46 pages • 1 hour read
Kathleen RooneyLillian Boxfish Takes a Walk
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2017A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 10-14Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 10 Summary: “Benefactors”
Lillian determines not to go through Washington Square Park because “at night it fills like a horrible candy box with pimps and hookers, with drug dealers and their clients” (100). During the day, she still enjoys eating her lunch there and recalls that on one such day she met Wendy, an aspiring photographer. Wendy introduced herself and asked to take Lillian’s picture. After chatting about poetry and photography, Lillian took Wendy for lunch and discovered that she likes having a young friend. Lillian admires Wendy, “whose Ohio parents raised her to be too humble, in my estimation, but just the right degree of courteous” because she is in many ways a younger version of herself: an artist, living on her own in New York City (105). The fact that Lillian likes dressing up carefully when she sees Wendy prompts her to begin thinking about the way people present themselves and their relationships, an idea that is connected to the concept of advertising. Wendy does not wear a wedding ring, but ironically, Lillian herself still does, and she notes that such symbols “do not always mean what they seem to symbolize” (106).
As Lillian walks, she recalls that Wendy has invited her to a New Year’s Eve party, and she tries to imagine what such a party would look like, finding the thought of her octogenarian self in its midst ridiculous. Nevertheless, she thinks that she might stop by anyway.
Chapter 11 Summary: “Fleurs de Rocaille”
In August 1933, Lillian moves into her own apartment because Helen is married. Lillian throws a party to which she even invites Olive Dodd—even though she is a “clod” who will not realize that she is unwelcome—because she feels bad excluding her. The party is a success until Olive arrives, made up in a way that other girls make fun of. Olive, drunk, gets angry and says everything that she really thinks about Lillian: She is a fraud for claiming that she never wants to get married, and one day she’ll wake up and realize that her life has no meaning. Lillian responds that Olive can live the life she wants to, but everyone can tell that she’s not happy. Olive storms out and rarely speaks to Lillian after that. Lillian is relieved by the quiet.
Almost a year later, Lillian buys a bottle of Fleur de Rocaille, a perfume that has just become available in America. The next day, Olive comes back from her lunch break reeking of the scent. She says that she has been planning to buy the perfume all along, but Lillian knows that she is just doing it to copy her. Lillian reflects on the differences between herself and Olive as she heads into Chester’s office to have her first drafts of ad copy edited—unlike Olive, she can take criticism where warranted. Yet lately, at night, she has been feeling anxious.
Chapter 12 Summary: “A Fireman’s Axe and a Dracula Cape”
In 1984, Lillian continues on her walk, thinking about her marriage to Max and the city landmarks that mark the passage of time, including the Port Authority and Twin Towers. Her reverie is interrupted by a man in a limousine offering to drive her to her destination. Lillian tells him that she is meeting family for dinner and can walk just fine, but he is worried. The other day, he tells her, he saw a seven-foot-tall man wearing nothing but a Dracula cape run into Central Park carrying a fireman’s axe. Lillian assures him that she is fine but wonders if everyone sees her as old and feeble.
She recalls that, years ago, her mother told her that Lillian is unhappy because she uses her intelligence to manipulate people. Lillian accepts this—it is what her job is, after all—but regards it as a skill rather than a flaw. However, it is a skill that she cannot turn off when she leaves work, and she is frustrated to realize that her mother is right.
Chapter 13 Summary: “A Flaw in the Design”
On Friday, August 3, 1934, Lillian goes to buy a rug for her apartment. She finds a beautiful but expensive one at Macy’s. Max, the rug buyer, introduces himself, and it is love at first sight for them both. Max explains the rug’s qualities that make it valuable, including why each one is woven with a small flaw that its weaver doesn’t correct. Lillian buys the rug and Max offers to deliver it that night and take her out to dinner. They spend the weekend together.
Before meeting Max, her job and her life had begun to feel mundane, but the romance makes Lillian feel “fresh and happy again” (140). Nevertheless, she worries about what she stands to lose by loving someone so much. They announce their engagement. Lillian admits that the inversion of traditional husband-and-wife roles is part of what appeals to her, including that she is the older and more successful of the two, which puts him apart from the other men she has known, for whom “I would deign to pull you up to my level, hardworking girl, was a theme they all played in one key or another” (137). However, her doubts grow as the people she knows and even the newspapers respond with incredulity; nevertheless, Lillian knows that this is true love rather than the sentimental imitations of it that she was mocking.
Chapter 14 Summary: “Mulligan”
When Lillian arrives at Delmonico’s, there are no tables available—it is a busy night, the hostess reminds her, though Lillian tries to explain her mission to get a do-over of that lunch with Max. As she’s leaving, a woman who overheard her explanation invites her to join her family for dinner. They eat and Lillian converses with their daughter, Penny. After the meal, Lillian is so happy that she is in tears. Excusing herself to go to the bathroom, she pays the bill for the family and leaves without saying goodbye.
She remembers that these chance meetings with people who knock her out of her routine are why she loves walking in the city. She decides to walk to Wendy’s party.
Chapters 10-14 Analysis
Marriage, motherhood, and relationships form the crux of the conflicts and rising action in these chapters, which demonstrate The Evolving Roles of Women in 20th-Century America. Like Lillian, Wendy is married—she says—but is not a traditional wife. Lillian’s relationship with Wendy emphasizes her desire to draw a contrast between her life as a professional and her life as a mother, noting that Wendy “is my friend, not my child, and thus our rapport has been unfraught and egalitarian, unburdened by guilt or disappointment” (104). On the other hand, Gian has been “one constant emergency, one ritual madness, one wrecker and remaker of myself” (104). Lillian’s relationship with Wendy has reminded her of the person she was before she became a wife and mother, and this highlights the fact that women increasingly have choices that prevent them from being defined solely by these nurturing roles.
Olive’s invitation to Lillian’s party connects with Lillian’s image of herself and reveals more about her values. Lillian has only invited her for the sake of not excluding anyone, and the argument between them emphasizes her distaste for Olive’s insistence on believing in sentimental advertising and presenting a false image of herself to the world. She notes that even though she “decked herself out in bohemian trappings” (111), she still wants to find a “boy” to ask her father’s permission to marry her. Lillian scoffs at her idea of marriage and everything it represents: a quiet life in the suburbs with a screaming infant and a cheating husband. It provides an opportunity for her to spell out her philosophy on the drawbacks of sentimental, packaged love, but—like the conversation with her mother about her ability to manipulate others—it also reveals a frustrated acknowledgment that her career includes as many pitfalls as it does achievements, and might not be enough to make her happy in the end: “From the peak, of course, all paths lead down” (120). This suggests that, while roles for women are evolving, there are still many obstacles in the way—a point that Olive’s presence makes clear.
Max comes into Lillian’s life at just the right time for her to change her mind. By describing him as a mass of contradictions—high and low, youthful but grounded, masculine but attentive to the design details of the rug she buys—Rooney conveys the conflicts he creates in Lillian’s life. These include those between her outward rejection of sentimental love and her utter devotion to him, and between her early life as a professional and later role as wife and mother. The media frenzy that follows Lillian’s engagement announcement shows the extent to which she had presented herself as immune to love and the public misunderstanding of what she had attempted to convey. She notes that she has been “typecast” as the determined spinster, not someone who simply valued true emotion and independence. By exploring these ideas, Rooney demonstrates the effort that people make to present or advertise themselves to the world in a particular manner, and the difficulty of living an honest life free from illusion or misunderstanding. This reflects the theme of The Influence and Illusion of Advertising.
