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.
Themes
Personal Identity and Sense of Belonging
Cora’s journey up until the time she meets Mary O’Dell is marked with a strong sense that she won’t completely know who she is unless she can find out who her birth parents were. Cora realizes after meeting Mary that she herself ultimately determines her identity. She begins to separate her outer identity as the daughter of Mary O’Dell and Jack Murphy from her inner identity of lover, mother, wife, and friend. She learns to trust her emotional identity as a child of the Kaufmanns rather than as the child of her biological parents. Moreover, she crafts an identity for herself that she presents to the world: She tells others that Joseph is her brother.
The characters’ emotional reaction to a place can reveal aspects of their identity. Cora’s sense of belonging is tied to Wichita, as she comes to realize during her time in New York. Although she looks back on her time with the Kaufmanns fondly, the town where they lived is not her home in the way that Wichita is. In contrast to Cora, Louise feels an immediate connection with New York and declares that she belongs there, leaving Kansas behind emotionally. She says exuberantly, “Isn’t that something? That I could feel so attached to a place that’s still new to me? It’s not even where I’m from” (299). These differing reactions to the new setting lead the two women on their diverging paths and give them a deeper sense of who they are. Joseph also experiences a sense of belonging not in his native Germany but in America (226). He makes the choice to embrace his new home and considers himself an American, integrating his immigration experience into his personal identity.
Certainly, emotional experiences to places are also shaped by the emotional connections to people with which they are associated. Wichita, for Louise, is laden with subconsciously distressing associations with her mother. She would therefore be unlikely to consider it her “home.” Cora gains acceptance and forges relationships in Wichita because her stage in life as a young married woman is conducive to the creation of social ties there. The town where the Kaufmanns lived was an unsuitable home for her not just because she didn’t have a legal right to the Kaufmann land but because of the hostility her schoolmates and Mr. Kaufmann’s daughter displayed to her. These two factors—innate emotional attachment and relationships with other people—intertwine to create a complex sense of identity. After her trip to New York, Cora returns to Wichita with her new, blended family and lives there for many years.
Functional and Dysfunctional Mother-Daughter Relationships
There are a variety of mother-daughter relationships present in The Chaperone. Cora’s friend Viola, who lives in Wichita, laments the fact that her daughters want to follow the shocking fashions of the 1920s. The narration then goes on to say that Viola died of cancer due to smoking “after her daughters picked it up” (12). The comment reveals that rather than guiding her daughters, Viola was instead influenced by them, a reversal of the desired mother-daughter dynamic. In this way, Viola may be considered a “dysfunctional” mother as she is led by her daughters rather than the other way around.
Myra and Louise offer a more explicit example of a dysfunctional relationship. Cora reflects, “Myra had never loved Louise as a daughter, or even as a separate person. If she’d ever loved Louise, it was as another limb of her own body, a mindless extension employed to make one last grasp at her own dreams” (370). Once again, Myra’s self-centered nature is the primary element of her relationship with her daughter as she blames her children for preventing her from having a musical career. Myra is quick, however, to use Louise’s fame to her own advantage, using her maternal relationship as her own claim to fame, an effort that eventually fails.
However, Louise and Myra are alike in their determination, their craftiness, their beauty, their ambitions, and their passion for the arts. A further parallel is drawn between them when they both return to Wichita and live under the same roof again briefly. They are both prevented from achieving their highest ambitions while hurting each other in the process.
Mary O’Dell is another dysfunctional maternal figure. She withheld love and affection from Cora as a baby and spent the bare minimum of time with her before leaving her at the women’s shelter to go back to Boston. This pattern repeats when the two women meet, and Mary can only spare an hour before catching the train back home to Haverhill. The fact that Mary’s pregnancy was undesired has profound implications for Cora, who begins to lend her efforts to the prevention of such unwanted pregnancies on a larger scale.
It seems that the only truly functional mother-daughter relationships in the book, or their unofficial equivalents, are between women who are not biologically related. Mrs. Kaufmann is kind and affectionate to Cora. Cora serves as a loving mother figure to Greta. In New York, Cora even tries to offer Louise guidance that she perceives as being maternal in nature:
All these weeks they had spent together, she’d known Louise needed mothering, someone to fill in where Myra, apparently, had left off long ago. Still, Cora saw now that the whole time they’d been in New York, she’d focused on all the wrong things […]. Nothing that mattered, not in comparison with what Louise truly needed by way of instruction and example (302).
Cora does her best with the limited amount of time she has with Louise, and it seems that Louise comes to respect Cora’s opinion in later years when Cora convinces her to return to New York.
Wealth and Money as Means to Influence
One of the most notable ways Cora uses her upper-middle-class status and the Carlisles’ money to her advantage is when she dissuades Viola from joining the Ku Klux Klan and connects her ability to do so to her own wealth: “Viola was older, but Cora was richer. She would capitalize on that” (11). Another way Cora uses her wealth to achieve a goal is when she returns to the orphanage and reconnects with Joseph under the pretense of buying the girls there a radio with money that Alan sends her.
Cora uneasily sees the financial difference between herself and Joseph when she worries about Joseph’s hesitancy to get breakfast with her after they sleep together for the first time. At first, she’s afraid that he’s put off by her forwardness in having sex with him, but she then realizes he doesn’t have nearly as much money as she does and is worried about the cost of paying for a restaurant meal:
How insensitive could she be? He lived on oatmeal, peanuts, donated fruit. Since Cora had come to New York, she and Louise had gone to restaurants every day without giving much thought to the bill. She had money from Leonard Brooks, money from Alan (297-98).
The mention of Louise’s father and of Alan, who are covering Louise and Cora’s expenses while in the city, underscores the gendered nature of money-making for the upper classes. Women were generally homemakers, as Cora is, giving their time to family and communal charitable endeavors. Alan continues to bring in ample income to provide for Cora and their sons, while Joseph clearly belongs to a different social class and does without experiences that Cora takes for granted. Cora’s concern about the unequal footing of their relationship leads to their sexual abstinence while Joseph establishes himself in Wichita and finds a job.
Despite this nod to financial equality, Cora has reversed the gendered pattern of money by taking in Joseph and Greta and covering their expenses while they get settled. Cora’s agency in this area is an effect of Alan’s homosexuality, since she says that Alan “owes” her for keeping his secret. The gender boundaries of Alan and Cora’s financial life have been blurred just as their sexual ones have, and Cora knows how to turn her emotional capital with Alan into financial agency. Cora later volunteers as a fundraiser for Kindness House, operating at the confluence of wealth and influence and further associating herself with financial success.
