50 pages • 1 hour read
Anita ShreveThe Pilot's Wife
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1998A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Sense of Self In Relationship to Others
When The Pilot’s Wife begins, Kathryn Lyons is devastated by the loss of her husband, Jack. She believes she and Jack had a good marriage, despite the distance that had grown between them over the years. Kathryn is adamant, up until Muire’s disclosure, that Jack could not be having an affair: “How devastatingly complete her trust in him had been” (224). Even after she finds out about his relationship with Muire, she initially believes it was just an affair. However, over the course of the novel, Kathryn is forced to question her relationship with Jack more fundamentally and, in the end, realize that Muire, and not Kathryn, is the pilot’s wife. Kathryn is forced to reconsider her identity as apart from Jack’s.
Before Kathryn finds out about Muire, she excuses the distance in her marriage as inevitable, “simply the normal course of events with a couple who’d been married for a decade” (267). She sees their lack of closeness as a natural development, believing that it is par for the course to ”live in a state of gentle decline, of being infinitesimally, but not agonizingly, less” (107). However, as the novel continues, the extent of the distance between Kathryn and Jack is revealed in such a way that Kathryn cannot deny that there is more to it.
This sense of distance grows greater when she meets Muire and realizes that Muire has known about her all along. Muire makes that clear with her first words to Kathryn: “I’ve been imagining this moment for years” (210). The hurt Kathryn feels from this is immediately compounded by the baby in Muire’s arms that looks exactly like Mattie and is obviously Jack’s child. In the course of their conversation, Kathryn also finds out that Jack and Muire had been married in the Catholic Church, a revelation that is doubly surprising to her when Muire tells her: “He was devout” (224). Kathryn realizes that Jack was not just keeping his other family a secret, but was hiding everything about himself, even his beliefs. Although she had thought of her marriage as good and normal, she is now forced to reconsider this in light of Muire and Jack’s open, honest relationship.
When Kathryn arrives at Muire’s home, she is sure of her position in the dynamic between the three of them. However, she experiences doubt within minutes, and these doubts grow throughout the visit. When Muire says that Jack used to “bid his schedules in reverse” Kathryn hears “the language of a pilot’s wife” (221), her first admission that Muire’s marriage to Jack is the real thing. The idea of Muire as Jack’s more legitimate wife begins to grow in Kathryn’s mind: “Seen in this light, she thought, the question wasn’t so much why Jack had taken up with Muire Boland and married her in a Catholic church, but rather why he hadn’t left Mattie and Kathryn” (264).
Kathryn knows that her marriage is the legally legitimate one, having happened first. But soon she sees that there is more to being Jack’s true wife than legal marriage. After Muire reveals the extent of her and Jack’s intimacy, Kathryn begins to wonder who Jack considered to be his true wife: “In a man’s mind, who was the more important wife—the woman he sought to protect by not revealing the other? Or the one to whom he told all his secrets?” (223) This shift in Katherine’s perspective happens quickly.
When Kathryn leaves Muire’s house, she is confused: Muire’s relationship with Jack is more intimate and honest than her own. They have two children together, which seems to lend further legitimacy to their family: “Muire Boland’s marriage had weight. Two children as opposed to one. Two young children. And then she thought: How could anything that had produced such beautiful children be thought invalid?” (243) Long after her conversation with Muire, as she looks down into the water where the plane went down, she wonders: “Had she been the pilot’s wife, or had Muire Boland?” (275).
Kathryn reconsiders the story from a new perspective. She sees the intimacy and honesty between Jack and Muire as greater than her own marriage. Coupled with the knowledge that Jack stayed with Kathryn for Mattie’s sake, she finally admits the truth. By acknowledging that Muire is truly the pilot’s wife, Kathryn is able to begin moving on, reconnecting with her daughter, and even finding the potential for love with Robert.
Navigating Grief
In The Pilot’s Wife, Shreve gives the reader great insight into the grieving process. One of the ways that she does so is through Mattie. Throughout the novel, Mattie shows a blunt, thoughtful honesty about grief even in the midst of its depths. While Kathryn’s grief is complicated by discovering Jack’s secrets, Mattie’s is for a father whom she unreservedly loved and respected, and whose death has shattered her world.
Julia and Robert offer advice about grieving for Kathryn, but it is Mattie who truly follows it. Julia’s advice, much like her character, is pragmatic—“the only way to the other side is through'' (31). Robert, who has seen grief as a part of his job, agrees with Julia: “You have to let this happen to you [...] It has its own momentum” (67). Kathryn finds this difficult, but because Mattie is young and not involved with the investigation, she is able to face her grief head-on. She immerses herself in grief but at the same time is thoughtful about the process, asking difficult questions and delivering some blunt truths.
Mattie has moments of clarity and honesty. When Kathryn says she would have Mattie attend Jack’s funeral to get closure, Mattie replies: “I don’t want to close anything, Mom. I can’t do that. I have to keep it open as long as I can” (89). She also refuses to accept the platitudes that people use to soothe each other in the wake of tragedy. When Kathryn wants to visit her at Julia’s house, Mattie tells her: “I don’t want you to come here and try to tell me a lot of lies to make things better. Because I don’t want lies right now. It can’t be made better, and I don’t want to pretend. I just want to be left alone” (120). As her mother, Kathryn sometimes has a hard time accepting Mattie’s need for space and time, but cannot refute the resonance in Mattie’s statement.
Luckily, Julia understands Mattie’s grief in a way that Kathryn cannot. She understands, for instance, that Mattie is angry and projecting that anger onto her mother: “She has to have someone to blame, so she’s blaming you. I know it’s irrational. You don’t remember this, but for a time, right after your parents died, you blamed me.” (197). Julia is possibly the only person who can get Kathryn to back away from her daughter: “You understand that just by your presence, you’re tearing each other apart. You can’t bear her grief, and she can’t bear to think of how much you’re hurting” (185). When Mattie wants to leave the house because it reminds her too much of Jack, Kathryn initially pushes back. Julia, however, supports Mattie, offering to take her home. This allows Mattie the freedom to express her grief in her own time and way.
Mattie refuses to be sidetracked by the pressure to behave a certain way, worrying Kathryn: “She doesn’t eat. Sometimes she breaks into hysterical laughter. She doesn’t seem to have the appropriate reaction to anything anymore” (155). Kathryn sees Mattie as “brittle” and “fragile,” and yet Mattie grapples with her grief bravely, letting herself work through the process. Kathryn, feeling the social pressures of adulthood, tells Mattie, “[L]ife doesn’t just disintegrate, that we can’t break all the rules,” and Mattie responds by saying that “all the rules had already been broken” (155). She shows maturity in her willingness to face her grief head-on, and her refusal to let anyone else define the way she mourns or her behavior. By the end of the novel, several months after Jack’s death, Mattie has come through her despair. She has not forgotten her father, as evidenced by her fishing with his tackle. However, because she has let herself work through her grief, she has been able to move forward with her memories of her father intact.
Keeping Secrets
Kathryn Lyons thought, until her husband died, that she knew everything about him, their relationship, and their life together. She was secure in their marriage, never even considering the idea that he might have an affair. Throughout the novel, she will come to question everything she thought she knew about her husband, as the extent of Jack’s secret-keeping comes to light. Kathryn is forced to let go of everything she thought she knew as she learns of his betrayal. As she reconsiders her own memories, she reinterprets events that she thought she understood from a new perspective.
Kathryn’s first inkling as to how good Jack is at keeping secrets comes, not with the revelation of his secret family, but much earlier in their relationship, when he and Julia collude to buy the house at Fortune’s Rocks. Kathryn is surprised that Jack would make such a big decision or plan without her: “How could he? she wonders. About such an important matter? [...] Jack is good at secrets'' (48). In another example, Kathryn considers Jack’s childhood and capacity to compartmentalize his dissatisfaction with his job: “He had seemed to put his discontent into the same place he had put his childhood—a sealed vault” (66). Although these statements are innocent at the time, their implications resonate differently as the novel unfolds and Kathryn uncovers more of his secrets.
Kathryn senses the distance growing between her and Jack, but sees it as a natural part of a good marriage. However, looking back and in light of Jack’s secrets, she understands the distance in another way. She can even mark the approximate time that she felt their distance truly begin, and realizes, once she meets Muire, that it coincides with the beginning of Jack’s relationship with his other wife, approximately five years earlier: “Was it when Mattie was eleven? Twelve? Jack had seemed to withdraw ever so slightly from Kathryn. Nothing she could point to or articulate exactly” (63).
Later, when Kathryn understands the complete picture, she will become angry—not just about Jack’s betrayal, but the way in which Jack resisted all her attempts at reconciliation. He even seemed content to allow her to blame herself for their distance: “She felt foolish, exposed for a fool, and she wondered if she didn’t mind that most of all” (226). Jack convinced her he had nothing to hide, more interested in preserving his secrets than salvaging their relationship.
Kathryn begins to understand that many of his secrets stem from his love of risk, which led him into a secret second marriage and smuggling for the IRA. She “speculated on the intensity of love that constant separation might engender. The intensity that being furtive and secret would naturally create” (221). Kathryn now understands that for Jack, secretive behavior would make his relationship with Muire more attractive. In fact, Kathryn realizes that those same secrets, which Muire was privy to, were a source of intimacy between them. As Muire says, “Jack and I did not have secrets” (218).
Throughout The Pilot’s Wife, Kathryn is faced with Jack’s betrayal on a number of levels. Yet, as she looks back over their life together, she realizes that his capacity for secrets and betrayal was on display the entire time.
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