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Themes are the fundamental and often universal ideas explored in a literary work.
Secrecy as Both Protection and Estrangement
Throughout the novel, characters use secrecy as a means of protection. Patrick has an established habit of keeping his sexual orientation secret, which affords him many privileges in a world in which it is illegal to be gay. He holds a respectable, well-paying job and enjoys the other accoutrements of a life that is both safe and luxurious. It’s clear how crucial secrecy is when Patrick is outed by Marion’s letter. He loses everything, from his lovely apartment to his freedom with the man he loves. Similarly, Tom keeps his sexuality secret from his fellow policemen in order to protect his job and the respectability it offers, going so far as to marry Marion both to mask his true identity and to help him get ahead in the police force. Marion, for her part, protects herself from the loss of Tom’s attachment and Patrick’s friendship by keeping her identity as the letter’s author a secret, one that she guards so fiercely it takes her four decades to tell Tom and Patrick what she’s done. Tom’s sister Sylvie’s secretly false pregnancy helps her achieve her goal of marriage, itself a source of protection in a world where women have limited opportunities. Secrecy protects the novel’s characters from societal and interpersonal destruction, often making the comforts and connections in their lives possible.
At the same time, secrecy also serves to estrange these characters from themselves and others. For example, Patrick burns his old diaries and his letters from his dead lover Michael, a symbol of the ways in which secrecy costs him part of himself and his history. When Patrick sees the Duchess of Argyle mocked in the street, he wants to rush over to him and praise his bravery. But his own need for secrecy prevents him from this potential moment of friendship and community, since doing so would reveal too much about his own identity to Houghton, his boss at the museum. The secrecy required of gay men leaves them isolated from the solidarity and community they might offer each other if they could live publicly, an isolation that makes them vulnerable to the kind of blackmail and alienation that leads to Michael’s death. Sylvie advises Marion to keep the letter she sent Houghton a secret, knowing that its revelation would threaten her marriage, but keeping that secret leads to 40 years of loneliness, an impenetrable distance between her and Tom, and the absence of Patrick. While revealing her role in Patrick’s arrest would have involved risking the upheaval of those relationships, secrecy still, in the end, costs Marion an authentic relationship with Tom and Patrick.
The Elusive Promise of Freedom
The characters in the novel long for a freedom that, time and again, proves elusive. Marion feels that to be only a wife and mother would be confining. She recoils from Sylvie’s acceptance of life as a mother, wondering what happened to the desire for freedom that Sylvie had expressed on her wedding night. Marion seeks freedom from domestic limitations by attaining the education necessary to pursue a teaching career, and by defending her right to keep her job when Tom argues that mothers should stay home with their children. While Marion successfully avoids the confining life of a stay-at-home mother, she nevertheless finds herself trapped in a lonely marriage. Tom compares Marion’s freedom to work with his own desire to travel to Venice with Patrick. When in Venice, Patrick and Tom experience the freedom to love openly, leading Patrick to suggest to Tom that they move there. However, this experience of freedom is fleeting. Not only do Tom and Patrick lose the freedom they had in Venice upon their return to England, but they also lose even the limited freedom they had enjoyed prior to the trip once they are exposed. The novel’s characters struggle within the circumscribed roles permitted to them, as these roles conflict with their inner desires, and each character ends up losing aspects of their freedom in the end.
The Constraints of Societal Expectations
Throughout the novel, people find their choices limited by societal expectations. In the world of the novel, men are expected to desire women and to marry them. Men who are attracted to men fall outside of accepted definitions of masculinity. Some, like Patrick’s boss Houghton—an “aesthete” in college who at least flirted with men, if not more, but had become a “family man” by the time of the novel—choose to deny their desire for men altogether. Others, like Patrick and Tom, seek ways to fulfill their desire for relationships with other men secretly. Patrick’s friend Charlie and his live-in lover Jim avoid penalty for living together by posing as employer and employee. Men like the Duchess of Argyle, a waiter at the hotel who makes his refusal to follow traditional rules of masculinity obvious, are subject to harassment and even arrest.
Women are also limited by social expectations. Career-seeking women like Marion must choose from a small list of career options, and even then they face disapproval if they do not ultimately give up those careers to stay home with children. Women are expected to passively await the attention of men and to raise children rather than pursue careers. To follow prescribed patterns of behavior is rewarded, while defying them risks social and sometimes even legal consequences. Marion also hides her sexual needs from Tom even when he’s her husband, believing that a good wife isn’t openly sexual. Men are expected to express sexual desire only within heterosexual relationships, and women struggle to express desire even within the confines of those socially acceptable relationships.
