The Scarlet Plague

Edwin is the grandson with the most prominent role in the book and the closest bond with Smith. The first sentences depict him walking with his grandfather, and the book ends in a similar way. Edwin is defined early on by his sharp senses and complete adaptation to the wilderness: He easily fells a rabbit and scares off a bear with his bow and arrow. Edwin’s appearance matches his tough nature: He is tanned, walks stealthily, and has piercing blue eyes and keen ears. He thus introduces the theme of The Resilience and Adaptability Required for Survival, as he is perfectly suited to his postapocalyptic environment.

Although Edwin is at first scornful of Smith’s old-fashioned ways, he is kinder toward his grandfather than his brothers are. Even though Edwin does not understand much of what Smith is talking about, he is genuinely curious and wants to learn, as when he asks Smith what money is in Chapter 1. Likewise, while Edwin laughs at the practical joke that the other boys play on Smith, he later defends Smith when Hare-Lip interrupts his story and comforts his grandfather when he starts to cry. At the end of the book, Edwin stays behind to guide Smith while the others leave. Nevertheless, it is telling that when Hare-Lip and Hoo-Hoo express their lust for power, Edwin declares that he will put them to work for him by reinventing the gunpowder that their grandfather has spoken of. If Edwin is the “heir” to the kind of society his grandfather represents, then the implication is that that society was also based on force, tempering the hope that Edwin otherwise seems to represent.

These two brothers work as goatherds and fishermen. Their names match their characterization as “savages,” and they function as antagonistic foils to Edwin and Smith. Unlike Edwin, they are rude and disrespectful toward Smith and show no desire to learn from him. While serving the seafood they caught, they play cruel jokes on their grandfather and laugh at his discomfort. During Smith’s story, they aggressively interrupt several times and express impatience with his precise use of language. At the end of the book, the two boys show that they have not absorbed Smith’s message at all: They proclaim their desire to gain power and control over others through violence and the embrace of superstition. 

For Smith, the two brothers therefore embody the almost irredeemable ignorance caused by societal collapse, yet the association of pre-plague society with violence raises questions about whether the brothers merely embody a different form of brutality.

Vesta is an upper-class woman who was married to the millionaire magnate John Van Warden before the plague, a union that Smith believes was merely “political” instead of based on love. When Van Warden died in the plague, Bill forced Vesta to become his wife and servant. For years, he beat and abused her, forcing her to do most of the work to allow both of them to survive. Vesta’s social downfall was apparent when Smith first met her, as she was dressed in rags and bent over a stove making soup. Vesta’s riches-to-rags fate exemplifies the social upheaval caused by the plague and underlines The Cyclical Nature of History and Civilization. 

Vesta, Bill, and Smith formed a love triangle, as Smith describes toward the end of the book. Vesta was a product of elite culture and thus shared Smith’s interests, so he came to love her and wanted to rescue her. However, Bill maintained his possessive hold on Vesta, and she later died in an incident that Smith believes to have been murder. Since Vesta’s story is told from Smith’s point of view, the reader does not learn her own feelings about her situation, which is itself telling. Although Smith believes that Vesta may have shared his feelings, he does not explain why, and despite his hyperbolically romantic descriptions of her—he calls her “the perfect flower of generations of the highest culture this planet has ever produced” (106)—his attitude toward her is elsewhere marked by a possessiveness that differs little from Bill’s except in its veneer of civility. He questions, for example, “Why should Vesta not have been mine?” (110)—an expression of both male and class entitlement.