74 pages • 2 hours read
Sarah PennerThe Lost Apothecary
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2021A 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
Betrayal, Trust, and Female Agency
In both timelines, betrayal proves to be a persistent and disruptive force. It compels characters to abandon their normative lives and operate in brand-new registers, doing things, out of hurt and anger, that they might not normally do. Frederick’s betrayal initiates Nella’s poison-dealing, resulting in the first time she ever significantly diverges from her mother’s licit path by selling a deadly toxin. Nella recognizes this situation with Frederick as “the same heart-wrenching journey of every woman to whom [she has] sold a poison” (135). The network of poison-dealing that blooms from Nella’s own experience of betrayal allows other mistreated women to level concrete, deadly consequences at their male abusers, circumventing a heavily gendered 18th-century society unlikely to censure these men for their offenses. By operating well outside the legal and social bounds of her world, Nella gives these women a similarly extralegal and extra-social avenue for removing a source of their own torment—the men in their lives.
Penner demonstrates that betrayal can also fundamentally alter a person’s way of thinking. As it is carried out by a once-trusted person, one of betrayal’s chief violences is its capacity to render all other human connections tenuous in the minds of its victims, regardless of the actual strength of those bonds. Nella completely closes herself off from the world around her, engaging with it only in the fleeting moments where she interacts with women who have suffered as she has; though she likes Eliza upon their first meeting, she has no cause to believe that their interaction will be any less transient than all her other ones. When Eliza keeps seeking her out, Nella is baffled and alarmed, as in her mind, the person Frederick’s betrayal turned her into is undeserving of long-term human connection, lest she taint that unfortunate other party.
Eliza’s perspective is also seriously affected by a breach in her trust, as Mr. Amwell’s advances cause her to be wary of him where the man once “gave [her] no reason not to” (135) trust him. Mr. Amwell’s behavior in this regard also recasts how Eliza views the supernatural. She once believed the world to be replete with nothing but magic, but Mr. Amwell’s attention and past actions, namely his alleged rape and impregnation of Johanna, inject Eliza’s wonder with a darker impression of the mystical. Johanna’s story convinces Eliza that “magick could sour and go bad” (75), after which she begins to hear Johanna’s spirit “cry out through the walls, late at night” (76).
Penner uses both Lady Clarence and Caroline to add nuance to this theme by showing that not every character in the novel wants an immediate, clean break from the offending man in their lives. These two characters parse through the betrayal they have experienced to either determine (in Caroline’s case) or seize (in Lady Clarence’s case) what they want out of life. Their motives are portrayed with complexity and care: Caroline decides to go to London without James to reassess the person she was, is, and could be outside of marriage, but she does not make a definitive decision to leave James until he compounds his betrayal by poisoning himself and attempting to guilt her into reconciliation. Lady Clarence, though upset with the continued affront of her husband’s affair, does not intend to leave him at all. She privileges her desire to have a child over her discontent with his betrayal and endeavors to rid herself of the instrument of his treachery (i.e., Miss Berkwell) rather than the man himself. Unlike Nella’s other customers, Lady Clarence does not intend to aim for the root of betrayal.
Feminine Power in Patriarchal Spheres
England’s Georgian era, the historical period when Nella and Eliza’s stories are set, was a deeply patriarchal epoch that financially and socially subjugated its women. It was believed that women and men differed fundamentally on the basis of both physicality and mental aptitude. Men had a vested interest in maintaining this status quo because masculinity was tightly tied to a man’s ability to control the women in his orbit, his wife in particular. The modicum of societal power that most women exerted was in the domestic sphere. In developing her theme of feminine power, Penner constructs characters who are allotted small bits of control and spool it into more expansive influence, becoming masters of their own fates in distinctly unique ways.
Nella’s character defies the rigidity of the Georgian gender hierarchy. As an unmarried business owner, she is financially independent, beholden to no husband. The shop itself is a matrifocal inheritance from her single mother, a true aberration in a patrifocal world. Though one might argue that the depiction of her physical illness plays into Georgian notions of women’s physically inferior constitutions, Nella suffers and works through more pain than any one person, regardless of gender, is likely able to bear, such as when she visits the Walworth field to collect beetles even with her joints swelling.
While middle- and upper-class Georgian women were often confined to their private home spheres by their husbands, fathers, or brothers, Nella can choose when and how she wants to leave one sphere for the other. Eliza is similarly able to navigate between private and public spheres, on account of her age and her lack of familial obligation. Her freedom parallels Nella’s, but she has neither Nella’s physical ailments nor the weight of Nella’s vocation, representing both the sort of person Nella once was and the person she becomes by novel’s end. But Eliza serves more purpose than simply reflecting or contrasting Nella’s attributes. She also stands for her own unique form of feminine power. She turns fanciful girlhood notions of magic into the sort of reckless, concrete action that Georgians would expect of a boy or man.
Nella and Eliza’s statuses are starkly contrasted with Lady Clarence’s. Though the woman is very wealthy, she does not have the same level of freedom that Nella and Eliza do. Lady Clarence, instead, turns to reconfiguring the one realm she does have sway over—her domestic life. She does this by attempting to murder her husband’s mistress, an act she believes will excise this threat from her bubble of domesticity and clear the way for her conception and delivery of a child. Lady Clarence wields control over her domestic sphere in the one way she feels she can, but her actions prove noxious, as her desire for Miss Berkwell’s death nearly condemns Nella and Eliza to their own demise. Though such rigid gender structures have loosened in Caroline’s era, her experience with James demonstrates that those systems have mutated and evolved to survive the centuries.
While James does not exist in an era that allows him free reign to rule his wife’s life, he does his best to dominate Caroline emotionally and mentally. He discourages her interest in an academic career, lies to her about his affair, and attempts to guilt her into staying with him by poisoning himself. Caroline applies her strength by throwing herself into just the sort of study that James discouraged her from, becoming the master of her own mind and future, and abandoning her impression (which the society around her perpetuated) that it is a woman’s duty to repackage herself to support her husband in marriage.
Secrecy
Throughout the novel secrets build on themselves until they become incredibly challenging to conceal, forcing characters to live in constant states of emotional tension that often manifest in the physical environment around them. The magnitude of Nella’s secretive work grows with every poison she dispenses, stoking her inner turmoil as she diverges from her mother’s guilt-free path. But her work also necessitates the transformation of her mother’s shop, further distancing her from the thing most imbued with her mother’s memory. She splits the single room in two with “the installation of a wall of shelves” (25) and the inclusion of a room that holds only a barrel of rotted barley (so her clients can request poisons from her), rendering the space so unrecognizable that most of the shop’s customers have stopped coming. Her changed shop reflects the changes in herself: Just as Nella’s secretive work makes it difficult for old clients to reconcile this new shop with the old shop, so too does Nella’s secretive work make it difficult for her to reconcile her present self with her past self.
In addition to serving as the physical manifestation of her internal struggle, Nella’s shop also serves as a significant secret that Caroline keeps for almost half the book. As Caroline struggles with whether to tell Gaynor or James about this discovery, and eventually settles on withholding the information from James entirely and from Gaynor temporarily, it cements itself as a concealed truth page after page. It eventually, if only partially, unearths itself by way of the notes she takes on the register, manifesting itself in her physical detainment by the police. Both Caroline and Nella’s situations demonstrate that secrecy can be incredibly high maintenance, requiring a great deal of effort to tend to. Even then, there is no guarantee that what is hidden will not emerge in one way or another.
But The Lost Apothecary does not take a wholly condemnatory stance on secret-keeping and deception. Penner displays secrecy’s complexity and nuance by presenting its capacity to both corrode and protect. After all, it is deception that allows Eliza to escape her abuser, and it is deception that allows Eliza to brew the Tincture to Reverse Bad Fortune without Nella’s knowledge, eventually saving her life and wiping her slate clean. Pregnancy, too, is couched in a secrecy that allows Nella, Lady Clarence, and Caroline to dictate when and with whom they share reproductive information about their bodies. Nella shares her experience of forced abortion with Eliza while they are hiding in the stable after collecting beetles, only after she has grown to trust the girl; this results in a small moment of catharsis for the older woman. When Lady Clarence arrives at Nella’s shop, she is comfortable enough in this feminine space to share her desire for a child, but she cuts herself off before she can mention her multiple conception attempts with her husband, a wielding of her power to share or withhold this information about her person. This directly opposes the Georgian era’s prevailing treatment of women’s reproductive capabilities as a matter of equal concern for women and their male relatives.
Even Caroline, in her present timeline, can control whether to share her potential pregnancy with James (which she declines to do). Additionally, by novel’s end, both Eliza and Caroline voluntarily keep secrets that protect those they’ve come to care about: Eliza keeps the secret of her survival after her jump from Blackfriars’ Bridge as well as the identity of the “special friend” (297) who counseled her into adulthood, while Caroline keeps to herself Eliza’s existence, feeling a kinship with the girl because Eliza hovered above “frigid, unwelcome depths… and jumped” (299), just as Caroline plunges into remaking her life after 10 stagnant years.
