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Chapter 2
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
The May of Teck Club is basically a hostel, though the residents rarely refer to it as such—only in low moments, like after a bad breakup. The ground floor contains offices. In more prosperous times, there was a grand ballroom on the floor above. Now, that floor houses the dormitories, sectioned off into cubicles. The girls there are used to dormitory life, having grown up attending boarding schools in the English countryside. They discuss men among one another, though none has much experience in this area. The floor above houses staff, and residents who live in shared rooms, unable to afford their own cubicle.
So much of the 1945 timeline takes place within the confines of the May of Teck Club, with the narration moving from room to room, and floor to floor, as it presents slice-of-life scenes that give readers a sense of what life at the club is like for the average resident. In Chapter 3, the narration guides readers through the physical structure of the club, breaking down which groups of girls live on what floor and what sort of activities happen where. It reads as a detached, almost scientific guidebook to an unfamiliar ecosystem or foreign land, a narrative technique that emphasizes outsiders’ tendency to idealize or romanticize life at the May of Teck Club. Living here, the narration suggests, is like living at a proverbial boarding school out of a classic novel: it's a place where all the tropes one associates with the lives of beautiful, young professionals all living in community with one another come to life.
Active
Themes
On the third floor live “the celibates, the old maids of settled character and various ages” who have, seemingly, committed themselves to living out the rest of their days alone. Joanna Childe’s room is here. The fourth floor houses the most worldly and beautiful girls. Of the five girls who occupy the five top rooms, three have lovers and “men-friends.” The girls don’t have sex with their “men-friends,” but rather consider them as marriageable options in the long term. The fourth girl is practically engaged. The fifth girl is Jane Wright, who works for a publisher. Jane wants to marry eventually, but for now, she just wants to hang around with “young intellectuals.”
Joanna isn’t especially old—she is only just wrapping up her schooling at the start of World War II, and so she can’t be much older than 30—yet she is counted among the club’s “old maids of settled character” nonetheless. That Joanna is cast in the role of “old maid”—the archetypal spinster—despite her relative youth speaks to the sexist, gendered stereotypes that permeate the mainstream culture. Meanwhile, though the dormitory girls demonstrate how comparatively modern they are with their embrace of unattached, unmarried sex, their strategic differentiation between lovers and “men-friends” reinforces traditional gender norms in its acceptance of marriage as one of the most important milestones of a woman’s life. Where men pursue intellectual interests and careers, women strive to marry well. Jane challenges this gendered expectation with her passion for her career and her interest in “young intellectuals.”
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Themes
Above this floor is the roof. Though once accessible via a trap-door in the bathroom ceiling, the door was boarded up after “a burglar or a lover” snuck through the door, entered the house, and attacked one of the residents. Greggie claims to know the story of how the trap-door came to be boarded up. Beautiful Selina Redwood notes that they’d all perish if a fire were to break out. Greggie scolds Selina for not knowing the “emergency instructions.” The warden goes through the emergency instructions about four times per year at dinner, but Selina rarely attends dinner.
The dormitory girls long to access the club’s flat roof, which would be ideal for sunbathing. One day, Selina realizes that the roof is accessible via a slit window in the lavatory—at just seven inches wide by fourteen inches long, though, it’s a tight fit. Given the tight fit, the window becomes a test to determine how fattening the club’s food is. Of the top-floor girls, only Anne and Selina are thin enough to slip through, and Anne only manages it after removing all her clothing. She injures herself, though, and decides to use soap or margarine to slide through more easily. Jane, who is overweight and constantly counting calories, cannot fit through.
Active
Themes
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Outside, Anne and Selina peer over the flat roof and see Greggie below, giving a tour of her garden to two new club members. Greggie shows the new girls a spot where a bomb went off a couple years ago. Greggie points out a spot where she suspects a second, unexploded bomb fell.
Active
Themes
Back inside, Jane frets over the calories of that night’s meal. Selina tells Anne she can’t lend her any soap this month (Selina gets soap, along with other rare commodities, from an American Army officer). Anne scowls, insisting she doesn’t want Selina’s soap—but she reminds Selina not to “ask for the taffeta,” referring to the Schiaparelli taffeta gown Anne’s rich aunt gifted her. Anne lets the top-floor girls borrow the dress, and they give her things like clothing coupons or soap in return.
Active
Themes
Jane leaves Selina and Anne and returns to her room to do her “brain-work,” which is what she calls her work in the publishing business. The club admires Jane for her brain-work, though they’re perplexed by the “pale, thin foreigner” who starts to call on Jane regularly. He visits the office or calls the office phone to ask to speak to Jane “privately.” Jane apologizes to the office workers for the man’s odd mannerisms, which she attributes to his foreignness. Lately, a different man—Nicholas Farringdon—has begun to call for Jane. Jane describes Nicholas as “brilliant,” though he’s still trying to establish himself in the publishing industry.
Jane’s “brain-work” takes multiple forms. Secretly, she writes romantic poetry in her room; “also secretly,” she writes scheming letters at the behest of the “pale foreigner.” Officially, she works as the sole assistant at Huy Throvis-Mew, a publishing firm. The firm’s director is “George Johnson,” to Jane, though he has gone by various other names in the past (Huy Throvis-Mew, for instance), and some of his friends call him “Con.” Jane assists George in many tasks, from taking books to the post office, to answering the phone, to taking care of George and his wife, Tilly’s, baby.
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Themes
After Jane has been working for him for a year, George starts to assign Jane “detective work.” This work consists of digging up insecurities or compromising information about authors and then using it to coerce them into signing contracts that disproportionately benefit the publisher. George’s con is “fairly innocent,” if somewhat shady, since he never manages to discover anything too bad about any author. To Jane, George insists that this practice is not a big deal—all the big firms do it. Jane has been thus far successful in this slightly dodgy field of work, especially with Rudi Bittesch, the Romanian man who often calls on her at the May of Teck Club.
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Themes
The poet Nicholas Farringdon is Jane’s latest focus, and he is notably different from authors George has assigned her in the past. For one, he knows that Jane is investigating him. He’s also quite arrogant—and, in Jane’s opinion, quite good looking. Nicholas has been particularly worrisome for George, who doesn’t understand Nicholas’s book but is also afraid of its failure, should George choose to publish it.
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Themes
When Nicholas first calls the office, Jane tries out her go-to opening line: “What is your raison d’étre?” But Nicholas only frowns in response. After that, Jane invites him to the May of Teck Club, an invitation that Nicholas accepts. She’s surprised but pleased when Nicholas takes such a keen interest in the club—and in Selina especially. Jane sits in the drawing-room with Nicholas, Selina, Judy Redwood, and Anne. They hear Joanna reciting poetry during an elocution lesson. “I wish she would stick to The Wreck of the Deutschland,” Judy observes.
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Themes
The narration returns to the slit-window scene, after Jane has retired to her room to work on her brain-work. Two girls—Dorothy Markham and Nancy Riddle— have just returned from a visit home. Dorothy Markham is the niece of Lady Julia Markham, the chairwoman of the May of Teck Club’s management committee. Nancy Riddle is “one of the club’s many clergymen’s daughters.” Nancy takes lessons with Joanna to try to get rid of her Midlands accent.
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Themes
From her bedroom, Jane overhears cheers as Dorothy Markham successfully fits through the slit window. Dorothy is slim and shapeless but intends to marry one of the young men she knows who are “drawn to boyish figures.” Now, Dorothy pokes her head in Jane’s room without knocking to ask for some soap, explaining that she’s filthy with soot from her escapade on the roof. In a few months, Dorothy will again knock on Jane’s door—to announce that she’s “preggers” and to invite Jane to her wedding. From the commotion that Jane now hears from her room, she guesses that Nancy has gotten stuck in the slit window.
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Themes
Jane resumes her work. She looks at the list of authors Rudi has assigned her and gets to work one of the names she hasn’t yet covered. “Dear Mr Hemingway,” Jane begins. Rudi pays Jane to write phony fan mail to famous authors, presenting them with sentimental sob stories intended to elicit a (preferably signed) response. Rudi then sells the signed replies for a profit, paying Jane a sum based on the response’s content and length. Jane would like to keep the signed responses for herself, but she needs the money.
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Themes
Jane initially worried about the scheme, but Rudi assures her it’s fine—she can always insist she’s just playing a prank. Though Jane once attempted to pen a letter to Henry James (not realizing James was dead) Jane’s skill has improved with time. She once wrote a letter to Daphne du Maurier in which she pretended to be an illegitimate child. Rudi paid Jane a good sum for Maurier’s “sympathetic response.”
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Themes
Now, Jane asks Rudi if he’d like a letter from Nicholas Farringdon. Rudi says no—he knows Nicholas, and he is certain Nicholas will never be “a Name” in the publishing industry. Still, Rudi asks what Nicholas has written. Jane tells Rudi about Nicholas’s The Sabbath Notebooks, which Nicholas calls “political philosophy,” though in Jane’s opinion it’s just a bunch of “notes and thoughts.” Rudi thinks it sounds “religious,” and he predicts that Nicholas will end up “a reactionary Catholic” in the future. Jane despises Rudi—he, unlike Nicholas, is “not at all attractive.”
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Themes
Jane notes that it’s 6:20 now, which means she has time to write one more letter before supper. She begins a letter to “Mr. Maugham” and eats a bite of chocolate to sustain her until supper. She thinks that perhaps this letter should be about illness—she has, after all, spent months in a sanatorium, recovering from tuberculosis.
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From her room, Jane hears Selina’s voice in Anne’s room as Selina recites “the Two Sentences.” The Two Sentences are an exercise that Selina learned in a “Poise Course” she recently took, which urged working women to practice maintaining their poise by reciting two sentences twice per day: “Poise is a perfect balance, an equanimity of body and mind, complete composure whatever the social scene. Elegant dress, immaculate grooming, and perfect deportment all contribute to the attainment of self-confidence.” All the dormitory girls are in awe of the Two Sentences—and envious of beautiful, poised Selina. By the time Selina finishes her sentences, Jane is done writing her letter. Meanwhile, Joanna’s voice echoes from the floor below. “One last time,” Joanna recites, wrapping up Nancy Riddle’s elocution lesson.
