The Gown

“Then the spun-out wretchedness of the years that followed, and all the while her certainty had grown that this was all she would ever know. The house on Morley Road and the workrooms at Hartnell, and the anonymous spaces in between. This life, this succession of gray days and cold nights and loved ones forever lost, was the furthest her dreams would ever stretch.”

Ann has been beaten down by the war and the postwar economy, which shows how hard life in Britain is. Ann has lost so much that she can’t dream of better things to come. This dreary statement encapsulates Ann’s state of mind at the beginning of the book; she doesn’t expect anything to change.

“I do know I wouldn’t trade places with them for all the…well, for all the coal and tea and electricity in the world […] I wouldn’t mind being rich. But for everyone to know my name and expect something from me? Watch every move I make? That’d be awful.”

Ann and Milly are arguing about the royals. Ann wouldn’t trade places with them despite their wealth because she can’t imagine the pressure that comes with it and how stressful that would be. Ann is sympathetic toward the royals despite their unearned wealth, and she demonstrates the prevailing royalist sympathies of the time.

“She handed it over, squelching a thrum of panic when he held it up and compared her face to the photograph. He had no power over her. He was not the police […] or the Gestapo. He would write down her passport number and proceed to do nothing with it. That was all.”

Miriam is terrified of handing over her passport to the hotel clerk, which should seem like an everyday gesture, because of her experience living as a Jew in Nazi-occupied France. It is a small moment but one that shows Miriam’s mindset and how hard it was for her during the war.

“Catching her breath and letting the pain fade from her arms. It had been almost two years since her liberation, and still she was weak. What had the American doctor said? Good food and rest and careful exercise, and above all patience, and she would one day be herself again. He had been a kind man, shaken to his core by the suffering he had seen, and he had done his best to help. But he had been wrong, for no amount of fresh air or nourishing food or pleasant walks in the sunshine could ever restore what had been taken from her.”

Miriam is still struggling two years after being released from prison, not only physically but also mentally. She is dealing with grief and trauma, and the crushing guilt of surviving while so much had been taken from her. She is withdrawn at the beginning of the novel and not sure how she is going to keep going forward.

“She had hoped to discern some slight evidence of guilt, of shame, in his gaze. What she had seen instead was hatred. Corrosive, incendiary hatred, and she had looked around the courtroom and recognized it in the eyes of others there, too.”

Miriam had just watched the person responsible for putting her family in prison pardoned for his crimes, and she saw the hatred still in his eyes. Even though the war was over, people’s attitudes toward Jews hadn’t changed. This hatred causes Miriam to emigrate to somewhere she felt safer. The war is over, but that doesn’t mean the attitudes that caused the war have changed.

“The door clicked shut behind him. She locked it, paused until his footsteps faded away, and then took her first easy breath of the day. Alone. Free of strangers hemming her in, free of half-remembered words and phrases that tugged at her brain like fishhooks. Free of the ingrained need to smooth her every expression into a neutral and unthreatening blank.”

During the war, Miriam was constantly in fear of being watched and continues to live with the effects of this experience. The war is over externally, but the marks that were left internally are still there.

“Once Milly was gone, she would be alone, with no one to notice if she was sad, or sick, or struggling. She’d be on her own, with nothing but her own strength of will to sustain her. Never mind that it was already worn thin from nearly a decade of grief and strain of hunger and war. She would manage. She’d find a lodger and continue to pay the rent on time. She would manage, somehow, and spring would come, and her garden would grow green and bright. And she would survive.”

Ann feels overwhelmingly lonely at the thought of Milly leaving; she’s endured so many hardships, and now her closest friend is leaving the country. But Ann decides she will survive through the force of her will. Survival is one of the themes of the book. Despite the things thrown at people, especially women, they survive. Ann shows that despite the terrible things she has experienced, she will endure because survival is a mindset.

“She stepped out the door, through the little gate, and began to walk down the street. She held the tin of peonies close to her chest and let the scent of them fill her nose. She walked through the gathering dusk, breathing in their magical scent, and with every step her heart grew lighter, gladder, and more hopeful. She had made a new friend. She had found her new home. And tomorrow would be better than today.”

Miriam feels a ray of hope knowing that she has finally found a friend. The peonies symbolize friendship because Ann saw that Miriam admired the peonies, and, even though she didn’t understand Miriam’s deeper connection to the gift, she gave them freely. This gift marks the beginning of their friendship.

“There was a reason that Nan had left the embroideries to her. Nan hadn’t wanted to talk about her life in England, or maybe she hadn’t felt able to do so, but she had saved the flowers for more than sixty years, and she had put Heather’s name on the box, and she had known that Heather would look for answers. She must have expected it—and that, in turn, meant she must have wanted Heather to know. It was the only thing Nan had ever asked her to do, and she couldn’t stand the idea of letting her down.”

Heather is feeling doubt about pursuing her grandmother’s past, but she keeps coming back to the knowledge that she left the embroidery for her. Heather is frustrated and confused because she wishes her grandmother told her about her past, and she is having a hard time finding information. She is angry but also feels guilty about letting her grandmother down. This conundrum continues to drive Heather to figure out Ann’s past.

“Even worse, she found herself softening her accent. Not much, not enough to sound as if she were aping her betters. But enough to shrink the distance between Mayfair and Barking by a few miles. It was a stupid thing to do, for he’d heard her friends talking, and only Carmen, who was actually the daughter of a barrister in Cambridge, had an accent that would pass in polite society. The rest of them, Miriam excepted, spoke like ordinary people, with ordinary accents.”

Ann feels insecure about her accent because it is lower class. Ann is with Jeremy and feels insecure, so she tries to make herself sound more upper-class and immediately regrets it. This incident shows the gulf between classes—something so simple as an accent can place where a person is in society.

“Ann had never expected to be the girl in the fairy tale. She didn’t believe in them, for a start, and she wasn’t certain she believed in this. She wouldn’t allow herself to believe. But did it matter? What was the harm in having supper with him? He did seem nice, and perhaps he was the sort of man who honestly wouldn’t care that she was the daughter of a motor mechanic and lived in a council house in Essex. That she lived from pay packet to pay packet and spent her days making clothes for women like his sister. Perhaps he was simply a nice man who found her appealing and wanted to get to know her better.”

Ann is practical and doesn’t know what to think of Jeremy’s intentions. She wants to believe in the fairy tale, but she looks at the class differences and doubts their relationship can work. This passage underscores the class differences between Jeremy and Ann and how people in England at this time didn’t date outside their class.

“Wealthy and indolent and so convinced of their own superiority that their disdain for everyone else fairly dripped from the tips of their manicured fingers. She’d noticed them straightaway. Their accents, all drawling vowels and clipped consonants, were so rarefied that even she could discern a difference in the way they spoke. And there was a languor in the way the women moved, as if dancing a waltz with an attractive man, or raising a glass of lemonade to their lips, were praiseworthy feats of endurance.”

The upper class has a different aura about it. The way they speak and move is different and sets them apart from ordinary people. They think they are better than people like Miriam and Ann, so they act like it, and everyone is aware of their status by how they act. These facts of life in a class system confuse Ann because while Jeremy often seems sincere, his affection is hardly believable to her given the strictures of their society.

“A few, she noticed, wore a kippa. The sign almost stopped her in her tracks. Did they not realize it was dangerous to be seen so in public? But no. They were in England. And this was the East End. Thousands of Jews, she had heard, lived and worked here. Had been here for hundreds of years.”

Miriam sees Jews worshipping and congregating for the first time since she’s been in England. She feels panicked before realizing they can worship freely and gather because they aren’t in Nazi-occupied France. Miriam still experiences the effect of trauma from the war, so she is shocked by the sight but comforted by the reminder they live and worship freely in England.

“How she yearned to hear, after so long, the beloved prayers and invocations. To repeat the words her grandfather had taken such pains to teach her. To belong, once again. But she had nothing to cover her hair, and the service had finished, besides, and Mr. Kaczmarek was waiting for her, and she wasn’t sure that she could bear it. To hear and see and sing would be to remember. To let the wounds be opened once more, and the bitter pain of loss consume her. Not today. Not yet.”

Miriam debates whether to go into the synagogue. She decides against going in because she isn’t ready to revisit her past; the good things from her memories, like her grandfather saying the prayers, have become tangled up with the bad. Miriam leaves but determines that one day she will be ready to face the past and heal.

“Life here is a far sight less dangerous than it was during the war. I won’t dispute that. But it’s also a good deal more miserable. The nation is beggared, the empire is crumbling, and we just lived through a winter where people froze to death in their own homes because there wasn’t coal enough to go around. No wonder everyone is over the moon about this royal wedding.”

Walter and Miriam are discussing the situation in England. Living conditions actually became worse after the war because the economy was in shambles. Walter explains the suffering and how much the royal wedding is a relief and a cause for excitement because people finally have something to celebrate. Yet, others are shocked to see a display of pomp and excess while the common people suffer.

“It was more than a little crazy, her coming here, since London was ridiculously expensive and there was no guarantee she’d find out anything about Nan, and she’d probably come home to an eye-watering credit-card bill and be no closer, on top of everything else, to finding a new Job. It was impractical and self-indulgent and she still was a little bit nervous that Nan would be upset that Heather was prying into secrets she’d kept for almost seventy years. Yet the box had said For Heather. Nan had wanted her to have the embroideries. She had kept them all those years so Heather might one day find them, and wonder, and understand there was more to her grandmother than she had ever imagined or known.”

Heather arrives in London but doubts she is on the right path to finding answers about Ann’s past. Heather wavers, but the box from her grandmother keeps her going. If Ann didn’t want her to figure it out, she wouldn’t have left the box to her. Heather realizes that maybe this was the way Ann had of telling her about the past, being unable to reveal it to her when she was alive.

“Nothing, apart from the knowledge that his interest made absolutely no sense. She had nothing to offer him. Nothing. She wasn’t beautiful or witty, she had scarcely a penny to her name, and she didn't have so much as a seed packet’s worth of charisma to sprinkle around. So why did he persist? Why wasn’t he ringing up one of his sister’s glamorous friends?"

Ann doesn’t know why Jeremy is interested in her. She knows herself and her past, that no man has been interested in her, so when this movie-star-looking man pursues her, she is skeptical. She is not traditionally beautiful, nor does she have qualities that would make someone like him interested, so she is confused. Ann shows her view of herself but also plants seeds of doubt about Jeremy’s intentions. She foreshadows the final revelations about his character.

“Perhaps he’d been distracted by the public’s anxiety over how the princess would find enough clothing coupons for her gown, and the resulting deluge of donations that women across Britain were posting to Buckingham Palace. Of course it was illegal to use someone else’s coupons, so all of them had been sent back with a thank-you note from some royal secretary. Sheer stupidity, Miriam had thought, but she’d wisely said nothing to anyone at Hartnell. They all seemed charmed by the idiocy of people giving up precious coupons to send to a princess who lived in a palace. What was next—people sending their butter and sugar rations so the bride and groom might have a larger wedding cake?”

Miriam doesn’t understand the English people’s response to the royal wedding, and how people can adore them so much that they would sacrifice their rations. Miriam grew up in France, which didn’t have a monarchy, and then she lived under the Nazi regime. She can’t understand the love for their rulers that the English have. This example shows how much people needed joy and something to celebrate after the war.

“The doubt pushed at her, woke her in the middle of the night, curdled the food in her stomach. But she was stubborn, and it became easier, after a while, to ignore all else and continue on. Worrying about what would become of her work once it was finished was a waste of time, she told herself. The act of creation was what mattered. If she were to set aside her ideas now, if she were to turn her back on them, she would be abandoning her parents and grandfather and the millions who had been vilified, betrayed, tortured, murdered, erased. It was unthinkable. It was impossible.”

Miriam wants to make her embroideries, but she is scared to keep going, and doubts plague her. She pushes herself on because she wants the world to remember her family and all the other Jews who suffered under the Nazi regime. Miriam’s art is her way of remembering them and making sure the world does too, She carries her family’s legacy on.

“What man in his position would admit to knowing a girl like her? He hadn’t introduced her, because he’d at last been confronted with the truth. He might swear that it didn’t matter, that times were changing and things like class and money and accents didn’t matter, but he was wrong. It was wrong and unfair that they mattered, but they did. Even if, by some miracle, they could ever have managed to paper over those differences in their private life, there would always be someone who would refuse to acknowledge her in a restaurant, or who turned away when she tried to engage them in conversation, or who whispered about her just loudly enough that she heard every word.”

Jeremy refuses to acknowledge he knows Ann in front of his friends, and Ann knows that it has to do with her class. She beats herself up that she could have imagined a fairy tale ending with his man when it was clear that they were from different worlds. This passage reveals the impossibility of marrying outside of one’s class at this time, and Ann uses this realization as an occasional to blame herself rather than Jeremy. In her mind, it isn’t his fault; the difference between their classes keeps them apart.

“Once, long ago, she had loved dogs. She’d never had one of her own, but her parents’ next-door neighbors had kept spaniels, and she had loved playing with them and brushing their silky fur. They had been such sweet animals, and she’d had such fun teaching them how to sit and fetch and shake her hand. Before Ravensbrück she had loved dogs. In that place of horror, she had seen what evil men could train a dog to do. She had seen what happened to prisoners who tried to run, and so she forced herself, now, to stand perfectly still. The dogs were far less likely to attack her if she didn’t move or resist in any way.”

Miriam lived through the concentration camps, which affects her perception of everything, including dogs. She is sad and frustrated because she used to love dogs, but then she saw how men could use them, and she couldn’t force herself to not be afraid of them. The war and the camps changed her perception of things she used to love, and she doesn’t know how to stop her stress reaction. Even this far into the novel, Miriam is still dealing with her trauma, which shows that it is something that takes time to recover from, and a person may never fully be able to.

“‘I had a position at Maison Rébé within the week, and I moved to new lodgings as well, and when the census of Jews was made I was not counted. I never wore the star. I lied. I hid. And I never saw my family again.’

‘You lived,’ he said, wiping his eyes with a second, equally crumpled handkerchief.”

Miriam talks about how she survived the war and the survivor’s guilt she experiences because of it. Because Miriam lied and hid, she lived. Her family did not. Walter tells her not to feel guilty because she lived and that’s what her family wanted. Victims should not blame themselves. Miriam’s admission here shows the progress in her healing.

“‘Nan went to the royal wedding and she never told me?’ Had she ever known anything about her grandmother? What, between them, had been real?’

‘No, ma belle. Do not be upset with her. Ann had her reasons for not speaking of the past, and it was a usual thing, in those days, to keep our secrets. It astonishes me, you know, the way you young people are so honest about everything. Every moment of grief or trauma or loss, laid bare for all to see on your Facebook and Twitter.’”

Heather is upset that her grandmother didn’t tell her about exciting life events, like going to the royal wedding. Miriam reminds Heather of the differences between their generations and that Ann was used to keeping things secret because they lived through a war. Secrets were normal, which Heather doesn’t understand. Miriam encourages Heather to have understanding toward her grandmother.