46 pages • 1 hour read
Oh, William
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Pages 168-237Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Pages 168-188 Summary
William and Lucy find Lois at home, but William is too afraid to meet her and sends Lucy in his place. Lois, who is a fan of Lucy’s books, welcomes her into her house, which is an inheritance from her adopted mother, Marilyn Smith. Houlton is a small, gossipy town, and Lois already knows about Lucy and William’s presence.
Lois insists defensively that she has had a very good life teaching school, marrying a dentist, and raising four morally upright children. She learned about Catherine’s existence when she was eight. She describes Catherine, the 18-year-old girl who came between her 28-year-old father Clyde and his long-term sweetheart Marilyn Smith, as an interloper. Lois speculates that Catherine only married Clyde to get away from her own home. Referencing Lucy’s memoir, Lois states that it was ironic of Catherine to state that Lucy came from nothing, when she herself “came from less than nothing […] from trash” (178). Catherine’s mother had alcoholism, her father was abusive, and her brother died in prison. Catherine used her beauty to tempt Clyde into marrying her and escape her home. Lois gives Lucy directions to the rundown place where Catherine’s family were from in addition to the farm she grew up on.
Lois says that her sole regret is that she was not kinder to Catherine when she used a private detective to track her down. Lois resented the outfit that Catherine wore to visit her, which indicated that she had risen socially and preferred the city. Most of all, Lois resented Catherine’s bragging about William and lack of interest in Lois. Lois reveals that her existence caused problems in Catherine’s marriage to Wilhelm. Lucy gathers that Catherine’s visit to Lois happened during the nine weeks that Lucy was hospitalized for appendicitis and she did not hear from Catherine.
Lois is astounded that none of Catherine’s family knew about her and is hurt that she was not mentioned in Lucy’s memoir. Lois asks Lucy to include her if Lucy writes another book. Lois makes it clear that she does not wish to meet William.
Pages 188-203 Summary
William is indignant that Lois does not want to meet him and accuses her of lying about Catherine’s brother dying in prison, because he has seen the death certificate.
William and Lucy follow the itinerary that Lois gave them. They see the Trask farm where Catherine and Wilhelm met and are moved by the sight of the post office where Catherine received Wilhelm’s letters, in addition to the small train stop where she went to Boston to meet him. They drive to the Dixie Road, to Catherine’s home of origin. They see a disheveled and furious-looking veteran, probably from the Vietnam period, on the way and his look is one Lucy has not seen since her childhood. Catherine’s family home turns out to be the tiniest house Lucy has ever seen, even smaller than her own childhood home. It is derelict and given over to nature. William compares it to a scene from a horror movie.
Lucy tells William that in marrying her, he married his mother. William responds that he married her because she was “filled with joy” (198). He found this quality astounding when they visited Lucy’s family and he saw what she came from.
Lucy considers that she and William have lived the American dream in rising out of their family’s poverty and having successful careers. William is grateful for the luck of his draft number, which meant he did not have to go to Vietnam. It occurs to Lucy that she may have taken something from William in going to see Lois herself. He tries to be dismissive, saying that “I was scared and you were trying to help” (201).
Pages 203-218 Summary
On the flight home, William is depressed about Lois not wanting to meet him. After, he tells Lucy that he will call her, but does not. He charges her with telling their daughters about their trip. Lucy suspects that he has begun to date someone. Lucy is upset by the empty look of her apartment when she returns, and she realizes that her journey with William has been a distraction from her grief over David.
When Lucy reunites with her daughters at Bloomingdales, they are indignant that their father has not spoken to them. They find the news that their grandmother came from such poverty astonishing, especially given her middle-class hobbies including golf. The girls share that they feel responsible for Bridget and have taken her out to tea.
Lucy recalls that Catherine’s death was the pivotal moment when she wanted to change her name from Gerhardt back to her original Barton. She found Catherine’s death liberating because she could choose her own clothes and by extension, her identity.
She runs into Estelle on the street, who lets Lucy know that the divorce has not been easy for her, even though she was the one who left William. Lucy reassures Estelle that she should get on with her life and that they will manage without her.
Lucy considers how secure Lois is. She conjectures that Lois was not only loved by her adopted mother, Marilyn Smith, but by Catherine while she was around. In contrast, Lucy never enjoyed that security and her brother and sister fared even worse. Her brother continued to live in the tiny house and never found a relationship, while her sister works in a nursing home. Lucy recalls that her psychiatrist informed her that most people from Lucy’s background “just don’t even try” and that her sense of “joy” is exceptional (218). Lucy does not know where this quality came from.
Pages 219-237 Summary
Lucy was right that William was seeing someone, as he asks for her advice about a woman. Lucy Googles the woman and says that she is wrong for William. He agrees.
Lucy reflects that while she will always “give off the faint smell of where I came from” (223), Catherine fully assimilated into middle-class city life. She relates to Lois Bubar’s point that Catherine was “citified,” whereas even during her book tours, Lucy was never identified as urban.
Lucy reflects on her relationship with David, who she met at the Philharmonic Orchestra concerts she went to with another boyfriend. She was transfixed by David’s playing of Chopin’s Étude in C sharp minor, and they married six weeks after Lucy went up to him and accidentally told him she loved him. Unlike with William, Lucy’s marriage to David was secure and predictable. She thinks back to the fact that William once made her feel safe, but that she does not know who he really is.
William comes to Lucy’s apartment, having shaved off his mustache and thus lost the feeling of authority she assigned to him. After cheerfully announcing that Richard Baxter, the parasitologist he feels competitive with, comes from Shirley Falls in Maine and not the land they traversed, he asks Lucy to go to the Cayman Islands with him, which was one of the vacation destinations that Catherine accompanied them to. Lucy hesitates. William says that he is reading a biography by Jane Welsh Carlyle and hopes that it will help him understand women.
Lucy reflects that after she left William and was seeing a man who loved her but made her nervous, she drew comfort from the light in a tower, ascribing it to a human presence. She then realized that the light was always on in the tower and had nothing to do with a human presence in the building. She compares William to the light in the building, thinking that “William was like the light in the museum, only I had lived my life thinking it was worth something” (235). She wants to protect William from the understanding she has just had, not wanting him to feel that he has lost his influence with her. She agrees to accompany him to the Cayman Island and concludes that the only truth she is certain of, is that people are fundamentally mysteries.
Pages 168-237 Analysis
In the last section of the novel, Strout completes the novel’s shift in focus from William to Lucy, using the other characters of the novel to contrast with her protagonist and motivate Lucy’s final sense of self-possession and closure regarding her first marriage. William fears the emotional drama of a meeting with Lois, so he sends Lucy instead. Lois’s own preference is talk to Lucy, a writer she knows so intimately that she can quote her from memory, over the half-brother she resents. While Lois is polite to Lucy, she demonstrates an awareness that she, a rural woman who was abandoned by her mother, may be looked down on or pitied by her. Lois is defensive and anxious to show that she has flourished in her environment, and she seeks to make explicit that she neither needed her biological mother nor missed her. However, at the same time, Lois expresses hurt that her experience and existence were dismissed by Catherine. Lois’s ambivalent feelings about her mother echo William’s own, and Strout suggests that both siblings have been shaped by feelings of resentment and abandonment regarding Catherine, even if those feelings are expressed in very different ways. Because Lucy is an objective observer of Lois, William, and Catherine, she is able to see more clearly the forces that have shaped their lives. This helps Lois become a more objective observer of her own life, and to reevaluate her feelings about her two marriages more honestly.
Lois’s offense at being left out of Lucy’s memoir is also an enjoyable metafictional moment in the novel, as Strout indicates that the memoir Lois refers to is the real-life book My Name is Lucy Barton. When Lois seeks a correction and a flattering portrayal in a subsequent book, she could be referring to Oh William! itself. Here, Strout intentionally reminds the reader of the artifice of fiction, suggesting that her protagonist is the real author of the book and blurring the boundary between story and reality. This narrative strategy emphasizes Lucy’s power as a writer who can document important family stories and secrets and make unseen people feel visible.
The full truth of Catherine’s background is revealed as being even more humble than Lucy’s, but Lucy senses that Catherine affected the transformation from poverty to middle-class life better than she did. Lucy admits that she drew comfort from Catherine’s death as she was finally able to choose her own clothes, a metaphor for deciding the kind of person she wants to be and how far she wants to integrate into middle class expectations. While Catherine sought to conceal her origins and distanced herself from people like Lois, Lucy takes ownership of her roots both directly in her writing and in her unintentional mannerisms and tastes. Lucy’s acceptance of her own varied life experience gives her the advantage of being able to connect emotionally with different types of people.
As Lucy gains self-assurance and becomes a more active character, William receives a dressing down and even disappears during the last part of the novel. Lucy feels guilty for taking something away from William when she meets with Lois. While William affects nonchalance, his bitterness comes out in insults at Lois and his incredulity that Lois wishes to be remembered well in Lucy’s writing. Lois’s rejection feeds into William’s insecurities over being rejected by women, principally by the mother who sent him off to nursery school a year early. Just as little William sought temporary relief in the arms of his nursery schoolteacher, Lois’s rejection leads him to seek a new woman, a random socialite, with whom he disappears for a few weeks, neglecting his family. Lucy realizes that his need to escape through relationships with women is part of his fundamental character and so gains the liberating sense that his affairs during their marriage had nothing to do with her. By the end of the narrative, Lucy rescinds William’s authority in her life, realizing that she assigned it to him as randomly as she assigned a human presence to a light in a building. At the same time, Lucy’s lingering compassion for William enables her to accompany him on the next journey on the trail of his mother, to the Cayman Islands. Here, Strout shows that Lucy’s feelings for William continue to be mixed and relate to how she feels about herself.
At the end of the novel, the image of the Empire State Building from Lucy’s window links into the view from the hospital window at the beginning of My Name is Lucy Barton. This provides a sense of completion in the protagonist’s understanding of herself, even as she affirms her strongest conviction that other people are essentially mysteries. Through Lucy’s final declarations, Strout suggests that while a greater understanding of self can be reached, the essence of others will always remain elusive.
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By Elizabeth Strout
