53 pages • 1 hour read
Sara CollinsThe Confessions of Frannie Langton
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2019A 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
Clothing
Clothing matters to Frannie throughout her narrative, What she and others wear affects her confidence and opinions. Clothing to Frannie symbolizes her social image. How others perceive her is something that consistently concerns Frannie. Her comfort in the blue serge dress she wears upon arriving in London comes from her belief that it will help her make a good first impression, a visible marker that she is respectable and thus should be respected. When Linux brings her cheaper linsey dresses to wear she is upset not out of vanity but out of pride — these dresses mark her as a maid, something she desperately does not want to be or appear to be.
This focus on clothing ties into the theme of visibility that is explored throughout the novel. When Meg gives Frannie her old dresses to wear, Frannie may be seen as nothing more than an extension of Meg, a sign of her eccentricity in having a Black maid. Frannie enjoys the fine clothes, but is frustrated by her invisibility. The dress her lawyer gives her during her trial also plays into the themes of visibility and image. Frannie feels comforted and confident in her nicer dress, knowing that it will make her appear more respectable to the court. She is aware that the English court is more a popularity contest than a way of divining the truth. This use of clothing to symbolize image emphasizes just how much London society bases their judgements of people on how they look.
Candide
Voltaire’s Candide reappears throughout the novel, acting as a symbol of Frannie’s relationship to reading and learning. In its first appearance, it begins as a moment of escape, showing Frannie enjoying herself and her engagement with literature. This is quickly struck down by Langton, who upon seeing her reading forces her to eat the book’s pages until she is sick. Langton’s harsh reaction to her reading contrasts with his own use of Frannie’s literacy in his experiments. She can only read when it suits him. The book reappears at the Benham’s home, her engagement with it becoming the excuse used as to why Frannie was kicked out. This is symbolic of her relationship with Meg—intellectual fulfillment and companionship that leads to her expulsion.
It is significant that the plot of Candide follows a young man, the eponymous Candide, who is isolated in a paradise being taught optimism as a worldview by his mentor. In the novel, he is abruptly thrown into the real world where he witnesses hardships of reality and develops his own ideas. Frannie’s journey is similar, in that she was taught a specific idea of how the world should work during her isolated existence on a plantation named Paradise, able to express her own opinions once entering wider society. Her experience is much darker though—despite the name Paradise, Frannie’s life on the plantation is fraught with hardship and pain. Her time in London is no less so, but she gains the tools she needs to put forward her own narrative.
Sugar
Sugar symbolizes the spoils of Empire throughout the novel. The sugar cane plantation that Frannie grows up on is rife with abuse and terrible working conditions. Those who work there are enslaved and unable to leave. Their diet is inadequate, which is ironic, considering the caloric and market value of the crop they produce. They face harsh punishments on the plantation and harsher ones if they attempt to escape. Frannie understands the true cost of sugar production, but in London she can’t resist the treats made with sugar. This is not out of callousness, but realism—she knows that avoiding sugar doesn’t actually make slavery on the sugar plantations stop. She also knows that everything in the Benham’s house is bought with money from sugar. As she thinks when Meg considers boycotting sugar production, there isn’t much point to “refuse to buy sugar with all that sugar money” (160). The sugar is the product of an unjust system, tangled up into English life.
Sal, coming from a similar background to Frannie, has no problem eating sugar, far away from the plantations and with her own problems to deal with. Again this isn’t callousness, but recognition of the pervasiveness of Empire’s crimes. Sugar’s presence throughout the novel shows the inescapability of the reach of English Empire and its practices. Though those enslaved on British plantations are far away, the goods they produce by way of an evil system are what London thrives on. This also shows the interconnectedness of the center of the Empire to its colonies. Even as people like Linux accuse Frannie of coming from a “savage” place, they happily and easily consume the goods that come from there.
