45 pages • 1 hour read
Rachel JoyceMiss Benson's Beetle
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2020A 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
The Golden Beetle
The golden beetle of New Caledonia is the novel’s dominant symbol. It appears in the book’s title and is introduced as an entomologist’s treasure from the very first pages, emphasized by the beetle’s golden color and jewel-like appearance. The idea of an undiscovered beetle captures Margery’s interest when she is only 10 years old:
Until that moment she’d assumed everything in the world was already found. It had never occurred to her things might happen in reverse. That you could see a picture of something in a book—that you could as good as imagine it—and then go off and look (4).
The beetle speaks to the theme of pursuing one’s vocation. Margery identifies the insect as her purpose in life almost immediately after glimpsing a picture of it for the first time, but soon becomes distracted by the circumstances of life. At many points in the book, Margery views her obsession with the beetle as an absurdity, as see feels pressure to be sensible and uphold the status quo; Joyce presents the path of conformity as always less troublesome than following a vocation, which can be fraught with pain and difficulty. Enid reminds Margery “Your vocation is not your friend. It’s not a consolation for someone you lost once, or even a way of passing the time. It doesn’t care whether you’re happy or sad. You must not betray it” (297). Margery eventually proves her commitment by devoting her life to the beetle, and is rewarded by a moment of sublime peace when she finally finds it. The same choice is offered to Freya Bartlett, who has also succumbed to an ordinary life rather than a vocation. For both women, discovering the golden beetle symbolizes the opportunity to discover themselves.
World War I and World War II
The two World Wars function as temporal motifs that are referenced at many points in the novel, and relate to the theme of being haunted by the past. Margery is the only character old enough to have memories of both conflicts. During WWI, Margery loses her father and mother to despair shortly after all four of her brothers are killed in battle. Margery goes into denial and fails to grieve properly for any of these deaths. Instead, she suppresses her emotional response and develops an irrational fear of bloodshed and guns. WWI featured the unprecedented use of machinery in battle after the industrialization of the previous century, resulting in extremely high casualties. The egregious death toll and depersonalized methods of warfare resulted in a philosophical shift, as many people struggled to psychologically comprehend the scale of destruction and readjust to life after war.
Later, WWII would reiterate these feelings of mass trauma, death, and loss of psychological certainty. Like Margery, Joyce portrays Enid as an indirect casualty: Her husband lost his leg during basic training and experiences agonizing phantom pains that cause him to want to end his life, but he needs Enid’s help to succeed. As a result, she is blamed for his murder and spends the rest of the book fleeing from her past.
Mundic is the most obvious example of the horrible effects that war can wreak on the psyche. He returns from a POW camp both physically and psychologically traumatized. Although he tries running away from the hallucinations that fill his mind, he can never outdistance them. In some sense, although the war ended four years earlier, Mundic has never left the camp. He still sees Japanese soldiers stalking him in the jungles of New Caledonia.
At the start of the novel, the entire population of Great Britain is also trying to escape the specter of WWII. Food rationing is still in force, and veterans like Mundic can be seen wandering the streets, many of them unhoused. The country’s attempt to heal the wound of the past by staging the Festival of Britain parallels Joyce’s characters as they attempt to define their futures after past trauma.
Clothing Choices
Changing styles of clothing function as a motif to illustrate the change in Margery’s character and her growing sense of ease in the world. She begins the book wearing baggy women’s suits and sensible shoes. This attire is at odds with her fundamental nature, but she doesn’t recognize the mismatch until she sees the cruel caricature sketched by her students. Her first act of rebellion is to steal a pair of lacrosse boots from the school’s gym teacher.
Margery’s transition into a beetle explorer is demonstrated by her hybrid outfit when she boards the ship to Australia. While she is still wearing dowdy female clothing, she has paired this outfit with a pith helmet and the stolen boots. This fashion choice illustrates her uneasy attempt to bridge the gap between her old life and her new one.
A bigger transformation occurs when her luggage is misplaced in Noumea, and she is given a bag of men’s clothing by mistake. Having no other option, she dons the comfortable shirts and shorts, which don’t hamper her motion while mountain climbing. Again, the attire demonstrates a transition in the focus of her life. She now looks the part of an adventurer, and is willing to ignore social conventions and gendered expectations for how she presents herself in the world.
Aside from the type of clothing as indication of Margery’s personal development, a lack of clothing illustrates the same point. When Enid and Margery stumble across a mountain pool, the uninhibited Enid has no problem doffing her clothing to go skinny dipping. Margery, on the other hand, keeps her underwear on. Much later in the novel, when the two friends have established a comfortable rapport with each other, Margery goes skinny dipping too. She has lost her self-consciousness in the presence of her friend and in the presence of nature as a whole. This simple act demonstrates the degree to which the tropics have become her true home.
