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Chapter 2
Themes
and Colors
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in My Name is Emilia del Valle, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Identity and Self-Discovery
Femininity and Feminism
The Power of Love
Challenge and Character
Class Exploitation
War
Summary
Analysis
The Transcontinental Railroad is a technological marvel of the 19th century, capable of making in four days a trip that used to take four weeks by stagecoach. Emilia’s first-class ticket entitles her to a comfortable, ventilated car and delicious food served on fine china. But she does notice that her comfort depends on the usually “invisible” workers who keep everything running.
Even when she’s privy to the comforts of the upper echelons of society, Emilia cannot and will not turn away from the lives of the people who make those comforts possible. She’s a working-class woman, and it’s clear that she will never turn her back on the other members of her class.
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In New York City, Emilia takes a room at tenement-neighborhood boarding house that caters to recent immigrants. Soon afterward, she meets Eric Whelan’s brother Owen, to whom she delivers a gift from Eric. Emilia is immediately attracted to the handsome, dark-haired Owen, and—much to her surprise—he quickly and effectively seduces her. Emilia keeps the details of their sexual encounters to herself, except to say that Owen is an extremely competent and generous lover. He’s also very well-educated in the arena of sexual health and birth control. He uses (and teaches Emilia about) condoms and takes her to a doctor to procure a diaphragm for herself, to protect against unwanted pregnancy.
A key—if largely unspoken—component of Molly’s image of the bad woman (which is, in turn, 19th-century American society’s) is sexual promiscuity. Emilia is making good on her childhood pledge to become a “bad woman” in embarking on her sexual awakening with Owen Whelan. But note that there’s nothing inherently bad about this relationship other than its defiance of norms. Owen doesn’t take advantage of Emilia. He treats her with dignity, even adoration. And, in direct contrast to the selfish and short-sighted Gonzalo Andrés, he takes great care to show Emilia how to protect her own health. Condoms made of animal viscera go back at least to ancient Greece and Rome; the first thing that is recognized as a modern diaphragm was invented in 1840s by a German doctor and subsequently popularized in America by the Goodyear Company (of rubber tire fame).
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Emilia thoroughly enjoys her time with Owen during the weeks she is in New York. But he breaks her heart in the end because she couldn’t help but fall in love with him despite his early warning that he wasn’t interested in a long-term relationship. Still, she feels grateful to him for teaching her enough about carnal delights (and sexual health) to empower her to take other lovers later in life.
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While in New York, Emilia covers a variety of human-interest stories as Brandon J. Price. She interviews “freak show pygmies” (a family of Swiss performers with achondroplasia on tour). She attends a séance conducted by Cora Hatch. She interviews suffragettes and impoverished women working in dreadful and dangerous conditions in the city’s factories. And she attends a performance by Omene, a belly dancer. Mr. Chamberlain particularly liked her write-up of that event, probably (Emilia implies) because of her detailed description of Omene’s exotic costumes and erotic moves. But the column also features an interview Emilia conducted with the performer, revealing her to be an “ambitious,” “unscrupulous,” and extremely competent (in a word, distinctly unfeminine) businessperson and self-promoter.
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Emilia shares one final night with Owen (reflecting, as she does so, on the unlikelihood of her losing her virginity to a man so adamantly uninterested in reading), then boards the train back to California, travelling third class this time in search of “new experiences” to chronicle. Compared to her eastward journey, the trip is miserable. The car is poorly ventilated and uncomfortable. The passengers have only the food and water they carry with them or procure at train stations. The trip takes nine days instead of four, because when there is a need to attach extra cargo or first-class cars to the engine, the third-class car gets decoupled and must wait for another train to pick it up.
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Finally, a filthy, greasy, and exhausted Emilia disembarks the train to find Eric Whelan waiting for her on the platform. She tells him about her trip, and he catches her up on local news. He also lets slip that Owen has a wife and four children. Emilia is mortified—not because she had sex outside of marriage but because she inadvertently participated in the betrayal of another woman. She vows to never sleep with a married man ever again if she can help it.
The longer she knows Eric, Emilia reflects, the more intimate their friendship becomes. Over time, she learns about his impoverished Irish childhood. Owen (seven years his senior) took young Eric under his wing. Although he forced the bookish Eric to participate in boxing matches (to learn self-defense), he otherwise protected him fiercely. When Owen decided to emigrate to America, Eric came with him. They started their new lives working in a relative’s fish shop, and Eric used his literary talents to eventually secure work in the newspaper industry.
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Brandon J. Price’s travel columns are well-received by the Examiner’s readership, and he begins to attract the attention of the American literati. But no matter how many invitations he receives to give lectures or meet luminaries like Mark Twain, Price can never accept without compromising Emilia’s identity. She begins to chafe under her imposed anonymity. And then fate hands her a chance to come out into the open.
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