36 pages • 1 hour read
Mary HoodHow Far She Went
Fiction | Short Story Collection | Adult | Published in 1984A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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BetaStory 2: “Solomon’s Seal”Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Story 2 Summary
The collection’s second story, “Solomon’s Seal,” brings the second reference to Solomon’s seal; the first appearance occurs in the book’s epigraph with an excerpt from a poem entitled “False Solomon’s Seal.” Like the first story, the protagonist is an unnamed female grappling with loneliness and isolation—with equal resignation, but this time mixed with anger. Told by a third-person omniscient narrator, the story opens with an angry and resentful protagonist looking back on a marriage marked by failure from its onset: “How they started out, that was how they wound up [...] She didn’t even unpack her [hope] trunk [...] What was the use of being house-proud in a house like that? [...] he didn’t care, why should she?” (22-23).
She and her husband Carl continue to live in a marriage of isolation and separation for 40 years. She turns to gardening to mitigate her anger: “The madder she got, the greener everything grew” (24). The only part of her garden that fails to grow is the Solomon’s seal. Carl finds companionship in TV, meals, and most of all, his dogs.
Despite the loneliness their union brings, she is surprised when Carl asks for a divorce. The trigger is the death of his dogs from Parvo virus—neither she nor the local vet can convince him that their deaths are not her fault. Although she has neither a desire nor a reason to contest the divorce, she is shaken when she hears that Carl has remarried and is compelled to visit the couple. The despair of her loneliness is the same—whether as his wife or as his ex-wife—and it is consistent with her resignation that just as her Solomon’s seal plants keep dying, isolation is all that life has to offer.
When she returns home from the visit, she takes out the hope chest again. This time, she breaks each plate “exactly in two,” waiting and waiting, but “the tears never [come]” (29), and she is relegated to being satisfied that at least he won’t get any of the plates. Removing the coverlet from the chest, she steps outside to cover her tomato plants and then checks on her Solomon’s seal. Again, she finds that the plant is dying, saying, “You’d think I could learn” (29), although she never does.
Story 2 Analysis
The experience of loneliness becomes deeper and darker in the collection’s second story, as seen through the solitary experiences of the second unnamed female protagonist and her husband, Carl. This time, the feeling of isolation is exacerbated by the fact that it is experienced not by a widow and a man on the road, but by a couple married for 40 years.
The hope chest is never unpacked, serving as a symbol of the wife’s hopelessness of finding authentic companionship in this union. The divorce is emotionally disruptive, but not because she contests it. For her, the divorce and Carl’s second marriage represent a broken contract in bringing to the forefront a disunion that is expected to be hidden away, masqueraded by the china and silverware of a proper country couple. For Carl, the contract is broken when, in his eyes, she causes his dogs to die—taking away the only authentic companionship he had.
The Solomon’s seal introduced in the epigraph of this collection is what is known as False Solomon’s seal—a member of the asparagus family traditionally used in folk medicine tinctures. True Solomon’s seal closely resembles it and is poisonous. The juxtaposition of the True Solomon’s seal in the story versus the False Solomon’s seal in the epigraph represents the underlying question of both the story and the epigraph—whether it is more toxic to suffer loss and isolation and feign a happy life, or to openly face the pretense. In the end, the protagonist concludes that loss and abandonment cannot be made right, and that the only hope is to veil the suffering.
