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42 pages 1 hour read

Laura Moriarty

The Chaperone

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2012

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Symbols & Motifs

Clothing, Fashion, and Beauty Standards

Clothing, fashion, and beauty standards such as body type—mostly as relating to women—play a central role in The Chaperone. (See 159-60 and 349 for examples of body type trends.) These outward and seemingly surface-level characteristics are in fact profound reflections of an individual’s status within a society. When they are chosen to ride the orphan train, for example, the New York children are given new clothing and made tidy and presentable for the prospective adoptive parents, as if to erase any evidence not only of “tears or interrupted naps” (56), but also of poverty or ill treatment. The agents are trying to reinvent the children to make them more attractive, much like a vendor would arrange merchandise to be pleasing to shoppers. This dynamic signals that the children are more or less powerless in these relationships.

 

Fashion can also indicate a person’s reaction to social expectations. Viola and Cora discuss changing women’s fashion worriedly, Viola dismayed by what she considers a lack of modesty and purity in her daughters, who want to follow the new fashions. Cora’s progressive roots have already taken hold—she timidly defends some of the new styles but backs off when she sees that Viola is against them. Cora herself wears old-fashioned clothing of the Edwardian era in the years before her New York trip, just as many of her contemporaries do. Cora’s restriction of her body with a corset is symbolic of the figurative restrictions she places on herself early in the story. The corset prevents her from eating as much food as she would otherwise—a symbolic reining-in of her needs.

 

Cora is at first content with her style, but in New York she sees many more examples of new clothing and hair styles and begins to feel out-of-date. After she returns from New York, she feels more freedom to choose which styles she would like to wear. Partly because of her rejection of black-and-white values, and partly because of her newfound confidence and self-knowledge, she has ceased to let society dictate all her choices. In this way, she has become somewhat like Louise, who embraces the new, progressive fashions.

 

Despite her staid appearance in general, Cora’s hair is curly and unruly, symbolizing her subconscious desire to be free of constrictive social conventions. She eventually acts on this desire and later is portrayed with a bobbed curly haircut, signaling her freer, more relaxed interactions with the world. Joseph reaching out and touching her hair to express his desire for Cora is symbolic of his recognition not only of her sexual needs but of her other, deeper desires.

Speech and Accents

The human voice and patterns of speech are powerful symbols in the novel of personal identity and public persona. Worried about appearing unsophisticated alongside the accomplished Alan, Cora teaches herself grammar before they marry. One of her first changes on her way from being a farm girl with only a basic education to becoming a sophisticated young woman, this process signals Cora’s unease with her past and her first attempt to equip herself for the future she desires as Alan’s wife.

 

Voices, accents, and speech patterns are also important for other characters. Just as Cora wanted to change her way of speaking, Louise insists that Floyd Smithers help her “fix” her Kansas accent so she, too, can sound more urbane and cultured. A sign of physical compatibility between Joseph and Cora is that Cora finds his low voice “pleasing.” Mary O’Dell hurts Cora by correcting her pronunciation of “Haverhill.” Later, although Louise has a “fine” voice, it’s rumored that she may have been driven out of work by the advent of the “talkies,” indicating the voice is an important force. 

The Age of Innocence

Cora reads The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton while traveling to and staying in New York, and quotes from Wharton’s book are the epigraphs for Parts 2 and 3 of The Chaperone. The Age of Innocence is a significant choice for Moriarty to include in the narrative because of its themes of extramarital love amid a time of social change, among other parallels to Moriarty’s book. Like The Chaperone, Wharton’s novel also includes the presence of two women, one representing convention (May in Wharton’s work, Cora in Moriarty’s), the other representing defiance of social tradition and scandal (Countess Ellen Olenska in The Age of Innocence, Louise in The Chaperone). Newland’s dilemma in The Age of Innocence—married to May but struggling to suppress his feelings for Ellen—is similar to Alan’s, as he remains married to Cora but struggles with his love for Raymond.

 

The title of Edith Wharton’s work also has significant connections to events in The Chaperone. Louise, seemingly in her own “age of innocence” at 15, has in reality had her innocence taken from her by sexual abuse. Cora, at the beginning of her time with Louise, is “innocent” of this knowledge and “innocent” (or, simplistic) in her understanding of Louise. Louise’s revelation not only communicates the loss of her own innocence but leads to the end of Cora’s. Cora also leaves her own “innocent” understanding of social norms in New York. These various “ages of innocence” come to an end through the events in the novel.  

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