50 pages • 1 hour read
Danielle ValentineDelicate Condition
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2023A 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 9, Chapter 33-Interlude 9Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 9: “Remember the 411 Rule”
Part 9, Chapter 33 Summary
Anna’s contractions become more intense. Dex, telling Cora to leave, gets Anna to the car. On the way, Anna sees a doll whose mouth has been painted red.
Part 9, Chapter 34 Summary
Dex, driving, pesters Anna with questions about how she feels. When she sees blood between her legs, he tries to offer her napkins. Anna recoils from his touch, which angers Dex, who calls her “unreasonable.” Anna becomes enraged, feeling as monstrous as the child inside her. She bites his finger off and spits his wedding ring onto the car’s console. Dex panics, and the car crashes.
Part 9, Chapter 35 Summary
Anna wakes in the wreckage and sees Dex, unconscious but alive. She tries to exit the car and call for help, but her contractions are more powerful, and there’s no cell signal. Anna loses consciousness. When she wakes again, Siobhan is above her, wearing a blue baseball cap. Anna, deeply alarmed, asks if Siobhan was the one following her all this time. Siobhan confirms that it was sometimes her but sometimes other women she works with. Anna, not understanding who else Siobhan might work with, asks if Emily or Talia are involved, but Siobhan says they are not. Anna slips in and out of consciousness as she sees that Siobhan is not alone—there are other women at the scene of the crash now, including Olympia. Anna feels the women drawing a star-symbol on her head in blood. Siobhan tells Anna not to fear the baby, because “[i]t’s a gift” (370).
Part 9, Chapter 36 Summary
Anna wakes in an ambulance; she tells them to take her to Dr. Crawford. At the hospital, Dr. Crawford attends to Anna as she has a precipitous birth, terrified of what she is giving birth to. To her surprise, however, the child she births is an entirely human baby girl.
Part 9, Chapter 37 Summary
Anna finally holds her child. The baby, though perfectly healthy and human, does have a hand-shaped birthmark under her chin. Anna learns that both Dex and Siobhan have died—Siobhan having passed away in the very hospital that Anna is in now, which hints to Anna that her memory of Siobhan in the blue baseball cap may not have been a hallucination. Olympia visits in the hospital and gives Anna an option: Olympia can tell her the truth of what happened or give her something to make her forget. Anna asks for the truth.
Olympia and Siobhan are part of a coven of women who work fertility spells to help other women conceive—something Siobhan wanted to help Anna with, as Anna was struggling through IVF. The night Anna miscarried and attempted to call Siobhan but got Olympia instead, Olympia heard how desperate Anna sounded. In response, Olympia sent one of their coven’s ultrasound techs—Meg—to see if the fetus was still viable. Meg found that it wasn’t, and Anna miscarried. When Anna later called Siobhan again, she sounded so desperate that Siobhan decided to go through with a more difficult spell—one that would bring the baby back to life. The spell was successful but came at great cost to Siobhan, eventually requiring that she give up her life. This type of magic, Olympia explains, is “against the natural order of things” (394) and required certain mitigating measures to prevent Anna from being in pain and having hallucinations. The women sent Anna cookies with medicinal herbs and placed dolls to draw the pain away from Anna, but because Anna stopped eating the cookies and moved the dolls, these measures were unsuccessful. When the women in the order tried to come by the house to fix the dolls or warn Anna, they were scared off by Kamal and were otherwise unable to contact Anna.
Concerned chiefly about what this magical resuscitation means for her child, Anna asks what the consequences will be. Olympia returns Anna’s memories of the night of the car crash to her. Anna remembers Siobhan explaining that the women in her coven are able to reincarnate themselves in the womb of another woman when they are close to death. Siobhan asks for Anna’s consent in completing the spell and transferring herself into the baby inside Anna. If Anna doesn’t accept, Siobhan will die, and the baby she gives birth to might be adversely affected by the magic. Anna doesn’t immediately respond, instead trying to “confront the pain head on, to grab it by the root and pull. To surrender” (399).
Interlude 9 Summary: “Lena Kayne, Many, Many Years Later”
Lena Kayne, who is trying to conceive but suffers from polycystic ovarian syndrome, attends an infertility support group. There, she meets the renowned and ageless actress, Anna Alcott. Lena is familiar with both Anna and her successful daughter, the actress Siobhan Alcott. When Lena tells Anna about why she’s attending the meeting, the pain she experiences, and her doubts about the medical establishment, Anna offers her a cookie and says that she knows a group of women who might be able to help her.
Part 9, Chapter 33-Interlude 9 Analysis
Much of Delicate Condition is in conversation with Ira Levin’s 1967 horror classic Rosemary’s Baby. In Levin’s novel, Rosemary, the eponymous character, is raped by Satan and, during the course of a tumultuous pregnancy, is attended to by neighbors who are secretly part of a satanic cult. Delicate Condition shares a number of plot points with Rosemary’s Baby—both women suffer extensively during their pregnancies, develop unnatural cravings, are ignored by their husbands, and are surrounded by members of a mysterious cabal. However, the ending of Delicate Condition diverges from that of Rosemary’s Baby’s. In Levin’s novel, Rosemary gives birth to the antichrist; in contrast, Anna gives birth to a healthy human girl, albeit one transfigured by a coven’s magic. This deviation from the anticipated ending of a pregnancy horror narrative underscores the theme of Monstrosity as Female Survival, calling into question the many assumptions that Anna, like the reader, has made about her situation. When made aware of the tampering of an all-female, occult-leaning coven in her pregnancy, Anna, like Io Preecher, assumes that she must be the unfortunate subject of a satanic ritual. Olympia’s explanation of the coven, though, subverts Anna’s assumptions as well as the societal expectation that any group of women who operate outside the confines of a patriarchal society must be, in some way, malevolent. Delicate Condition reframes horror tropes around pregnancy, witchcraft, and female-driven communities. Anna comes to understand that Dex and her doctors, not the coven, are the root of her horrors.
While the novel’s ending does reveal that Olympia and Siobhan had good intentions in interfering with Anna’s pregnancy, their failures to get Anna’s consent throughout her ordeal raise questions about what commentary Delicate Condition is creating about female-led communities and the women who inhabit them. This guide’s exploration of the theme of The Necessity and Limits of Female Friendship examines this question from the perspective of female friendships. It’s also important, though, to consider what commentary this ending is producing about Anna herself. The novel’s final interlude reveals that Anna has not only raised Siobhan as her own daughter. Anna has also embraced the coven and, it seems, even begun trying to find a woman whose unborn child will serve as the vessel for her own reincarnation. Is Anna’s participation in the coven a form of altruism forged from her own harrowing experiences of a painful pregnancy? Or has Anna been so traumatized by the ordeal of her pregnancy that she’s now willing to use the bodies of desperate younger women for her own self-interests? Both interpretations of Anna’s character arc are plausible in part because of where Valentine chooses to end Anna’s character development prior to the final interlude. In the final chapters of the novel, Anna is pushed to a point where she embraces her monstrosity and finds power in doing so. Are Anna’s actions in the final interlude the natural progression of this embrace of the monstrous? Or are they a sign that Anna has found healing and solace in the space between the car crash and her conversation with Lena Kayne? Valentine’s use of ambiguity leaves room for multiple readings of Anna’s arc over the course of the novel. As a result, many interpretations of the ethical dilemmas presented by the coven’s actions are possible.
