54 pages • 1 hour read
The Dutch House
A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Wealth and Happiness
The Dutch House is essentially a story about the chain of events that unfolds after Cyril manages to pull himself up from poverty. Cyril’s achievement is one that reflects the myth of the American Dream—if a person works hard, he or she can buy property, secure an education for his or her offspring, and rest assured that this offspring will make even more progress in the next generation. In the case of the Conroys, this narrative is not borne out. The outcomes for the characters in the novel show that on balance, wealth cannot assure happiness.
Cyril’s life is the ultimate exemplar of this truth. When Cyril moves his family from a tiny, on-base house to the Dutch House, he assumes he can simply slip into the trappings of a wealthy life with no repercussions and that his family will be happy with this shocking change. The contrast between their lives before the Dutch House and their lives in the Dutch House is one of the reasons that Cyril’s marriage with Elna ends. Cyril never consults his family, particularly his wife, about her wants and needs; it is this inability to pay attention to who Elna really is that destroys their marriage. Cyril’s biggest mistake is in thinking that wealth will provide Elna and his children with everything they need to achieve happiness.
Cyril’s death forces Danny and Maeve to confront a life without the wealth they expected to inherit as Cyril’s children. Their sense of displacement and disinheritance stunts their growth as human beings in many ways; this sense of entitlement, of being owed wealth, keeps them locked in place for so long that Danny pursues a medical career that does not interest him, and Maeve stays an accountant instead of pursuing higher education after completing her undergraduate degree. Despite their sense that they have been wronged by their disinheritance, both Danny and Maeve seem to be financially comfortable people. Maeve’s gift with numbers allows her to become a chief financial officer, while Danny builds his own real estate company in much the same way Cyril did. Despite these financial successes, the Conroys are far from happy. Danny can’t make his marriage with Celeste work in the end, for example, and he repeats the errors of his father by putting his wife in a house that she does not want.
In the end, the few people who do manage to achieve happiness are far from wealthy. Elna, who seems to have been itinerant for 40 years, is an example of how renouncing material goods can lead to a meaningful life. The working-class characters in the novel—Jocelyn and Sandy—also achieve happiness through service to others and building communities around them. The Norcrosses, the only middle-class family in the novel, also manage to achieve happiness through strong family relationships. Patchett’s novel can be read as one that critiques the American Dream as a dead end that ignores the importance of family and community in achieving happiness.
The Power of the Stories We Tell About Ourselves
The stories that characters tell about their pasts impact the way the characters assert control over their own lives. In some instances, these stories prevent characters from living productive, happy lives. In other instances, the characters’ recognition that they exercise control over these stories of the past allows the characters to make substantial changes for the better.
The central story of The Dutch House is the one Danny and Maeve tell themselves about Andrea’s decision to expel them from the house after Cyril’s death. Andrea’s decision to put Danny out weeks after the death of his father is by most accounts a cruel and incomprehensible decision, but the Conroy siblings’ insistence on seeing this story as the sum of their identities prevents both from carving out happy lives for themselves for many years. Maeve stays in Jenkintown, Pennsylvania, in part because it is near the Dutch House and forces Danny to complete an education in which he has little interest. She sees herself as a nothing more than a victim for years.
Danny is also trapped in an identity shaped by the stories he tells about himself. Danny’s story is that his relationship with Maeve is the most important one in his life and that he is meant to follow in his father’s footsteps. Danny knows immediately that he has no interest in being a doctor, but he takes the extreme action of completing medical school because of his belief that only Maeve knows best. Danny’s enmeshed relationship with Maeve is arguably one of the reasons why he can’t make a success of his marriage with Celeste. Danny’s prioritization of his relationship with Maeve and his focus on work are important contributions to the breakdown in his marriage.
Danny’s sense of himself as Cyril’s son leads to mixed results as well. Rather than taking advantage of the medical education he receives, he attempts to keep a connection with his dead father by doing the things Cyril did. Danny buys a house for his wife without consulting her. He exposes his family to financial risk and capitalizes on his relationship with Morey to gain information he needs to make his first real estate purchase. On the one hand, his real estate dealings and decision to break with Maeve’s plans for him allow him to be financially successful. On the other hand, this financial success ends in personal unhappiness. Danny’s narratives about himself lead to mixed results.
Celeste, for her part, is also caught up in a destructive narrative about herself. She believes that her identity is based on that of her husband. Celeste’s vision for herself was that she would be a doctor’s wife. When Danny fails to follow through in becoming a doctor, Celeste is unhappy, even though she enjoys a financially secure life because of Danny’s real estate business. Celeste is highly intelligent and has a college degree, but she decides to stop teaching and focus on mothering nine months after her marriage to Danny. Danny’s descriptions of this time in her life make it clear that Celeste finds mothering lonely and not particularly stimulating. Celeste eventually divorces Danny, presumably moving on to create a new life for herself by surrendering the hold of that past on her.
In Elna’s case, she grows up poor in Brooklyn and decides as a teenager to dedicate herself to charity as a nun. Her relationship with Cyril changes her trajectory, but even when she is surrounded by the wealth on display in the Dutch House, she can’t see herself as anything other than a poor woman who should have been a nun. This disjunction between who she is and who she imagines she should be causes her to leave her children and husband, go on a 40-year odyssey of charity work, and to become the caretaker of a woman who replaced her as a wife and mistreated her children. Her actions are extraordinary ones that lead other characters to see her as a saint. At the same time, her single-minded pursuit of her self-imposed vow of poverty exposes her children to great damage in childhood and adulthood.
Place and Identity
Cyril and Elna both grew up poor in Brooklyn. In Cyril’s case, he leaves Brooklyn by fighting in World War II. His movement from Brooklyn to France and then to the outskirts of Philadelphia seems to be the making of him. His time abroad as a paratrooper breaks his body, leaving him with pain for the rest of his life, but it also brings him into contact with the information that allows him to buy the land in Horsham, Pennsylvania and start building his wealth. He rarely returns to Brooklyn, doing so once with Danny. Cyril’s decision to buy the Dutch House is an effort to acquire a setting that is fitting for the children of a self-made man.
Elna, despite being from the same neighborhood as Cyril, is never at peace in the house. She escapes from the Dutch House and spends most of the decades away from her children wandering from place to place—Bombay, San Francisco, Los Angeles, the Bowery neighborhood in Manhattan, and then finally back to the Dutch House. During these years of wandering, Elna refuses to be attached to any place. Instead, she is attached to her calling to be charitable. By giving up connection to a specific place, Elna fulfills her sense of who she should be.
Danny and Maeve, who spend crucial parts of their childhood in the Dutch House, do feel a strong sense of connection to the place. Maeve imagines the Dutch House as a castle when she is five. When she is displaced and then barred from entering the Dutch House, she sees herself as a person who is unable to be who she should be because she is unable to enter the Dutch House. It takes her years to work through this trauma. Danny’s purchase of a house for her and her brief visit to the house years later when Elna forces her way in are what it takes for Maeve to stop seeing her only authentic identity as the one that unfolds in the Dutch House.
Danny’s path is a little different than Maeve’s. He also spends much of his life seeing himself as a former inhabitant of the Dutch House, but as he grows into adulthood, he founds an identity in other locations: the various cars in which he and Maeve sit to spy on the Dutch House, the apartment he purchases for his family in New York, and the brownstone he buys near the Natural Museum of History as a home for his own family. While the places are significant in and of themselves—they symbolize connection to Cyril and the creation of a family outside of Maeve—the important thing is that Danny’s sense of his personal geography is one that is more expansive and flexible than Maeve’s. Danny more quickly recognizes the danger of focus on the Dutch House and exclusion from it as dangerous to the Conroy children.
While place understandably exercises an important influence on identity, the characters who manage to have successful lives find other props for identity, including vocations and relationships with others.
Gender Norms and Mothering
Although Danny is the narrator of the novel, the characters who exercise the most gravity are the mothers. Both Maeve and Elna are maternal figures, with Maeve serving as a surrogate mother to Danny after Elna leaves the family. In addition, Celeste fulfills a traditional maternal role by becoming a stay-at-home mother to May and Kevin, while Andrea refuses to mother her stepchildren. The personal cost that these women pay for fulfilling or refusing to fulfill maternal roles shows the influence of gender on the identities of women during the historical periods covered by the novel.
Maeve is never a biological mother, but her role from the time she is 10 until her death is to serve as a mother figure to her brother. This years-long sacrifice is one that requires her to give up a great deal. When Andrea refuses to mother Danny after Cyril’s death, Maeve assumes complete responsibility, including finances, for raising Danny. Instead of going to graduate school, Maeve stays around Elkins Park and Jenkintown and works at a job that she grows to like but that does not allow her to fulfill her intellectual potential. Even if she had decided to return to school, Cyril made no provisions for her further education. While she almost never expresses dissatisfaction at this outcome, she is not the person she would have been without the burden of this responsibility. Her refusal to visit Columbia University and New York is in part driven by recognition that a life in the city is something she lost when she became a surrogate mother for Danny.
Celeste is the most traditional mother in the novel. She is a woman who chooses to be a mother almost immediately after her marriage to Danny. Her life as a mother is one in which she goes home to stay with her children after having worked as a teacher early in her relationship with Danny. Again, there is never any hint that she regrets having her children, but Danny’s description of her eagerness for Fluffy’s company after childbirth and the way “her big, wandering brain was underutilized” (224) by taking care of children imply that the traditional feminine role of mother is not the not the most stimulating life for Celeste.
Celeste’s other aspirations also focus on nurturing, in this case by serving as Danny’s wife. Danny notes early in the relationship that Celeste sees it as her “job” (156) to nurture him: He picks Celeste to be his wife because she “committed herself to smoothing [his] path and supporting [his] life” (206). Celeste’s divorce from Danny, when her children are older, is not detailed in the novel, but the divorce seems to be Celeste’s choice, indicating that she decides to escape from the role of mother and nurturer of a male ego.
The other two major female characters in the novel, Andrea and Elna, reject their roles as mothers in significant ways. Andrea boots Cyril’s first set of children out of their childhood home two weeks after Cyril’s death. Patchett portrays Andrea’s decision as unhinged and cruel, and her legal inheritance of Cyril’s money and property by right of joint survivorship is an act of deceit according to Maeve’s perspective. Andrea, it seems, fulfills one of the cultural scripts associated with mothers in blended families—the wicked stepmother.
Elna also refuses to mother traditionally when she leaves her children. Despite abandoning her children, she manages to escape much of the negative feedback because of her selfless sacrifice and nurturing behavior, both of which put her more in line with other gender norms associated with women. Nevertheless, her children struggle with her choices, with Danny pointing out that “[t]here is no story of the prodigal mother” (264) and equating Elna’s abandonment of her children with a metaphorical killing (the prodigal mother “killed them all” (264)—her abandoned sons and husband—when she left them).
The outcomes for these women in the novel paint a sobering picture of the impact of women’s internalization of gender norms and the backlash they face when they reject these roles. Regardless of the choices they make, Maeve, Celeste, Andrea, and Elna are subject to harsh consequences for their choices.
Unlock all 54 pages of this Study GuidePlus, gain access to 8,800+ more expert-written Study Guides.
Including features:
Related Titles
By Ann Patchett
