53 pages • 1 hour read
Laura PurcellThe Silent Companions
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.
Symbols & Motifs
Fire
Content Warning: The source material and this guide discuss violence toward women (including implications of rape and incest), child loss, miscarriage, violent death from murder and execution, the mistreatment of someone with a disability, animal abuse, substance use, mental illness, and racism against a Romani person.
Fire has always been a part of Elsie’s life, as her family owns a factory that produces matches and potent fire starters. Even after Elsie moves to The Bridge, she keeps matches in her pocket. Whether a token of her past or a safety measure for the future, the matches symbolize a spark that resides inside Elsie. She has endured tremendous pain in her life, yet she still has a will to survive and thrive. Fire also represents comfort and safety. With the constant damp chill and darkness that permeate The Bridge, a fire must always be kept going. The warmth of the hearth and the candle flame bring Elsie comfort in the cavernous, unwelcoming house.
The presence of fire symbolizes the characters’ desire to rid themselves of the dark forces that haunt them. As a child, Elsie used flames to eradicate the evil of her abusive father when she intentionally set a fire in the factory to create a diversion and then murdered him. At The Bridge, she orders the staff to burn the silent companions, desperate to cleanse the house of their evil influence. After killing Hetta, Anne welcomes the flames that await her, believing they will cleanse her soul. Yet, just as fire can purify, it also can scar and destroy. Elsie compares her traumatic memories to flares: “Memory flickered like a tinderbox. She refused to let the flint spark” (2). In the hospital, Elsie’s burn scars are a constant reminder of the fire that consumed the house and nearly killed Elsie. The destruction of the Bainbridge home marks the end of an era and should symbolize a chance for Elsie to start again. However, just as the silent companions earlier returned like phoenixes from the ashes, Hetta appears at St Joseph’s to condemn Elsie to death, forcing Elsie to recognize that immolation can’t entirely free one from the burdens of history and that some forms of evil are fireproof.
The Bridge
The Bridge serves as the centerpiece of Laura Purcell’s Gothic tale, as the once grand but now decaying estate reflects the residents’ physical and spiritual deterioration. The crumbling house, shattered windows, and overgrown gardens indicate the rot that has spread within. The narrative describes its effect on Elsie: “The very fabric of the building was bad […] this place made her nervous” (214). The silent companions and other supernatural phenomena within The Bridge underscore its role as a liminal space, underscoring The Thin Line Between the Supernatural and Reality. It becomes a literal bridge to the past as characters from prior generations reappear in spirit and inhabit the home. The house itself also comes alive, becoming a character and embodying the evil forces that torment the Bainbridge family. With doors that lock and unlock by themselves, unexplainable sounds, and rooms that transmogrify from pristine to dilapidated overnight, the house leaves Elsie questioning her rationality: “She did not like being alone in this house: she felt it was watching her. Sensing her movements within its walls” (54). The strange sounds and frightening occurrences create constant tension and fear. Elsie feels the weight lifted when Jolyon takes her to London, but the house soon draws her back, as if she is tethered to it by some inexorable force.
The Bridge also represents the Bainbridge family’s history and heritage, developing the theme of The Violence of Class and Social Status. It is a physical manifestation of the family’s legacy—a grand country estate that signifies tremendous wealth and privilege. However, when Elsie arrives, she learns the house hasn’t been lived in for decades due to its frightening past and because the Bainbridges are a dying breed. The house now holds little but the relics and memories of past generations, making it a repository of family history. Elsie and Sarah quickly realize these heirlooms symbolize the burden of the past that weighs heavily on the current generation: “She had never felt so overpowered, so swallowed as she did in this house” (138). In opening the garret, Elsie releases the Bainbridge family secrets, and they come to life in the form of the silent companions. Meanwhile, the Bridge’s remote location and imposing structure intensify Elsie’s physical and emotional isolation, mirroring her emotional entrapment as she struggles with her grief, guilt, and the oppressive legacy of not just the Bainbridge family but the Livingstone family secrets as well. Being inside the house gives Elsie a feeling of inescapable doom, as if she were being chased by something evil from the past that is pushing her into future devastation.
Children
Though no children live in The Bridge, babies and children are a pervasive motif in the story. When Elsie first visits the nursery, it appears to her as a pristine room, freshly prepared for her unborn child. However, Mrs. Holt reveals the room as a haunted, moldering place where Rupert and Mabel experienced a poltergeist. The first silent companions to appear are children: a young girl and then a young boy that represent Hetta and her Romani friend Merripen. After Elsie sees all the repeated names in the village cemetery, Mr. Underwood explains that children don’t survive long in the impoverished area, so their parents recycle the same names. Rather than hope and the possibility of a future, children and pregnancy become associated with death due to poverty and lack of appropriate medical care. The pervasiveness of infant and child loss emphasizes the fragility of innocence and—for a family like the Bainbridges—the fragility of the family wealth and name, which are passed on through progeniture. This in turn associates children with the burden of inheritance that Elsie keenly feels as she carries the last Bainbridge heir: “For Elsie there was nothing but fear. Fear for the baby. Fear of the baby” (58).
Elsie’s feelings toward her unborn child are further complicated by her abuse at the hands of her parents and her knowledge that she resorted to murder to free herself of it. Implicitly, she fears she will be an unfit mother, which speaks to children’s relationship to the transmission of trauma across generations. The troubled bond between Anne and Hetta further develops this idea. While the potion Anne used to conceive Hetta may not have made her daughter evil, as Anne ultimately concludes, there is some suggestion that it caused her disability and ensuing mistreatment. When Anne kills Hetta, she forces her daughter and the generations that come after her to pay the price for her own unchecked ambition and ill-fated decisions. Rupert’s son’s death, coupled with the incineration of The Bridge, marks the end of the Bainbridge family line, the only progeny left behind being Hetta’s disembodied spirit.
