Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Turning, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Trauma and Memory
Family, Violence, and Love
Addiction
Belonging and Escape
Regret and Forgiveness
Summary
Analysis
Raelene, a mother of young daughters, lives in a caravan park. Feeling claustrophobic, overwhelmed by her children, and in pain—her face is bruised—she goes to the laundry block to wash clothes. There she meets a woman she does not know, who seems prim, proper, and middle class, out of keeping with the surroundings. The woman says to Raelene, “That must have hurt,” and Raelene assumes she is commenting on her injury, but she was actually referring to Raelene’s belly button piercing. Surprised by the woman’s consideration, Raelene warms up to her quickly. Her name is Sherry, and she and her husband, Dan, are staying in the caravan park while their house is being painted. They have just moved to White Point, the seaside fishing community where Raelene lives.
The beginning of “The Turning” indirectly introduces many of the motifs it will later make explicit. Raelene, already deeply dissatisfied with her life in the caravan park, is ashamed of her bruises, visible signs of Max’s abuse. Her assumption that Sherry is commenting on the bruises indicates her deep insecurity. While it seems that Max’s abuse has become almost routine, it also seems that Raelene has no intention of leaving him, which makes her even more ashamed that others know about the abuse.
Themes
Raelene and Sherry rapidly become good friends, and Sherry helps care for Raelene’s daughters, telling them stories. Other residents like Sherry, too: her magnetism changes the mood of the entire caravan park for the better. Her husband, Dan, is handsome and kind, quite unlike Raelene’s husband, Max. Max, a fisherman, drinks excessively, beats Raelene, and is floundering in his career; his younger brother, Frank, is a successful professional football player, which makes Max resentful. Around town, he is known for his aggression and violence. Raelene tries to pretend she still loves Max and reflects on when things went wrong with him, and what is different about Sherry and Dan. She considers if it is class-based; Dan is a manager, unlike Max. Despite their closeness, Raelene’s friendship with Sherry remains separate from the rest of her social life, including Tuesday darts nights at the bar, which Sherry declines to attend.
The speed and intensity with which Raelene and Sherry become friends indicates now only the strength their connection, but also the weakness of the ties that bind her to her other friends. As is often the case in abusive relationships, Raelene is quite isolated from world outside her home. Raelene’s theory that the difference between the abusive Max and the kind Dan—and, implicitly, the difference between her marriage and Sherry’s—is one of profession or class indicates her sense of dissatisfaction in White Point. This dissatisfaction stems not from her feeling out of place—rather, she is unhappy because she feels that she belongs there and, consequently, does not deserve any better.
Themes
When Sherry and Dan’s house is finally ready, Raelene helps them move in. Their neat new home forms a sharp contrast to her own, which Max has left a total mess. Their relationship continues to devolve, as he beats her and spends time at the bar or the Cesspit, a seedy, all-male gathering place. Despite it all, Raelene still enjoys sex with him, even orgasming, to her surprise. Meanwhile, Raelene starts leaving darts night early to spend time with Sherry and Max. While she enjoys socializing with them, she is consumed by the question of what makes them different from her. She imposes on them, coming by drunk or late, even interrupting them having sex, to her embarrassment. Raelene becomes increasingly dejected about her own life, living in the caravan park with a husband like Max.
Raelene’s regret counters her sense that her life has nothing more to offer her—she fears that she has made the wrong choice in life. Despite this fear, choosing something different—leaving Max—is not an option she seriously considers. That she still enjoys sex with Max emphasizes the trauma of her abuse, binding her to a person who actively harms her. While Raelene is genuinely attracted to Max, she also chooses to focus on this as a way of compartmentalizing and dismissing his abusive behavior.
Themes
Eventually Raelene skips darts night altogether and, arriving at Sherry’s early, finds her and Dan reading the Bible together. She thinks she has finally figured it out: religion is what makes them different. When she voices this to them, she begins to cry, telling them how unhappy she is with herself and her life. They try to comfort her, to no avail, and she goes for a walk along the lagoon. She admits to herself that she does not love Max at all but wonders if she could do any better, or even deserves to. The next day, when Sherry comes to see her, Raelene hides and makes her daughters do the same. Sherry comes again the next day, but their conversation is stilted and awkward. Raelene buys herself a Bible but feels nothing reading it.
Finally admitting the truth to herself about her marriage with Max, Raelene feels that she has lost a sense of purpose—of belonging—in conceding that her marriage does not make her happy. She sees Sherry and Dan as using religion to feel that they belong to something greater than themselves or their marriage. Unable to find meaning in religion herself, however, Raelene now feels utterly lost.
Themes
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When Raelene goes over to Sherry’s next, she is angry and erratic, taking her frustration out on them. In the midst of her rant, asking why they never have anything to drink at home, she finally learns the truth: Dan is a recovering alcoholic, which is why he and Sherry are religious. Raelene continues to go visit them but pretends to be going to darts night instead. She debates religion with them, but abstractly; despite a powerful experience on another solitary nighttime stroll on the beach, she cannot bring herself to believe. Max, in the meantime, is getting worse, getting less work, drinking more, and beating Raelene. Frank quits football, provoking scandal across town.
The revelation that Dan is a recovering alcoholic reorients Raelene’s thinking. No longer able to put Sherry and Dan on a pedestal, she must now confront the fact that while her life can change, she will have to affect that change herself. This realization is both freeing and frightening, as Raelene had been relying on her sense of powerlessness and the notion that she did not deserve anything better to rationalize her situation to herself.
Themes
One day, on a trip to Perth with Raelene and her daughters, Sherry tells her to leave Max. Raelene is shocked and refuses to entertain the thought. When Raelene stops at a religious trinket store, Sherry avoids going in. Raelene goes in alone and buys a snow globe of Jesus walking on water for herself. She then asks Sherry to tell her about when she knew she believed in God. Sherry’s explanation convinces Raelene that she, on the contrary, does not and cannot believe. Comparing Sherry and Dan’s relationship to her own, Raelene finally feels—or admits to herself that she feels—jealousy.
Sherry’s advice to Raelene merely verbalizes what Raelene already knows Sherry has been thinking—and what she herself as been thinking, too. Despite this, Raelene clings to the idea that religion can offer her a different kind of escape, even as she admits to herself that she does not believe in God. Religion for Raelene is aspirational, a way to transcend the circumstances she does not feel capable of escaping on her own.
Themes
As winter sets in, things between Raelene and Max get worse. The sea is too rough for fishing boats to go out, so Max is home all the time, unless he is at the bar or the Cesspit. When he does have work, the catch is poor, and it is clear that the boats are losing money, not making it. Raelene, on the other hand, goes to see Sherry and Dan less and less after her trip to Perth. Instead, she gets into the habit of nighttime walks on the beach alone. While she still does not feel true belief, she covets her snow globe, even sexually fantasizing about Jesus.
While Max is fully responsible for his abuse of Raelene, knowing that the episodes of abuse correspond with Max’s employment status suggests the social origins of his behavior. As the economy of White Point declines, alcoholism, domestic abuse, and other similar social problems worsen. Raelene, rather than take action, continues to retreat into her desperate attempts to find God, the only recourse she feels that she has left.
Themes
One afternoon Raelene and her daughters are sitting outside when Max returns unexpectedly early. Before she can say a word, he attacks her, pinning her to their van and demanding to know what she has been doing instead of darts night: he assumes that she has been having an affair. Raelene tries to tell him that it is not what he thinks, but as he continues to hurt her, she resolves not to tell him anything, feeling that he does not deserve it. She speaks only in allusions, referring to Jesus, but in language that makes Max think she does indeed have a lover. Max is enraged and brutalizes her in front of their daughters, beating her until she passes out.
Max’s jealousy and its vicious consequences seem to disprove Raelene’s hope that, with religion, she could endure life together with him. To the contrary, Max’s cruelty and need to control seem to permit no rivals. Ironically, in refusing to explain herself to Max, Raelene finally regains some small degree of empowerment, refusing him the information that he wants most even to protect herself.
Themes
After Raelene passes out, the caravan park manager, Harrison, finds her and her daughters. He takes her to a nurse, not the hospital, at her insistence. The nurse is Max’s boss’s sister, and Raelene worries that Max will be fired; she also fears that Harrison will evict them. After getting stitched up, she has the nurse buzz her hair; Max pulled out several clumps. The nurse advises her to leave him, but Raelene rejects her advice. Returning home, she tries to calm her daughters down and put them to bed. As she waits for Max to return, drinking alone and reflecting, she gets a call, which she thinks—and hopes—is Sherry. In fact, it is Bob James, Max’s boss, who tells her to tell Max that he has been fired. Raelene finally drifts off to sleep but awakens to find Max attempting to force himself on her. As he rapes her, she sees her snow globe, and cries out Jesus’s name. She finally believes and feels that nothing Max can do to her can hurt her now.
Max’s firing suggests the failure of society to protect people like Raelene. While the disgust that Max’s boss, the nurse, and Harrison feel is an understandable reaction, through their attempts to punish Max their only further isolate and thereby hurt Raelene. In the chapter’s finals scene, Raelene finds escape in the most unexpected of places. Seeming to dissociate entirely as Max rapes her, she reaches a state that blurs physical pain, sexual pleasure, religious feeling, and personal transcendence. To Raelene, Max is a broken man who cannot hurt her any more than he already has—now, she sees Max’s violence as an expression of his own sense of total failure.
Themes
