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Chapter 3
Themes
and Colors
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Go-Between, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Social Class and Hierarchy
Coming of Age and Trauma
Masculinity
Fate, Myth, and Magic
Love, Sex, and Marriage
Summary
Analysis
Marian takes Leo to Norwich to buy clothes, and he sees the experience as a “turning-point” that changes everything. Before the trip, he hadn’t really thought much about his appearance, and it is a somewhat disturbing revelation to him that he is “bound up” with how he looks. Marian chooses the clothes, judging what suits Leo and what doesn’t.
Marian is Leo’s ticket to social acceptance—she has the taste and refined aesthetic sense to make him look good, which he has just realized is going to be important. That Leo feels this trip is a turning point shows that he at a very delicate in his adolescence, highly impressionable, and looking for allies.
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Leo and Marian have lunch at a hotel, which is a new extravagance for Leo. One they’re finished and with the shopping done, Marian asks Leo to go and spend some time looking around the cathedral, as she has some other business to attend to. Leo greatly enjoys the cathedral; Marian’s attention to him has put him in an ecstatic mood.
The Norwich trip is almost like a date, except Leo is too young to really think of Marian romantically (and obviously her true affections are elsewhere). The cathedral lends an epic quality to Leo’s feelings, intensifying them. This is all so new to him that he is in a state of rapture, spellbound by the new sights and Marian’s attentions. Marian is deliberately vague about the “business” she has.
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Not long after, Leo meets Marian by the statue of Sir Thomas Browne, someone he’s not heard of before. He gets there early and sees Marian on the other side of the street. She seems to be saying good bye to someone, before then walking back to the coach and taking Leo home.
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Leo considers the trip to Norwich his “spiritual transformation.” At mealtime back at Brandham Hall, everyone greets his new appearance with “cries of acclaim.” He is made to stand on a chair and spin round so that everyone can get a good look at his new outfit. The guests remark on the green color of his clothes and, when one likens him to Robin Hood, he is “delighted” to think of himself as that character and Marian as Maid Marian, Robin Hood’s love interest.
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One of the guests asks Leo if he feels different now he has new clothes. He replies, “’I feel quite another person!” Mrs. Maudsley asks him to come closer so she can admire the outfit, which she likes very much. She then asks Marian whether she saw anyone in Norwich; Marian says no, and gets Leo to confirm that they were busy shopping the entire time.
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Now with clothes better suited to the weather, Leo enjoys the heat, which he feels gives everything the “sense of suspended movement.” He wants the heat to “somehow be cumulative,” to get “hotter and hotter” so he can find its “heart.”
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Leo’s clothes feel good to wear. He feels that their thinness represents his first “steps towards” his “corporeal union with the summer.” He imagines discarding them one by one, until eventually he’ll be released “into nakedness.” He’s not too sure about sex, but he knows he has “yearnings for nudist fulfillment,” for there to be nothing between “me and nature.” At the same time, he doesn’t think of these feelings as being really “capable of realization.”
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Leo feels very grateful for the purchases made on his behalf and can’t believe he is the recipient of the Maudsleys’ “godlike” expenditure. He sees the inhabitants of Brandham Hall, especially Marian, as “resplendent beings,” and “citizens of the world who made the world their playground.” He finds them easily equal and comparable to the “august and legendary figures of the Zodiac.”
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On Saturday the 14th, a group from Brandham Hall decides to go swimming. Leo wants to try out his bathing-suit, but he doesn’t know how to swim. Marian says she’ll teach him, but Mrs. Maudsley won’t allow that. Leo’s mother has told her that he is prone to catching a cold, and accordingly Mrs. Maudsley insists Leo gets written permission from his mother before he does any swimming.
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Leo and Marcus go along with the swimmers, taking their bathing suits even though neither of them can swim. Leo is disappointed by how much their suits are going to cover up their bodies. Even though Leo knows he isn’t going to swim, the fearful idea of it still gives him “a tingling on my skin and a faint loosening of my bowels.”
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The party of six, including Leo, Marcus, Marian and Denys, walk down some tree-lined paths towards the water. Marcus tells Leo that Trimingham will be arriving that evening and warns of his “dreadfully ugly” face, which sustained wounds during the Boer War. He then says that Mrs. Maudsley wants Marian to marry Trimingham, making Leo feel jealous and that he already dislikes the man. He doesn’t understand why she’d want to marry someone “horribly ugly” who is “not even a Mr.”
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The group goes over marshy terrain and water creeps over Leo’s shoes. He notices a structure of “bars and spars and uprights, like a gallows,” which he finds intimidating. Suddenly they spot the head and shoulders of a man among the rushes. The man walks up to the structure and dives into the water below. Ted's "manly" physicality is also hinted at in his actions here, while his work on near this structure resembling a gallows hints at his fate.
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The grown-ups are shocked to see another man—seemingly a trespasser—swimming on their lands. Denys suggests that he order the man away. The girls of the group go off to change. As the others near the man, Denys realizes that it’s Ted Burgess, the tenant of one the nearby farms on the estate. Denys seems relieved not to have to make a scene and admires Ted’s swimming ability (“for a farmer”).
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After Ted emerges from a dive into the water, Denys shakes his hand. Ted apologetically says he didn’t know anyone was going to be there, and that he needed to cool down after getting hot from farm work. Denys tells him not to hurry and that Trimingham will arrive that evening.
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The other men in the group go off to change, and Marcus and Leo withdraw to the rushes to put on their bathing suits. Leo feels that being able to see others and not be seen is “tinglingly secret.” Marcus tells him there is no point in Leo putting on his bathing suit if he’s not going to swim at all.
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Everyone emerges by the water in bathing suits, and Leo is disappointed by the way these suits seem to cover up even more of their bodies than their evening wear. Leo watches the others swim. He also observes Ted getting out of the water, “his muscles bunched.” Leo retreats “almost in fear before that powerful body,” which speaks to him of “something I did not know.”
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Leo watches Ted get dressed, in awe of his bodily maturity and “those limbs which have passed beyond the need of gym and playing field, and exist for their own strength and beauty.” Throwing his clothes on with “furious energy,” Ted walks off back toward the farm. Meanwhile, the girls in the water laugh at their attempts to keep their hair dry.
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Marian gets out of the water and comes up to Leo. Her hair is coiled up like the Virgin of the Zodiac in Leo’s diary. She asks Leo whether “that man”—Ted—has gone. Leo asks if she knows Ted;, she says only that she may have met him and can’t really remember.
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The group gets changed, and Marian complains to Leo that her hair is so wet it’s going to make her dress damp. He offers her his dry bathing-suit, which she gratefully pins round her neck. She asks Leo to spread her hair out over his bathing suit so it can dry quicker, which he considers “a labour of love … the first I had ever done.” As the group walks back to the Hall, Leo feels a “tremendous sense of achievement.”
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