will need. They trick him into going inside and lock the door, thereafter ignoring his calls to be let out and only interacting with him to bring him meals. They tell him to write anything, Cassandra jokingly suggesting he write “The cat sat on the mat” (315). Thomas and Cassandra keep watch over the tower from the gatehouse, where Cassandra notes guards of the past must have watched over the prisoners kept in Belmotte Tower. One evening a few days after they first locked Mortmain in the tower, Cassandra notices a car pulling up to the castle. It is Topaz and Simon.
Chapter 16 Summary
Topaz and Simon are looking for Rose, who disappeared after leaving a note for Simon asking for his forgiveness. Cassandra tells them of the telegram; they trace it to a nearby seaside village. Topaz discovers that they have locked Mortmain in the tower and insists they let him out. When he is let out, Topaz instructs Cassandra and Thomas to look over what he has been writing. They find he took Cassandra’s suggestion and wrote “The cat sat on the mat” repeatedly on one page, then composed puzzles, riddles, and crossword clues. Believing the plan has failed, Cassandra drives with Simon to find Rose. They check the village’s hotel first and then go to another inn, where they hear Rose and Neil’s voices through an open window. Cassandra realizes she “could never mean to him what Rose had meant” (330). They return to the castle without confronting Rose and Neil.
The sisters meet once before Rose emigrates to America at a family meeting held in Mrs. Cotton’s apartment. Rose tells Cassandra that Stephen was the one to tell Neil that she didn’t love Simon but that Cassandra did, hoping Neil would break them up and free Simon for Cassandra. Mortmain’s novel is accepted by American and English publishers, and he is paid a large advance.
Cassandra resumes her journal in October. Simon lives at Scoatney and visits daily to help Mortmain. One morning, at Belmotte Tower, he speaks with Cassandra about Mortmain’s work so that she can continue to support him while he takes a trip to America. Cassandra does not understand the importance of puzzles and childhood riddles to her father’s novel, but Simon explains that Mortmain is replicating the process of learning to read. Mortmain’s novel will explore “his philosophy of search-creation” (337) by mimicking the mental processes necessary for that kind of creativity.
Cassandra plans to spend her time writing and learning real shorthand so that she can work as an author’s secretary until she becomes an author herself. Simon asks Cassandra to come to America with him, with the implication that if she did, they would marry. She considers it, recognizing that married life would be “heaven” to her now, but ultimately says she’ll see him on his return to England in the spring. Simon’s proposal was “only an impulse—just as it was when he kissed me on Midsummer Eve” (341). Instead, Cassandra will switch to fiction writing and focus on her artistic career.
Part 3, Chapters 15-16 Analysis
The final chapters of I Capture the Castle focus on the novel’s theme of Authorship and its Obligations and Cassandra’s character arc. Cassandra attempts to confront the dysfunction in her family directly by demanding to know what her father has been working on, even though she feels disconnected from him in general. A love for writing connects them and acts as a bridge to building a closer relationship. While Cassandra and Mortmain are emotionally distant from each other, they also believe in distinct creative philosophies. Therefore, Cassandra’s work in repairing her emotional relationship with her father metaphorically connects their two writing disciplines: her traditional realism and his modernism.
This connection between writing disciplines that Cassandra and Mortmain’s relationship represents is further supported by Mortmain using Cassandra’s suggestion of “The cat sat on the mat” as the beginning of his new novel (315). Here, Mortmain takes inspiration from a source representative of the past in two senses: the “past” of a literary lineage of realism in novel writing that Cassandra practices and the “past” of childhood. Because Mortmain is able to resume writing after Cassandra influences him, Smith argues for a bridge to be made between past and modernity (as discussed by the novel’s theme of The Historic Past and Modernist Thinking).
Realist novels and experimental writing are compared through the final realizations of authorship that Cassandra and Mortmain each experience. Mortmain’s abstract work concentrated on form seeks to simulate an emotional-intellectual experience in the reader, while Cassandra seeks to tell a story through direct language, description, and dialogue. Simon’s theory of Mortmain’s new writing as a process of “search-creation” applies to Cassandra’s writing as well, as she began her journal without a story—she was in a state of searching. Then, through the lives of her family, she discovered a story and how to compose it for a reader—the process of creation. Again, this connection is underlined in the novel by the fact that Cassandra’s contribution to Mortmain’s new writing is the very first lines of his novel; their authorships, once discovered, are dependent upon one another.
Cassandra ends her journal after discovering her authorship and finalizing the story of her family and the Cottons. Cassandra’s goal in starting the journal was to “capture” the castle or describe her family to better understand and connect with them. It isn’t until Cassandra confronts her father (and, by extension, her father’s authorship) that she can connect again with her mother’s memory. She feels her mother’s presence in Mortmain’s gatehouse office, then again in Belmotte Tower, allowing her to once again picture her mother’s face (307). Confronting the figure of a mother has two implications for Cassandra. First, she better understands her sexuality and gendered social expectations from her experiences with Simon, Stephen, and caring for her male family members. Second, Cassandra’s character arc and her concept of authorship depend upon her completing the journal’s initial task of capturing. To finish the journal, Cassandra needed to recapture her mother’s memory. With this done, Cassandra can now embark on a career as an aspiring novelist, a financially and romantically independent woman, and a dedicated member of her family.
