36 pages • 1 hour read
Jojo MoyesThe Last Letter From Your Lover
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2008A 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
Alcohol
When Jennifer, in the weeks following her accident, returns home after an evening out with friends and is led up to bed by Laurence, she wishes “suddenly, that she had drunk more” (88). This is a recuring motif in The Last Letter from Your Lover. Time and again, alcohol serves to numb characters to their feelings and make them avoid confronting unpleasant truths. In this instance, Jennifer wants to be more anaesthetized by drink so that she can better cope with emotionally and physically disconnected sex with Laurence. She also does not want to face up to what this disconnect implies about her life. The same happens when she thinks Anthony is dead; she uses alcohol (along with Valium) to dull her feelings of shame and guilt and to inure herself to a life without meaning or joy.
However, there are also specific moments where drink has the opposite effect. This is seen in one of the opening scenes of the novel where Ellie is walking home with Douglas following a night out. He talks about “In vino veritas [in wine there is truth] and all that,” after criticizing her choice to sleep with a married man. Alcohol allows Douglas to be candid with his friend about what he really thinks. Alcohol also leads Anthony to speak a certain truth about Jennifer. He is drunk when he calls her a “spoilt little tai-tai” (71). Further, it is this event, when Jennifer overhears those comments, which provides the catalyst for their subsequent meeting and relationship. Thus, alcohol have the effect of facilitating dramatic change just as much as it can stunt it.
Clothes and Jewelry
On one level, the female character’s concern with clothes and jewelry serves to highlight the subordinate place of women within the 1960s. For example, after her accident, Jennifer struggles to remember the plot of a novel she had read, but she reflects that she has “more pressing matters to attend to” like “working out what on earth she was going to wear this evening” (78). Clothes, not her own memory, have priority in her life. This reflects a world where more serious or substantial concerns, like politics or business, are the preserve of men. In contrast, women are expected to content themselves with superficial questions of decoration and appearance.
Within this limited world, then, it is little wonder that clothes become fetishized. This is most vividly demonstrated when Jennifer is about to leave Laurence. She contemplates two dresses laid out on her bed. The first is a “midnight blue she had worn on the night of Laurence’s birthday” (218). The second is a “pale gold brocade, with a mandarin collar and no sleaves” that “she had worn on the evening that Anthony O’Hare had declined to make love to her” (219). The two dresses seem to symbolize for her the choice between two types of men and life. The standard blue dress represents a life of conformity and social acceptance, the second one of risk, non-conformity, and adventure. Jennifer chooses the latter. Nonetheless, in tying her identity so much to clothes, and thus with the way men perceive her, her choice remains circumscribed by the very conventionality she is trying to escape.
Status and Wealth
When first assessing Rory as a possible romantic partner, Ellie makes several negative assumptions about him. As she says, “she suspects he earns significantly less than she does, and probably still shares a flat. It’s possible he doesn’t even drive” (336). Thus, her initial lack of interest, while not solely about Rory’s income, is very much linked to his perceived lack of social status and position. The notion that he is “not her type” and is too young may be a rationalization for a deeper sense that he might not have many of the markers of social success that she expects the men she dates to possess (336).
Reading about Jennifer falling in love with a “penniless playboy reporter” appear to alter her attitude on this point (380). Jennifer’s and Anthony’s love evolved precisely from a rejection of petty conventional society and its obsession with “who has what” (71). It emerged from a challenge to the idea that social rank should be the primary determinant of one’s choice of partner. By the end of the end of the novel, Ellie rejects John, the famous writer, for Rory, the librarian. She comes to see that there are more important things than status. It also becomes another way in which Ellie starts to identify Rory with Anthony and herself with Jennifer.
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By Jojo Moyes
