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Chapter 8
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
Nicholas’s tape-recording of Joanna’s recitation from that night is taped over, “for economy reasons.” Nicholas is furious—he wanted to play it for Joanna’s father at her funeral. “It’s infuriating,” Nicholas tells Joanna’s father. “She was at her best in The Wreck of the Deutschland.” Joanna’s father tells Nicholas it’s okay. He laments Joanna’s having ever come to London in the first place, though, declaring it “a mistake.” Nicholas doubts Joanna’s father ever really knew her. He tells Joanna’s father that Joanna was reciting psalms when she died. He notes her “religious strength” and her “sense”—and deep fear—“of Hell.”
Chapter 9 continues in the style that has characterized much of the novel up to this point: a light-hearted and humorous tone that clashes rather absurdly with the story’s actual subject matter, which by now has become notably darker with the destruction of the May of Teck Club and the tragic death of Joanna. Again, this strange clash between tone and subject is deliberate, guiding readers to feel the disorienting experience of trauma as the book’s characters do. Nicholas’s assessment that Joanna “was at her best in The Wreck of the Deutschland” has dual meanings. On the surface, is he commenting on how well Joanna recited that particular poem. His remark takes on deeper meaning if one reads Joanna as a stand-in for one of the drowned nuns featured in that poem. Symbolically, then, Nicholas is suggesting that Joanna was “at her best”—meaning her moral or existential best—at the moment of her death, when she accepted her fate bravely and without abandoning her faith. When Nicholas observes that Joanna’s father didn’t really know her, he is responding to her father’s comment that it was “a mistake” for her to move to London, implying, perhaps, that the move to London corrupted Joanna’s soul and solidified her fate. Joanna’s father sees Joanna’s death as a senseless tragedy, failing to recognize the religious conviction, bravery, and profound humility that Joanna showed as she died. Nicholas recognized it, and it has clearly had a profound effect on him.
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After agreeing to take Joanna’s father to see the site of Joanna’s death, Nicholas asks if he’s seen any of the surviving girls who were trapped with Joanna. Joanna’s father has. Nicholas describes Selina and asks if Joanna’s father saw a girl matching her description, but Joanna’s father can’t remember. Nicholas explains that he’s been trying to find Selina but hasn’t been successful.
It's unclear why Nicholas wants to see Selina, but one plausible explanation is that he seeks closure. Having seen the true selfishness and superficiality of Selina after she took advantage of the tragedy to steal the taffeta gown for herself, Nicholas no longer believes in Selina’s capacity to develop a social conscience or in their future together as a couple.
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When Nicholas speaks Selina’s name aloud, it triggers something in Joanna’s father’s memory. He recalls hearing one of the girls complain that a “Selina” had stolen her only formal gown. Nicholas confirms that this is Selina. Nicholas and Joanna’s father reach the site where the May of Teck Club once stood. Joanna’s father stands before it, holding his hat in his hands as he takes it all in.
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Later, Rudi Bittesch looks through the papers on Nicholas’s desk and asks if they’re his manuscript for The Sabbath Notebooks. Nicholas tells him they are, and that Rudi can have it. It might be worth something after Nicholas dies, should he become famous someday. Such generosity is out of character for Nicholas, but he feels obligated: Rudi has discovered Selina’s whereabouts. Rudi is annoyed when Nicholas adds that he has decided against publishing the book for now. To cheer him up, Nicholas offers Rudi the letter that “Charles Morgan” wrote to Nicholas, declaring Nicholas a “genius.” Rudi immediately recognizes the letter as “Jane’s work” and hands it back.
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Themes
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Changing the subject, Rudi asks why Nicholas is so happy—has he found Selina? Nicholas says he has. When he saw her, she “screamed. She couldn’t stop screaming.” Rudi suspects that seeing Nicholas reminded Selina of the explosion. Nicholas agrees. Rudi suggests it’s for the best—Selina is “no good,” and she’s also married to “a crooner in Clarges Street.” Nicholas says that Selina’s husband is a nice man, actually—and “quite a decent crooner,” though he admits he never heard the man croon.
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Jane has since returned “to her normal state of unhappiness and hope,” and she’s now living in a furnished room on Kensington Street. When she joins Rudi and Nicholas, Rudi asks her if Nicholas makes her “scream.” Jane says no—but she might start if he refuses to let George publish The Sabbath Notebooks. Rudi tells her about Selina, and Jane confirms that the explosion “was hell.” Rudi wonders why Nicholas is so in love with Selina, anyway. He thinks Nicholas should “find a woman of character or a French girl” instead.
In the present, Jane calls Nancy, who is now married to a Midlands clergyman. Jane asks Nancy if she thinks that Nicholas’s conversion might have been connected to the fire—she wants to know because she is writing an article about Nicholas in the wake of his death. Nancy thinks it might have been Joanna who inspired him. “Joanna was very High Church,” Nancy explains. Jane doesn’t think so because it was Selina, not Joanna, whom Nicholas was in love with. She cites a note in Nicholas’s manuscript in which he claims, “a vision of evil may be as effective to conversion as a vision of good.” Nancy thinks maybe Nicholas loved all the May of Teck girls.
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In a flashback to V.J. (Victory over Japan) night in August, Jane, Nicholas, and Rudi join the large crowd gathered outside the palace. It’s a chaotic scene. A seaman comes up to Jane and kisses her on the mouth, and she has no means to escape. Nicholas observes another seaman “slid[e] a knife silently between the ribs of a woman who [i]s with him.” She silently falls to the floor. Nearby, a different woman screams. Maybe she has been stabbed, too—or maybe someone has simply stepped on her foot. Rudi and Jane are too busy cheering to notice. Nicholas tries to shout that a woman has been stabbed, but no one notices. The seaman shouts at the collapsed woman.
Nicholas leads Rudi and Jane out of the crowd and toward the park. As he walks, he finds himself near the knifer. Without knowing why, Nicholas slips the Charles Morgan letter into the knifer’s shirt. Nicholas, Jane, and Rudi continue on to the park, singing as they walk. Aircraft fly above to celebrate the victory. “Well, I wouldn’t have missed it, really,” Jane muses. She stops briefly to pin back a piece of hair that has come undone. When he dies, years later, Nicholas will think of this image of Jane with a pin in her mouth, “as if this was an image of all the May of Teck establishments in its meek, unselfconscious attitudes of poverty, long ago in 1945.”
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