36 pages • 1 hour read
Lee SmithFair and Tender Ladies
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1988A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
Poetry
Ivy starts out life as a dreamer who loves to read, and she makes frequent references in her early writing to poems and stories that she particularly loves. Sometimes she uses quotes, but often she either casually mentions poems in passing as normal parts of sentences or relates entire lengthy stories that she’s been told and finds memorable. As Ivy ages and has children—and therefore no more time to read—she ceases referencing poetry for the most part. Her affinity for poetry comes back somewhat during her affair with Honey Breeding, as he stirs her dormant imagination and shares stories with her like some of her favorite adults used to when she was a child. Towards the end of her life, Ivy becomes a storyteller for her grandchildren, filling the role her aunts and favorite older friends filled for her. In her final letter, as she starts to fade, Ivy’s writing again leans toward the poetic, recalling stories once again and becoming a stream-of-consciousness recollection of fragments of her life.
The Wear and Tear of Life
Starting very early in Part 1 with John Arthur’s heartsickness, Smith repeatedly describes characters in the novel as being worn out by life. Ivy describes both of her parents as shells of their former selves, observing how small and lifeless each of them seems in the time leading up to their respective deaths. Even Ivy herself becomes small and thin, like her mother, as she ages. Several of Ivy’s friends, relatives, and lovers suffer to the point that they undergo irreparable changes to their personalities and bodies. Franklin drinks to forget the screaming of his brother dying at a young age. Many men returning from the war come back broken in one way or another. Violet’s husband, Rush, spends a day with a dead man on top of him inside the mine and comes out “a shadow of himself” (183). Nearly everyone either finds their way out of rural Virginia permanently or ends up deteriorating under the pressures of the rural way of life.
“Putting on Airs”
Tying into the larger theme of class structure and capitalism, characters who try to improve their social station are dismissed by their peers as “putting on airs.” Ivy’s family says that of Beulah for wanting to be rich and acting as though she is better than the rest of her family. Ivy says it of her own children and grandchildren when they try to distance themselves from their rural upbringing and shun things like Ivy’s childhood stories or way of life. Ivy is very careful through all of her encounters with those from more elite backgrounds not to alter herself too much, insisting to her family that she’s not “putting on airs” just because she is staying with Molly, or learning from Miss Torrington, or dating Franklin.
