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Chapter 1
Themes
and Colors
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Girls of Slender Means, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Gender
Youth and Romantic Idealism
Authenticity and Humility
Trauma
Summary
Analysis
Joanna Childe gives elocution lessons to the cook, Miss Harper, in the May of Teck Club’s recreation room. Joanna gets paid six shillings an hour, slightly less if the students are May of Teck members. She spends the rest of her time preparing for her next school exam. The club takes pride in Joanna because she’s “well built, fair and healthy looking,” humble and respectable—everything a rector’s daughter should be.
“Elocution” is the skill of clear, properly articulated and pronounced speech. Though Joanna accepts payment for her lessons and so isn’t teaching purely out of goodwill, it is undeniable that she uses her self-discipline and talent to engage with her community, thereby enriching it. Indeed, Joanna’s voice as she guides her students through reciting poetry is threaded throughout the narrative, making her presence heard and felt even as Joanna doesn’t play a particularly active role as a character for much of the novel.
Active
Themes
The truth is that Joanna fell in love with a curate at the end of her schooling. The relationship didn’t work out, and Joanna decided she wouldn’t pursue romance after that. She turns to poetry to inform her philosophy of love, and at some point she came to understand that if she were to attach a similar feeling to someone else, it would destroy the whole foundation of love, marriage, and commitment. When she finds herself falling for a second curate, then, she tries to suppress her feelings.
Here readers learn that Joanna’s rigid self-discipline and her commitment to her elocution skills haven’t come from nowhere: they were a conscious choice she made in reaction to an ill-fated romance. Joanna’s choice to devote herself to poetry and religion reinforces her embrace of higher ideals over fleeting, superficial earthly passions.
Active
Themes
Joanna’s feelings for the second curate begin when she sees him in the pulpit at an evening service. He’s the most handsome man she’s ever seen, dark and tall with an athletic build. Newly ordained, he’s set to enter the Air Force soon. Joanna watches from off to the side as the curate instructs a pretty young woman in the meaning of a scripture passage about repentance and salvation. “It is better to enter maimed into the Kingdom of Heaven than not to enter at all,” the curate explains to the beautiful young woman.
Active
Themes
Joanna decides in that moment “to enter maimed into the Kingdom of Heaven,” though she “d[oes] not look maimed.” She gets a job at the May of Teck Club in London and hones her elocution skills, beginning her formal studies toward the end of the war. Joanna does not participate in the other girls’ trite debates about the club’s food and whether it’s overly fattening.
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