50 pages • 1 hour read
Helen SimonsonThe Hazelbourne Ladies Motorcycle and Flying Club
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2024A 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
Social Pressure for Female Respectability
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of death.
Through the experiences of Constance and other female characters, as well as the opinions expressed by several male and female characters, the novel highlights society’s problematic insistence on female “respectability” and the notable lack of such a standard for men. This theme is part of the novel’s historical setting and its exploration of gender equality and roles through the lens of the early 20th century.
This theme presents and explore the challenges experienced by women at this time. Many of the novel’s female characters chafe against English society’s postwar insistence that women leave the workforce and return to their families—or start families themselves—because they enjoyed the financial independence that their work afforded. Constance observes, “It mortified her that still—after a world war, after her own service to the family, after her precious certificates earned via correspondence school—even the most well-meaning of friends and family continued to see marriage, any marriage, as her preferred future” (31). Suddenly, it becomes a great deal less “respectable” for a woman to work, and the key to a socially acceptable life is to return to the domestic sphere that middle- and upper-class women used to inhabit. This is what convinces Patricia, ultimately, to quit her job. She tells Constance, “[My fiancé] says that marriage is the only really respectable job for a woman” (182). Likewise, when Iris wins third place in the Victory Day race, the male first-prize winner won’t even make eye contact with her, and Poppy is often confronted with criticism that she is overstepping boundaries of right conduct.
The novel explores the double standard of respectability, as its male characters also reap the benefits of paternalistic and conservative attitudes that, it argues, negatively impact women. As Poppy tells Tom on the beach, “Living within your means is a fiction men impose upon women […] You run up debt as if it’s a part of being a gentleman, and meanwhile I am to watch the pennies in my purse even though I have women depending on my business” (107). While having money—though not working to earn it—helps establish a woman’s respectability, a gentleman in debt is still perfectly respectable. Further, in romantic relationships, women are vilified for having sex, while men’s reputations remain untouched. It is for Rachel’s sake, not Percival’s, that their marriage must proceed before her pregnancy becomes obvious. Then, after Constance and Harris kiss, she worries “that he now h[olds] her reputation in his hands. She ha[s] come too far this summer to feel so powerless” (319). Regarding the de Champneys, Mrs. Fog says, “[T]heir mother […] was not formally married to Sir Roger” (225). Significantly, she does not say that Simon and Mathilde’s parents were not married; she specifies that their mother was unmarried to their father. Her social training causes her to fault the unmarried woman rather than the unmarried man who had just as much a role in having children outside marriage. Thus, the novel shows that this is due to social pressure for female “respectability” specifically rather than holding men and women to the same professional, personal, and sexual standards.
The Arbitrary Nature of Gender Roles
This theme deploys the historical tensions around women’s ability to assume men’s professional roles during World War I to illuminate the subjectivity of assigning certain roles based on sex or gender. The novel highlights that women proved themselves capable when given the opportunity during the war, and this is reinforced by its treatment of the female characters. They are shown as capable in satisfying the demands of both intellectually challenging and physically demanding jobs, as Constance learned to run the Mercers’ estate and Poppy, Iris, and Tilly worked as dispatch riders. The revelation that the roles assigned to each gender are arbitrary, not based on natural aptitude, is part of the novel’s dramatic tension. It also arguably has modern-day parallels that the reader is encouraged to consider.
These tensions, resulting from the fact that women are beginning to pursue lifestyles previously only permitted to men, create dissatisfaction for many in the novel: the women who are expected but do not want to retreat into their purely domestic roles and the men (and even other women) who feel threatened by them. Describing her foray into so-called men’s work, Poppy says, “We were reviled in the beginning—I’m not sure if they were more afraid we were incompetent or unwomanly […] I guess I got used to feeling […] I was doing something important. Now we are all expected to go home to the kitchen or drawing room” (100). Poppy’s wartime work gave her a sense of purpose, urgency, and significance, and she, like so many other women, doesn’t want to give it up. As Poppy explains to Mrs. Fog, “[W]e are being summarily ejected from our wartime jobs, our mothers still push us to get married, and we can’t even vote until we’re thirty!” (168). Now that women proved their capability, their prewar roles are unsatisfactory.
The novel shows how, at this period, women’s attitudes and expectations began to change, eventually leading to female suffrage and emancipation. Female characters are shown realizing how much society infantilizes and devalues them by insisting that they should defer to men. Poppy tells Mrs. Wirrall, “There was a war […] We women won’t stand to be treated like children anymore, you know” (30). When life in the home was all middle- and upper-class women knew, they felt less urgency to transcend it. Now, however, having been compelled to do so out of patriotism or necessity, many women are unwilling or unable to return to their former lives. Their apparent superfluity in the workplace is highlighted by Mrs. Draper’s claim that women are “distracting” to men at work, and thus should be eliminated from office spaces, and Captain Pendra’s “fear that young ladies often have a similarly uncertain and tenuous relationship to home as second sons and nephews” (298). In other words, women are viewed as second-class citizens, the spare offspring who are less valuable than a son, and a potential burden. This truth is represented by Constance, who must find a home and eke out a living in a series of unpaid roles considered suitable for a woman of her social class.
This theme demonstrates how women’s lives changed as drastically as men’s during World War I, but in different ways. The cast of female characters and their agency in the novel reflect the historical trend that women began to feel purposeful in ways they never had before, and many also enjoyed newfound financial independence. Their ability to assume the roles long occupied by men demonstrate women’s intelligence, usefulness, and adaptability, and their success reveals the subjectivity of the social standards that previously limited their opportunities.
Perspective Created by Loss
This theme explores the ways in which change, especially caused by war and disease, can lead to a sense of loss and disorientation. It is expressed in the novel through the variety of character attitudes and trajectories, as they are shown dealing with the upheaval of 1919. While the novel shows that some characters resist the changes brought by the war and the influenza pandemic, others develop a more nuanced—and certainly more modern—perspective of their lives and values. Rather than attempt to resume the routines that used to feel normal, as Lady Mercer does, characters like Mrs. Fog reevaluate their priorities to live more fulfilling lives after loss.
Mrs. Fog, for one, is no longer willing to put duty ahead of happiness. Reflecting on her relationship with Simon de Champney in light of her brush with death, she tells Constance, “Life is too precious. I have done my duty and now that I am an old woman, I shall do as I like” (223). She realizes that her “duty” has long been at odds with her happiness, a perspective gained, in part, with age but also, more recently and urgently, by world events. She says, “You must feel it too, Constance, how every day we are given is precious? The war and this dreadful epidemic have only made that clearer” (235). Constance does feel it and frequently wishes that people could slow down and learn from what the world collectively experienced. When she learns about the Navy’s intention to haul away the German U-boat, “Constance wonder[s] why they [a]re in such a rush to have the war towed away and tidied up anyway. Memories fade[], scabbed over by the layers of time. Perhaps a lasting peace require[s] some rusting reminders of carnage?” (41). She is eager for change—socially, professionally, and personally—and hopeful that new perspectives might result in this.
The novel also explores this shift in perspective through the characters of Poppy and Harris. Poppy tells Constance, “Only a year ago the divorce seemed such a scandal even I worried about us […] I was so angry at my father, and then he died and everything became so very unimportant” (47). While news of her parents’ impending divorce once mortified her, after her father succumbed to the “Purple Death,” Poppy realized how petty her fears were. As a result, she finds it remarkable that “the powers that be [at the hotel] have decided that after four years of war and pestilence they should still have the vapors over a woman having tea in trousers” (8). Harris also realizes that the losses he sustained in the war, though significant, are not as bad as what Jock lost, and this perspective empowers and helps him to move forward.
As Constance says, “After so much war and death, surely things must change” (238). These words are prescient and create dramatic irony, as the reader knows that great change did occur following World War I. The novel presents acceptance of change as a positive force to counter loss, suggestive of modernity, opportunity, and progress.
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By Helen Simonson
