55 pages • 1 hour read
Beth LincolnThe Swifts: A Dictionary of Scoundrels
Fiction | Novel | Middle Grade | Published in 2023A 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
Swift House
Swift House symbolizes the Swift family. This mystery novel belongs to the country house murder subgenre of detective fiction, and the entire story occurs at the isolated estate. The house takes on even greater significance because Lincoln uses literary devices to portray the manor as a character: “The House looked very fine. The lawns had been swept clean of leaves, the hedge maze had been trimmed, and the statues had been scrubbed behind the ears” (3). This example of personification creates the impression that the house is another Swift striving to look their best for Aunt Schadenfreude’s funeral rehearsal. The author emphasizes that “the House is a member of the Family” by giving the home a gravestone in the cellar like all the living Swifts (288), and the two definitions carved on the stone underline the home’s meaning as a symbol of the family as a whole: “HOUSE / Noun / i. A place of abode, a dwellinge / ii. A family, royal or of noble lineage” (288). Swift House plays an essential role in the novel’s genre, structure, and characterization.
Like the family who calls it home, Swift House is ancient, eccentric, and brimming with perils and possibility. The structure has stood since the days of Vile, Cantrip, and Gramercy, the three ancestors who exert the strongest influence on the plot. Just as the Swift family has grown and scattered around the globe over the centuries, the original estate expanded with the construction of wings, a hedge maze, and an artificial lake. These additions cause the house to look as eccentric as the far-flung relatives who return to the ancestral seat for the family reunion: “[W]ith its boxy outline and unexpected tower, the House now rather resembled the head of a rhinoceros” (20). The house also represents the family through their shared socioeconomic status: “[T]he House, like its owners, had come down in the world, and let in the rack and ruin. Mold and dust and shabbiness ruled” (21). The state of the house deteriorates along with the family’s fortunes. In keeping with the complexity of the Swifts’ family dynamics, the house offers both danger and shelter. The building contains deadly booby traps as well as the cozy kitchen, Phenomena’s laboratory, and other beloved locations, just as the Swift family contains both the scheming Candour and the compassionate Fauna. Lincoln uses the house’s symbolic meaning to enhance the happy ending. Atrocious decides to hire a “team of highly skilled contractors and conservationists” to repair the estate (332), which offers hope that the family will heal and grow stronger as a result of their experiences at the reunion as well. As a symbol of the Swifts, Swift House demonstrates the family’s capacity for growth and change.
The Family Dictionary
The family dictionary serves as a motif of the theme of Tradition as an Obstacle to Progress. The Dictionary of the House of Swift is an “ancient, leather-bound monster of a book” with a “gold-embossed cover” and pages illuminated with “intricate, colored designs” (14, 327, 15). The care that the Swifts put into preserving and beautifying the centuries-old book makes clear the great significance they place upon it. The Swifts’ most important custom is “the tradition of naming [their] children using the Family Dictionary” (14), a practice that they believe sets them above people with commonly found names. The book also appears in other traditions. For example, Fauna swears on the dictionary rather than the Bible when she becomes the new matriarch, demonstrating the tome’s sacredness in the Swifts’ eyes. At the end of the novel, this new leader proposes a paradigm shift in the way that the family approaches the dictionary and tradition as a whole:
‘The job of a Dictionary isn’t to tell us what words have to mean—it’s to record us, as we are, and to change alongside us,’ said Fauna. ‘I think it’s time for us, as a Family, to make a fresh entry. To do things because we think it’s the best way, not because it’s how we’ve always done them’ (329).
By suggesting that the Swifts approach the dictionary like descriptivist linguists rather than prescriptivists, Fauna articulates the author’s message that traditions and customs should serve people, not the other way around.
Names
Names function as a motif of The Struggle for Self-Determination. According to the Swift family’s traditional beliefs, a person’s name decides their personality and destiny. Based on this limiting view, Felicity’s ordinary name dooms her to a “perfectly boring, perfectly average” life (19), and Shenanigan cannot help but be “devious and underhanded” (213). As a result, the protagonist chafes against Aunt Schadenfreude’s frequent remark that “[s]he can’t help her name” (18). Shenanigan relishes making mischief, but she wants her actions and choices to be truly her own.
Gravestones are a key iteration of the motif of names. The Swifts commission monuments with their children’s names and definitions so that their “names are quite literally set in stone” from their infancy (45). Thus, the labyrinthine cellar full of living Swifts’ gravestones becomes emblematic of the family’s seemingly inescapable adherence to nominative determinism. The protagonist’s impulse to destroy her gravestone in Chapter 5 represents her desire to break free from external definitions and expectations so that she can decide for herself who she is. In Chapter 30, Candour smashes many gravestones when he stumbles during the climax, signaling that the Swifts will survive his machinations and reach new heights of personal freedom and self-determination. The gravestones’ destruction points toward the positive shifts under the family’s new matriarch, Fauna, who ardently believes that everyone has the right to decide for themselves who they are.
