42 pages • 1 hour read
Laura MoriartyThe Chaperone
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2012A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Part 1, Chapters 1-4Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 1, Chapter 1 Summary
It is June 1922 in Wichita, Kansas. Cora Carlisle, a 36-year-old married woman with teenage twin sons, is waiting out a rainstorm in her Model-T with a friend, Viola Hammond. Cora is involved in her community through suffrage marches and charitable endeavors. Viola mentions that a woman they both know, Myra Brooks, wouldn’t answer the door when she knocked. Myra is beautiful, cultured, and aloof. Viola tells Cora that Myra’s 15-year-old daughter, Louise Brooks, has been accepted to a dance school in New York City and that Myra wants a chaperone to accompany her there for six weeks over the summer.
The women reflect on the changing fashions in women’s clothing and hairstyles—most notably, shorter skirts and bob haircuts—and Viola recounts that, to her dismay, her own daughters want to adopt those fashions. Viola reveals her intention to the Ku Klux Klan, but Cora dissuades her, knowing that given her greater wealth, Viola will listen to her. The women finish their errand, and Cora goes to pick up her husband, Alan, a lawyer, at his office at the end of his workday. On the way home, she tells Alan that she has volunteered to take Louise to New York, even though she hasn’t talked to anyone in the Brooks family about doing so.
Cora has a particular interest in visiting New York because she lived there in an orphanage until she was six, then was taken to Kansas on an “orphan train” and adopted by a married couple in Kansas. None of her friends and neighbors in Wichita know about her origins. Alan wonders if it’s a good idea for her to travel there, referring to the emotional distress that investigating her birth family could cause her, but he doesn’t try to dissuade her. There are numerous allusions in this chapter to Cora not being able to have other children after the twins’ difficult birth.
Part 1, Chapter 2 Summary
After contacting the Brookses and offering to take Louise to New York, Cora goes to their house to meet with Myra about the trip. Though elegant, the house is in disarray, and Myra blames the family’s maid for not showing up that day. Cora is a bit shocked at the state of the house and reflects that she always tries to clean her house before her own cleaning woman comes. Rather than being interviewed for the chaperone position as she expected, Cora is surprised to find that Myra seems to have already decided to let her go to New York with Louise.
Cora meets Louise when she comes downstairs after a fight with her older brother in which Louise claims he hit her. Cora is again shocked, this time that the brother would physically harm Louise. She also notices Louise’s beauty and stubbornness. Louise is at first indifferent to Cora, especially because Cora doesn’t know about the dance teachers at the New York school, but Cora claims to love good theater, and Louise perks up at this common interest. She leaves the room, and Myra discusses the details of the New York trip with Cora. Louise’s father has taken the lead in planning the trip, and he is the one who insisted upon a chaperone for Louise. Myra cautions Cora to convey to Louise that she could be whisked back home if she misbehaves in order to control the willful teenager. Myra reveals her disinterest in and even antagonism toward her children when she responds to Cora’s assurances of keeping Louise safe, “I just want her to go” (30).
Part 1, Chapter 3 Summary
Cora and Louise leave for New York. Alan and Louise’s father accompany them to the train station in Wichita. After Louise has been gone for a long time on a visit to the restroom at the station, Cora looks for her and finds Louise flirting with a strange young man who has bought her a bottle of Coca-Cola. Cora gets Louise to reluctantly return to the waiting area with her.
Once on the train, Cora and Louise each get out their reading material—sophisticated fashion magazines and an erudite philosophy book for Louise, and a popular women’s magazine and historical novel (The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton) for Cora. The two talk about historical fiction, and Louise says, “Everything is so stuffy. All those ridiculous rules and manners about who gets invited to a party, and who can be seen with whom. […] It’s just tedious and fake. I couldn’t care about it” (39).
Louise says that she doesn’t want children but would like to be married, a comment that sparks a reflection from Cora about the contemporary debate on birth control. As they travel, Louise is exuberant to be leaving Kansas and asks Cora if she’s ever left the state. Cora lies and says she hasn’t, although she came west from New York on the orphan train when she was a little girl.
Part 1, Chapter 4 Summary
Chapter 4 is a flashback to Cora’s childhood. The orphanage where she grew up in New York is run by Catholic nuns. She has only a vague memory of a woman she thinks may have been her mother, “a woman with dark hair, curly like her own, and wearing a red knit shawl. It was her voice Cora remembered or imagined, most clearly, saying unknown words in a strange language, and also, clearly, Cora’s name” (47).
The girls at the orphanage are given basic food, clothing, and amenities, but the nuns sometimes use physical punishment, and the girls must take in laundry to help cover expenses. When she’s about six, Cora is put on a train to the Midwest with some other girls from the home to be selected by a family to live with. Although she doesn’t have strong memories of her mother or other family members from her time before the orphanage, Cora doesn’t want to leave New York and her friends.
The agents in charge of the children on the train give them new clothes and make sure they look neat and tidy when the train stops in the Midwestern towns. The younger children are selected first, but several of the girls Cora’s age are also picked before she is. Many of the adoptive parents are open about wanting a child, usually a boy, who can withstand heavy farm work. A couple named the Kaufmanns eventually select Cora to come home with them. The nuns and the agents on the train repeatedly tell Cora that she should consider herself lucky for the care she has received and the chance to be adopted.
Part 1, Chapters 1-4 Analysis
These chapters introduce many of the novel’s prominent characters, including Cora, Louise, Myra, and Alan. Moriarty is setting the stage for later conflicts between the characters and further plot developments. Cora and Alan’s relationship appears affectionate but also rather formal, a dynamic that is better understood when Alan’s homosexuality is revealed later in the book. Myra is clearly an indifferent or even hostile parent, a fact that helps explain Louise’s desire to escape to New York.
Chapter 4 offers insight into why Cora is so interested in New York and why she would volunteer to take Louise there. The flashbacks from Cora’s childhood help the reader understand that the city is a part of Cora’s identity, a part that she doesn’t fully understand because she doesn’t know about her birth family. Knowing that Cora wrote to the orphanage several times over the years asking about her family, as will later come up in Chapter 7, makes it clear that the issue is an important one to her and holds profound emotional implications.
These chapters illuminate the setting of 1920s Wichita, particularly as experienced by middle-class women like Cora. Historical events like racial tensions (as expressed by the rise of the Ku Klux Klan in Wichita), changing social norms for women—in the form of independence, mobility, and changing clothes and hair fashions—and Prohibition are integrated into Cora’s experience. These issues all have the potential to create tension between individuals, generations, and communities.
It was common for socially prominent homemakers such as Cora to be involved in their communities through charitable efforts and social movements, such as voting rights for women and the temperance movement, which sought to criminalize alcohol through Prohibition—both movements that Cora was involved in. The 1920s middle-class society described in The Chaperone emphasizes an appearance of respectability, tidiness in dress and the home, decency as defined by traditional social values such as a two-parent nuclear family with children, religious observance, and community and social involvement. Cora will eventually subvert or question many of these values, but at the beginning of the story she is firmly entrenched in them, at least on the surface. These early chapters place Cora in this context so that the changes she undergoes over the course of the novel are more meaningful.
