55 pages • 1 hour read
Ann LearyThe Foundling
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2022A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
Animals
Animals appear as symbols of both the danger of male aggression and enforced female meekness in The Foundling. Sister Rosemary tells the girls a story about Deirdre, who was killed by a bull after she jumped down from a tree. The danger of bulls, Sister Rosemary warns, is that “They don’t kill to survive like lions or tigers, no. They kill… for sport” (54). The lesson that Sister Rosemary wants to impart is “‘to never wander into a field of cows unless you know where the bull is keeping himself” (54). The bull represents masculinity as well as power.
Dr. Vogel repeats a similar lesson when she describes the ways men prey on girls who have a “moral weakness”: “A lion will study a group of antelope, or gazelle […] He’ll single out an antelope that’s weak or slow. That’s the one he’ll attack” (78). She makes the case that the work they are doing at Nettleton is humane because rather than giving the girls to the lions—ironically, the exact action Dr. Vogel takes—Nettleton protects girls from predatory men.
While Mary is waiting to see Lillian at the barn, she observes the cows: “Once they’d passed through the gate, for some reason, the cows remained in line and marched single-file along a narrow path they’d worn in the last stretch of field before the barn” (123). She compares the dairy girls to the cows; once enclosed, the cows are docile out of habit, despite being playful outside of the gate to the barn. Especially in contrast to the wild and active lions and bulls, comparing girls to cows highlights how they’ve been tamed and domesticated.
The Suitcase
Mary’s mother’s suitcase symbolizes Mary’s evolving relationship with the world. The suitcase, which Mary calls a very nice lady’s suitcase, is her only inheritance from her mother. Mary first uses the suitcase when she is leaving St. Catherine’s Orphan Asylum. Mother Beatrice admires the suitcase, and Mary describes it as “padded, like a pillow, and decorated with little hand-stitched ovals” (11). She also describes it as very large. At this point in time, Mary is optimistic and this is reflected in the suitcase’s description.
The next time she pulls out the suitcase, she is leaving her aunt Kate’s house to go to Nettleton. Mary realizes that it is a small suitcase, but she still views it as very nice. She fawns over her mother’s taste. However, she notes that “the soft leather on the outside was ivory colored; it wasn’t white, as I’d remembered. That would have been garish. No, it was ivory—almost cream.” (19). Mary remembered the suitcase as white but it’s darker, representing a loss of innocence—since Mary was sexually abused by her uncle, the world no longer seems quite so bright. Despite this, Mary resists the idea that she has lost anything, saying this new color is more chic. Mary wants to be like her mother and to inherit her mother’s fabled sparkle through the suitcase, which might entice people to think about how Mary is a fine lady.
When she arrives at Nettleton, she crosses another threshold in her life and character development. She compares her own things to Gladys’s various cheap, feminine things, relieved that Gladys is not a cosmopolitan woman but a girl who wears cheap perfume and makes her own clothing. Mary, nevertheless, notices that her suitcase smells of leather mixed with a musky, sweaty odor, or what she calls “old-man smells” that remind her of her uncle Teddy (37). Mary’s past is becoming more integrated into her present as she matures. In this moment, however, she covers up the smell with Gladys’s powder, foreshadowing her initial attempts at covering up harsh realities with aspirations and excuses.
The last time Mary discusses her mother’s suitcase is when she is packing to leave Nettleton. She embraces the reality that Dr. Vogel is morally bankrupt and Nettleton is a prison rather than an institution that helps women. She also recognizes her own power and agency to act in the world. When she opens her suitcase, she barely recognizes it:
When I opened it, the pink satin lining looked cheap, even in the dim light of the room. I imagined my mother’s delight when she’d first opened it; she probably thought it very fancy, the way we girls at St. Cat’s had when we saw it. Now I knew that shiny pink satin was too much; it was gaudy and second rate. It had been poorly sewn as well, some of the stitching was already frayed. And it was far too small to hold all the things I’d accumulated in my time here (262).
Mary has grown to accept the truth of her past and current circumstances. She has also had many experiences and interactions that have made her more worldly. Her relationship with her suitcase reflects her coming-of-age journey.
Books
Reading materials mentioned throughout the text reflect on the characters who read them. Mary identifies Jake as a romantic when he shares her love of modernists such as Flaubert, E. M. Forster, James Joyce, Thomas Hardy, Virginia Woolf, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. They are all writers who write about the humanity and desires of outcasts. These are themes that resonate with Jake as a character, an American Jew who is drawn to fighting for and writing about the disempowered.
Jake’s recommendation for Mary is Matthew Lewis’s The Monk: A Romance, a keystone British Gothic Novel that follows multiple characters through sordid plotlines in which people and institutions that seem wholesome are found to be corrupted and corruptible. The novel alludes to Mary’s loss of innocence and involvement with the happenings at Nettleton. The novel also gestures to the Gothic tropes that are peppered throughout The Foundling.
The books that Mary reads from Dr. Vogel’s library include Heredity in Relation to Eugenics by Charles Davenport and The Kallikak Family: A Study in the Heredity of Feeblemindedness by Henry Goddard. Both books were key texts of the eugenics movement and were used to justify the foundational ideologies and practices of eugenics in the US. They are indicative of Dr. Vogel’s deep commitment to eugenics and reflect her racist, classist, and xenophobic rhetoric throughout the text.
