67 pages • 2 hours read
Kate MortonThe Clockmaker's Daughter
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2018A 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
The Influence of Grief
The Clockmaker’s Daughter is particularly concerned with the trauma caused by sudden loss and the impact that grief has on a person. All of the main characters are touched by grief in some manner, and they handle this loss in different ways. While the novel makes no judgment about how to approach bereavement, some characters handle their loss more successfully than others.
Birdie/Lily lost her mother early in her life and dealt with the absence of her father by believing that he was in America and would return for her. Just as she never blamed her father for leaving her, Birdie never blames Lucy for her death. While she initially feels despair upon learning she is a ghost and can no longer communicate with Edward, Birdie makes the best that she can of her circumstances by taking an interest in the visitors to Birchwood. Instead of being becoming a vengeful ghost, Birdie instead acts as a benevolent observer or even, where she can, a positive influence. She turns her loss to good by empathizing with the other broken, wounded souls who come to her house. Kate Morton hence subverts the tropes of ghost stories by exploring the influence of grief when a ghost is grieving their own life.
Juliet also shows emotional resiliency by dedicating herself to protecting and nurturing her children after she learns her husband has been killed in World War II. Juliet never remarries, suggesting that her love for Alan endures, but along with her career she maintains active interests and many friendships, including one with Leonard. She grieves her loss and moves forward, and this is reflected in the fact that her legacy endures through her descendants, of which Elodie is one.
Characters who have more difficulty moving on usually find some element of guilt attached to their grief. Jack’s marriage ends because his wife couldn’t deal with the hero complex that Jack developed after his brother died. Leonard feels even greater guilt, convinced that he directly caused his brother’s death by sleeping with his fiancée. He wanders aimlessly for years, drifting through time like the novel itself, until he finds an anchor in his interest in the life of Edward and Lily. Leonard is haunted:
[T]he awareness that, no matter how he willed it, he could never go back and make it so that the horror hadn’t happened; that whatever else he did in life, the fact of the war and his brother’s death and the wasted years since would always be part of his story. (260)
In a novel preoccupied with history (via archival research, archaeology, ghosts, or stories), Leonard’s thoughts show that the theme of grief emotionally reflects ways of looking back on the past.
Lucy’s grief shows expression in the atonement that she attempts for the conflicted silence that she maintained about Lily’s death. Edward’s grief destroys him; after losing Lily, his career collapses, he wanders the Continent, and he drowns at a young age without producing any more remarkable work; Morton hence creates a parallel between Leonard and Edward—the researcher and the subject. Lucy demonstrates a stoic endurance, and she attempts to make amends by fulfilling Edward’s wishes about the girl’s school and giving Lily a proper burial. However, she never is able to speak the truth about what happened, and at the end of her life merely tells Leonard: “I have lived a long time and I have learned that one must forgive oneself the past or else the journey into the future becomes unbearable” (248). This statement is reflected by the plot of the novel in which future generations reconcile events of the past.
Elodie’s father also grieves the loss of his wife, Lauren. Elodie feels more distance from her mother’s death and her opinion of her mother is colored by her knowledge of Lauren’s affair with the violinist. Part of Elodie’s character arc involves coming to terms with her mother’s life, mourning her, and deciding to step out of her shadow.
At the end of the novel, Elodie and Jack’s discovery of Lily’s grave suggests that they, like Birdie, will also come to terms with their losses and find a way to move forward and embrace love. Finding a way to reconcile loss and live life underpins the theme of The Influence of Grief and constitutes the falling action of the novel.
Love of Art and Appreciation for Artistic Accomplishment
In a novel with a group of artists at its core, a passion for and appreciation of art are qualities that many characters share. This provides a thread that allows Morton to connect the discrete time periods of the novel.
Edward Radcliffe’s gift for painting and the esteem in which his work is held reflects the epitome of artistic ambition. All the members of the Magenta Brotherhood are dedicated to the creation of art as either artists or models, like Clare and Lily. Edward’s is the most volatile of all the artistic personalities in the group; he is consumed by art, so much so that he is physically impacted by beauty, demonstrated by his distracted, transported response when he first meets Lily.
An appreciation for the art of past times also weaves throughout the novel. In Elodie’s day, the artists of the Magenta Brotherhood are objects of academic study, as demonstrated by Leonard’s biography. Birchwood has become a museum of the Magenta Brotherhood’s art which draw visitors to the house and gift shop which, Birdie is interested to see, prints her face on everything from tote bags to coffee mugs. Like Elodie’s work in the archives, dealing with the preservation of artifacts, the museum at Birchwood keeps the narratives surrounding the artists and their subjects alive. Edward’s lost masterpiece represents the knowledge that researchers seek by studying past art, yet the painting’s presence in a village pub suggests that art isn’t the preserve of an elite class but a gift to be enjoyed by all.
The interest that other characters have in artistic pursuits suggests that the creative arts add a vital element to the enjoyment of life. Tip becomes an artist later in life and keeps a studio which Elodie visits. His charm box for her has immense sentimental rather than just financial value, as demonstrated by the priceless Radcliffe Blue diamond being embedded among other trinkets.
Juliet is an artist as a talented writer who uses her power of observation to write a column that gives people hope in the midst of war. Elodie’s parents, who are musicians, exemplify the power that the musical arts have to move, transform, and even heal. Like Leonard’s interest in Edward Radcliffe, which becomes a way to anchor him and give direction to his life, the pursuit of art for various characters in The Clockmaker’s Daughter underlines the power of art to inspire, instruct, or show someone how to see with new eyes. This point mirrors the questions raised about truth and perspective throughout the novel.
The Toll of War
The devastation of war provides a haunting backdrop to The Clockmaker’s Daughter which augments its prevailing subjects of grief and love. The impact of the World Wars appears across Morton’s oeuvre, an overt or sublimated theme in many of her books. In this novel, Morton explores the impact of the World Wars on British life of the 20th century through the character study of those who survive.
Elodie first thinks about the sacrifice of soldiers when she recalls the tragic story of the World War I veteran who dove into the Thames to rescue a drowning woman and acquired tetanus, which cost his life. Morton’s use of the river symbol exemplifies the connection between current generations and wars of the past. She briefly ponders the irony that a man who survived such devastating conflict should then lose his life through a valiant act, brought down by a now-treatable disease.
Mrs. Berry, Elodie’s landlord, represents a generation that remembers and was shaped by the events of World War II. Through Mrs. Berry, Morton explores several of the novel’s major themes when she tells the story of how she met her husband, a German boy whom her family sheltered. The Kindertransport was a rescue effort sponsored by the United Kingdom to move Jewish children out of Nazi-controlled territories between 1938-1939. Like many of the actual children who were rescued, Mrs. Berry’s Bernstein never saw his parents again. While these early chapters with Elodie introduce a quest that centers around the identity of a woman in a photograph and the sketch of a house, they also point to the world events that fundamentally altered much of the world between the 19th and 21st centuries.
Juliet, first spotting Leonard in 1928, recognizes the impact that experiencing war has on those who fight. She detects from Leonard’s demeanor that he was a soldier and thinks: “They still wore uniforms, these poor, broken men. They would always be a generation unto themselves” (306). Juliet, like Leonard, experiences the horrors of war personally in that her husband is killed in action and her home is obliterated. Escaping to Birchwood is an attempt to protect her children not only from bombs but also from seeing destruction, just as writing the columns about village life is an attempt to help others see the beauty and humanity that remain in the world. Juliet allows Morton to expand the scope of The Toll of War to the home front.
In the mourning for those lost, the war theme intersects with the novel’s other themes of grief, exemplified by Leonard’s lament for his brother. Leonard thinks of the immense loss of life for so many:
Where had they all gone? It seemed impossible that it could all just end like that. Impossible that so many young men’s hopes and dreams and bodies could be buried in the earth and the earth remain unchanged. Such an almighty transfer of energy and matter must surely have affected the world’s balance. (235)
Given this obliterating power of war and The Influence of Grief, the novel offers art and love as antidotes to despair. In the falling action, both Leonard and Juliet are heartened by their epistolary friendship, having both lost people whom they loved in war.
Morton uses the tragic trajectory of Edward’s life to reflect this idea. In giving up his art after he lost Lily—in effect, sacrificing his artistic passion because he lost his romantic passion—Edward shows the consequence of losing oneself to despair. While the novel gives no real answer to Leonard’s question about the meaning of such loss, at least not one that appears in the novel, the motif of the light winking in Birchwood’s attic window—a remnant of the enchantment laid by the Fairy Queen—suggests that beauty always survives The Toll of War.
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