Serpent & Dove

Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2019

A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.

Download PDF

Themes

Opposites Attract

Content Warning: This section contains references to violence and bodily harm.

The story of seemingly opposed personalities finding love is a tale as old as time. One such story, with a particularly French origin, is the fairy tale titled “La belle et la bête” (“Beauty and the Beast”), the most popular version of which was retold in 1756 by Madame Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont. Mahurin’s Serpent & Dove borrows heavily from its narrative but reverses the roles, making Reid the Belle character and Lou the Beast.

Most “Beauty and Beast” variants focus on courtship and marriage, privileging love over social conventions. As the story begins, the Belle character is happy in her father’s house and in no hurry to marry. Similarly, although Reid longs for connection, he doesn’t believe it possible after his heartbreak with Célie. Instead, he is focused on serving his spiritual father, the Archbishop, by captaining the Chasseurs. However, this is also stasis. To mature, Reid must move out of his father’s house, find his equal, and forge his own path. In animal bride/groom tales, this occurs when Belle’s father “disturbs” the monster’s property or loses a gambling debt. In atonement, his daughter is married off to the “monster.” In Serpent & Dove, Reid must marry Lou because his spiritual father, the Archbishop, must protect his daughter, a product of his previous transgression.

Alien and frightening, Lou terrifies Reid. She rattles Reid’s status quo, representing qualities Reid has within himself that he has not admitted. He cannot stand her bawdy, temperamental, and irreverent personality. At first, he rejects her, trying to make her bend to his will, so that he will win approval from his brethren. Like Belle, who knows her sisters are jealous and cruel, Reid still wants to belong.

However, once Belle enters the castle, she must find out who the Beast really is, judging him by her own perception. Reid too must decide who Lou really is. As Belle gets to know the Beast, they develop a friendship, echoing the slow, real-life process of discovering love. Belle begins to note the Beast’s goodness, disdaining social convention that beauty equals worth. Reid has the same type of moment when he praises Lou’s care for the ailing and volatile Monsieur Bernard, noting that God will always offer a forgiveness the Church may see as improper.

In the structure of the tale, Belle almost loses the love of the Beast because of some betrayal of trust, just a Reid almost loses Lou when he rejects her after he finds out she is a witch. In “Beauty and the Beast,” the break occurs when Belle returns home and doesn’t seem to want to return to the Beast’s castle because her sisters feign treating her well. Reid, too, momentarily falls into the philosophy of the Chasseurs. It is only when Belle dreams Beast is dying from loss of her that she reassesses her sisters’ hypocrisy, realizes she loves the Beast, and hurries back to reclaim him, even though he is physically a beast. Similarly, when Reid realizes Lou could be lost to him forever, and the Archbishop whom he once trusted is only self-interested, he hurries to find Lou even though he now knows she is a witch.

When Beauty makes the crucial decision to disregard conventional attitudes, she is able to see the Beast as her soulmate. As Reid lets go of his loyalty to the Chasseurs, he lets his love of Lou be his defining focus. Both characters rely on what is in their hearts. In the end, by privileging their own love, instead of the dictums around them, Belle and Reid move beyond what others expect of them to fulfill their own destinies, leaving the father’s houses behind forever. Significantly, the monstrous still resides within their lovers, but Belle and Reid love them anyway. Because the story ends romantically, the audience is challenged to question its own standards of judgment about people who seem different than oneself. These stories promote personal perception as a guide to romantic love rather than social/religious expectations, bringing the opposed lovers to a happy conclusion.

Resisting Dogma

Lou and Reid each have significant ties to either of the two factions waging war for Belterra’s land: the Dames Blanches and the Chasseurs, respectively. Both factions are headed by hypocritical zealots, Morgane and the Archbishop, who pretend they are acting for the collective good instead of being self-interested. As Lou and Reid learn to accept each other they start to see past the zealotry of these leaders. They accept a middle way that allows for aspects of both ideologies and—most importantly—for tolerance.

Both the Archbishop and Morgane expect their followers to agree with their narrow point of view, vilifying their enemies to enhance their claims. The Archbishop encourages the citizenry of Cesarine to view witches as evil, connected to Satan, and deserving of death. On his orders, the Chasseurs act swiftly and violently toward witches, regardless of their age or circumstance. Determined to distract the public from his indiscretion with Morgane, he belittles other men for having sexual feelings and suggests women are wicked seducers corrupting the chaste. He projects his own sins (real or perceived) onto others—even his own child. Reid eventually realizes this when the Archbishop tells the Chasseurs they need to hunt Lou down to save the kingdom. While this in part is true, Reid astutely observes that the fervor of this call to duty will allow the Archbishop to gloss over what Ye Olde Sisters have revealed: The mess is in part his making.

Morgane also acts from a position of misplaced righteousness, convincing her followers that they should show no forgiveness to the people of Belterra, let alone the Church. Since the people of Belterra live on the land their ancestors stole, they deserve to be punished. Although the witches have a right to be angry at being persecuted, this does not give them the right to persecute others. Morgane has no qualms about the witches attacking innocent people like Tremblay’s daughter, the child they leave with no eyes, or the woman whose face is a moving mask of bugs. Her sole goal is to consolidate her power so that she can eliminate the king and Church. Her insistence that others follow her demands is no different than the Archbishop’s; she has brainwashed Estelle and Manon into thinking all the witches’ problems will be solved when Lou is sacrificed. Morgane claims to be righting the balance and retrieving what the witches lost, but she really wants a group of disciples worshipping—and fearing—her. Lou irritates her because she escaped her grasp and doesn’t believe in her creed.

Lou, Reid, and their friend Ansel offer hope of resisting such zealotry, ultimately refusing to accept the views of the Archbishop and Morgane as doctrine. Ansel is one of the first characters to deviate from a lockstep approach. Although he is training to be a Chasseur, he immediately respects Lou despite her criminal past and (to Reid’s eyes) coarse behavior. Taking to heart the Christian message of compassion rather than the Archbishop’s judgmentalism, he refuses to turn Lou in as a witch because he saw her sacrifice her own well-being to lessen Estelle’s pain. Lou in turn learns that while Chasseurs may generally act like the aggressive Jean Luc, not all do. When Ansel keeps her secret and Reid sympathizes with Monsieur Bernard, Lou sees tolerance and goodness in action. Lou’s embrace of this alternative—through her friendship with Ansel and her love of Reid shows how being true to one’s heart can bring greater peace and harmony. Lou’s rejection of Morgane’s view and Reid’s rejection of the Archbishop’s paves the way for their reunion and possibly a bridge between the two groups.

Loyalty Within Friendship

Serpent & Dove stresses the importance of loyalty within friendship—even at personal risk—through the use of foils. Ansel and Coco reject greed or self-interest in favor of maintaining close ties with Reid and Lou. Jean Luc and Manon are false friends willing to sacrifice their friendship to gain power within unjust hierarchical systems.

While Jean Luc claims to be Reid’s oldest and best friend, Ansel turns out to be the truer friend. As boys, Jean Luc and Reid were inseparable, and at Mass, the two still joke around as they used to. Both Jean Luc and Reid have vowed to be loyal to each other, the Chasseurs, the Archbishop, and the Church. However, Jean Luc is more loyal to his own quest for power than anything else. His first tactic is to humiliate Reid, hinting that he is an irresponsible leader. When this doesn’t work, he goads Reid by making lewd suggestions about Lou and poking the wound of Célie’s rejection. He usurps his supposed friend’s authority, first at the Tremblays’ and then later when he takes his place as captain of the Chasseurs rather than join Reid’s rescue team. Ansel, whom Reid sees as little more than a new initiate, could similarly advance within the Chasseurs by turning Lou in as a witch. Instead, he adheres to his own beliefs regarding loyalty and friendship by keeping Lou’s secret and aligning himself with Coco. He never judges his friends by their title or by how they live up to the so-called wisdom of his institutions. Instead, he measures people by how they treat others. He even challenges Reid to be better than the Archbishop and forgive Lou, risking his friendship and his job. To be a loyal friend, the novel suggests, one must first be loyal to one’s own values.

Lou also has friends who serve as foils to one another. Manon and Coco were Lou’s childhood friends, and both claim to remain her friends as adults. However, these women’s relationships with Lou are radically different. Manon claims to love Lou, but she acts as her jailer at the Chateau, injecting her with the paralysis drug to keep her sedated. She has bought into Morgane’s ideas that Lou’s sacrifice is necessary and tries to manipulate Lou: She makes her promise to participate in the ritual after explaining how her sister was killed by Chasseurs. While her desire to avenge her sister’s death is understandable, Manon doesn’t see the irony—that she is condemning Lou to a similar fate. In actuality, Manon values her position within Morgane’s ranks more than she loves Lou. When the rescue team attacks Morgane, Manon fights by her leader’s side. Manon’s loyalty is to revenge, not to any friendship.

As a blood witch, Coco should be Lou’s enemy, but their childhood relationship solidified her loyalty. Lou was nice to Coco when the latter needed to get away from her aunt, and they met often in the woods. Lou also rescued Coco from the police when the latter first got to Cesarine and then offered to share her home in the Soleil et Lune. Coco is determined to return the favor, protecting Lou even when doing so risks exposing herself as a witch. She remains loyal through disagreements and despite personal feelings: Though she doesn’t like Reid, she doesn’t hesitate to join Reid’s rescue team because she recognizes they both love Lou. Coco ultimately risks her life to prevent Morgane from killing Lou.

Loyal friends like Ansel and Coco can argue with their friends and still believe in their inherent value as people. They operate from a desire to lift their friends up, accepting their foibles and understanding their circumstances. They do not use their friends to advance their own interests, nor do they goad, belittle, or manipulate. Illustrating true loyalty in friendship is one of the primary ways the secondary characters function in Serpent & Dove.