46 pages • 1 hour read
Elizabeth StroutOh, William
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2021A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
Clothes: Hand-Me-Downs and City Outfits
Clothes are a crucial motif that tracks the social ascent of Catherine and Lucy. Fashionable clothing signifies middle-class status that enables these women to establish themselves as modern urbanites who have left behind their undesirable rural origins. Catherine especially is a preppy, immaculate dresser who has fine things like white embroidered nightgowns and white loafers. The color white, which easily shows dirt, is a symbol of Catherine’s leisured lifestyle and the fact that she has left manual labor in her past. While Catherine initially suggests to Lucy that she too will “live” in white loafers as she sees her daughter-in-law struggle with aspects of middle-class life, she concocts a transition wardrobe for Lucy, where she imagines that she is buying her things that are better than her original clothes, but not so fancy as to be intimidating. Similarly, Catherine gives Lucy her old nightgowns because while they are fine, they have already been used and are therefore not too much for her. Lucy likes the second-hand nightgowns and also favors thrift-store clothing for its unique style. However, Catherine, who has come from poverty, is sensitive to signifiers of deprivation in Lucy’s thrift store coat and so gives it away. Although Lucy is resistant to Catherine’s interference in her wardrobe and by extension the type of person she should be, she is too insecure to present her own vision of herself until Catherine dies.
When Lois meets Catherine, her shock at the urban youthfulness of Catherine’s style which “wasn’t something you’d find anyone wearing up here” (183), indicates her dismay at the deceptive kind of transformation clothes can produce. To Lois, Catherine is not only posing as far fancier than she is, but as younger too. Catherine’s affinity for youth is a testament to her wish for continued relevance. Lois’s struggle for words as she contemplates the “almost sleeveless dress. Just little caps over the shoulders” and the “white—oh, what is it called, you know the word […] that stuff that goes around—” (183), shows her astonishment at her mother’s techniques of integration in the metropolitan middle class. Lucy, who can supply the missing word, “piping,” and understands that Lois is referring to Catherine’s “favorite everyday dress” (183), has a greater context for Catherine’s presentation. Lucy’s awareness of aesthetic terms that Lois is ignorant of, indicates how Lucy is privileged with inclusion in the world of fashion and while Lois’ rural status makes her lag behind. However, Strout insists on the subjectivity of the value of fashion, as Lois disdains what Lucy partly admires.
The Maine Landscape
The rural Maine landscape with its neglected veterans and long stretches of isolation becomes a symbol of both Lucy and William’s ancestral past and their unconscious states. Initially, Lucy finds the landscape, which features “barely another car in sight” (109), frightens her with its contrast to bustling New York City, the place populated with the people she loves. However, the landscape turns out not to be too strange, but too similar to the unhappy one of her childhood. She finds herself confronting the feelings of loneliness, entrapment, and social rejection that she has long repressed. The impoverished and mentally struggling veterans who appear in the most random places haunt her and remind her of her war-traumatized father. Paradoxically, she also finds that the landscape consoles her for her parents’ losses, and at Fort Fairfield she is “thrilled” by the sensation of “suddenly much sky […] because I had grown up with sky all around me” (128). By being in a similar landscape, Lucy can heal some of the guilt she felt at abandoning her parents and their way of life.
William is bewildered by the Maine landscape, though he tries to control it by researching in advance. He distracts himself from the emotionally fraught potential meeting with Lois by touring the surrounding landscape. As William accumulates knowledge, he holds onto the illusion of control over his life that he had at the beginning of the novel. However, when Lois takes control by refusing to meet him, thus derailing the purpose of his trip, he is left to drive around to the places on the itinerary Lois describes on the theme of Catherine’s past. William’s restlessness in taking up this mission indicates his propensity to choose impulsive action over confronting his feelings. Lucy sees that when William contemplates the tiny scale of Catherine’s house “his face looked so bewildered, it made me ache for him” (196). Here, the realization of Catherine’s extreme rural impoverishment unmoors William as much as the notions of his father as a German soldier. His describing the place as “a horror movie” indicates his wish to dissociate and distance himself from what he is seeing (197).
Lucy’s Memoir
Lucy’s memoir—a metafictional reference to Strout’s previous novel, My Name is Lucy Barton—is a symbol of Lucy’s wide readership and success as a writer. It also symbolizes the inherent incompleteness of every story, and the requirement of a sequel to explore elements of the first book that were important but left ambiguous. Lucy’s prominence in rural places like Maine, where Lois is a fan, and the Deep South indicates that despite her metropolitan dwelling, her fiction transcends the urban-rural divide and speaks truths to the white working classes who fell left behind by globalization and modernity. The reader’s realization of Lucy’s prominence as an author, who has achieved international renown as the narrative progresses, gives the impression of her strength in the face of William’s weakness. Through Lucy’s success and William’s career frustration, Strout suggests the triumph of a feminine empathetic sensibility over a masculine scientific one (Kellaway, Kate. Interview: Elizabeth Strout ‘I’ve Thought About Death Every Day Since I Was Ten’. The Observer. 17 Oct 2021). This is supported by the novel when Lucy gains access to privileged spaces such as the prisoner of war collection at the library and Lois’s home, where William does not.
The most metafictional parts of the novel occur in the interview with Lois, when she quotes verbatim from Lucy’s memoir, saying, “your mother-in-law introduced you to people by saying, This is Lucy, she comes from nothing” (177). Lucy, and readers who are familiar with My Name is Lucy Barton, cannot miss the accuracy of Lois’ citation. Lucy is almost incredulous at the direct quote, in addition to Lois’s hardcover copy of the memoir, which indicates that she bought it early and takes it seriously. However, while Lois may admire Lucy’s writing, her real motivation for intimacy with the memoir is to learn more about the woman who abandoned her and the life she went on to live. When Lois finds herself unmentioned in the memoir, she re-experiences the sense of being left behind and overlooked. Her insistence that she is written into a new memoir indicates Lois’ sense that she is entitled to at least as positive a portrayal as Catherine in Lucy’s work. Lucy experiences “a strange sense of unreality” at hearing Lois’s gripe about being left out of the original memoir (187), since the book is the story of Lucy’s life and experiences, and she did not know that Lois existed when writing it. Lucy is startled by her writing’s power to make reputations and upset feelings, in addition to the fact that she, someone who is so sensitive to invisibility, could have forgotten someone. However, in the end, Lois gets her wish and emerges not only as a solid character in Lucy’s first-person narrative of Oh William!, but as a motif for Lucy’s thoughts on childhood development and abandonment.
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By Elizabeth Strout
