The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2006

A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.

Download PDF

Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Pages 1-74

Pages 74-141

Pages 141-192

Pages 192-277

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Symbols & Motifs

Clothing

Clothing, though a necessity of life, can also hold cultural and symbolic meanings. O’Farrell focuses not only on what her characters wear but also the colors and textures of the garments. One of Esme’s earliest memories is of Jamila’s beautiful sari, and the distinct sound it makes when she moves. Jamila’s garment not only symbolizes an important part of her culture but also provides a pleasant memory for Esme amid years of pain. When the Lennox family moves to Scotland, their cotton shifts, perfect for the balmy Indian climate, are not only insufficient against the Scottish chill, but are also seen as coarse and common. Ignoring Esme and Kitty’s trauma, their grandmother makes outfitting them in proper attire her priority, and when the girls first visit the department store, Esme is perplexed by the expectation that she has to wear so many layers of uncomfortable clothing.

Esme and Kitty’s grandmother insists they be fitted for dresses to be worn to social events. Bored by what she sees as a pointless endeavor, Esme complains until her mother threatens her with punishment. Instead of a frilly dress, Esme begs for a velvet gown. Her choice of dress symbolizes her intense personality and preference for soft, flowing fabrics as opposed to the formality of stiff taffeta. However, her mother scoffs at her choice, deeming it inappropriate and something a sex worker would wear. Once the dresses arrive, Kitty treasures hers while Esme finds hers ill-fitting and ugly. The dress, like her life in Scotland, is a prison, and Esme feels as if she’s suffocating under its oppression.

When Esme tries on her mother’s silk negligée, she is drawn to the mystery of it as well as its sleek, sensual texture. A garment meant to slide over the body, accentuating its every curve, the lingerie symbolizes Esme’s sexual awakening and desire to know more about her body and attraction to Jamie. Having never been called beautiful, Esme finally feels so in the garment and for a moment, relishes being comfortable in her own body. However, the moment is quickly shattered when her father discovers her indulgence and shames her behavior. Her mother quickly forces her into the confines of the uncomfortable dress and shoves her out the door to a party.

Iris earns a living selling vintage clothing and accessories in the modern era, and takes great pleasure in the feel and look of the fabrics. Clothing is not only a part of Iris’s occupation, but is also a way she expresses her individuality. Eschewing the popular, bland fashion of the day, she chooses to wear unique vintage pieces that reflect her nonconformist attitude. Iris despises the fact that Fran’s never worn the vintage dress she gave her as a wedding gift and sees her sister-in-law’s clothing as pedestrian and predictable. Like Esme, Iris also has a memory tied to a specific dress, “The same dress as when her grandmother had caught them” (256). One dress symbolizes Iris’s attempt to conform to mannerly society at a tea party, but it’s torn as she and Alex explore their forbidden attraction. Throughout the novel, O’Farrell uses characters’ apparel as symbols of their social standing and refusal to adhere to conventional behavior.

Memory and Time

As the novel details a nonlinear series of events, O’Farrell uses each character’s remembrances to reconstruct the past. Time becomes fluid as it sometimes passes quickly, slows to a crawl, or stops entirely—with O’Farrell’s manipulation of time being a symbol of female trauma. The novel begins with Esme piecing together her memories, establishing a timeline of events leading up to the tragedy that changed her life. Esme reflects on her earliest memories in India: There, time slowly unwinds as she spends her days in the freedom of childhood. When tragedy strikes and leaves Esme alone with Hugo and Jamila’s dead bodies, she loses track of time; when her parents return, she has no recollection of how long she’s been locked in the library.

When the family moves to Scotland, time speeds up, symbolizing a sense of urgency to make Esme and Kitty proper ladies. Esme feels the passing of time, as she’s bored with the tedium of high society life and empty hours spent at home. When Esme dances with Jamie, time stops; after his assault, she once again loses track of time to avoid her trauma. When Iris removes Esme from Cauldstone, she attempts to reacclimate herself to life outside the walls of the psychiatric hospital. Esme uses her memories to reorient herself, but as her trauma resurfaces, she tries to stop her thoughts entirely. As Esme’s memories detail events in chronological order, Kitty’s recollections are fragmented. O’Farrell manipulates time through Kitty’s perspective to reflect both her Alzheimer’s disease and trauma.

Iris also has a unique relationship with time. She lives in a city suspended in history, as Edinburgh’s New Town is built atop Old Town, and parts of the city look the same as they did generations ago. Iris owns a store that transcends time by reselling vintage clothing and accessories; though she is a modern woman, she prides herself on appreciating the past. Once Esme becomes her responsibility, Iris is plunged into the past—that of her family and countless women incarcerated in psychiatric hospitals. In reading their stories, Iris sympathizes with Esme and other women locked away for decades—and understands their having lost time to neglect and abuse. As the novel reaches its climax and Esme considers her murder of Kitty, she calculates the time by watching a sundial through the window. The sundial, one of the oldest forms of timekeeping, helps Esme make sense of her decision—and in waiting for a specific (arbitrary) moment, she compartmentalizes the horror of what she did. In a story that crosses oceans and decades, everything comes down to one decision made in one instant, as if the sisters’ lives have been leading up to this moment. For Kitty, the passing of time has been lost to her, but with Esme’s decision, her clock stops permanently. Esme’s crime can’t make up for the time she’s lost, and even as Iris grabs her hand, her future is uncertain.

Vanishing

O’Farrell includes the term “vanishing act” in the novel’s title as a nod to a magician’s trick, but when applied to her characters, the term takes on a sinister tone. Characters disappear off the page either through illness, exile, or murder—and those left behind act as if they never existed. After Hugo’s death, the Lennox family forbids Esme from even speaking his name; her beloved Jamila, seen as nothing more than a servant, is also forgotten. Whenever Esme makes her presence known, whether through piano music or tempestuous arguments, her parents try to tame her into submission—and she soon realizes that to be a woman is to erase any sense of individuality. When Iris looks at a photo of Esme as a child, it appears as though she’s fading away: “Her outline is slightly blurred—she must have moved as the shutter fell. To Iris, it gives her a ghostly appearance, as if she might not have been there at all” (232). After Esme’s parents realize they can’t tame her, they make her vanish.

In Cauldstone, Esme perfects her own vanishing act by disappearing mentally to protect herself from further trauma, a concept in psychology known as dissociation: “She shuts her mouth, closes her throat, folds her hands over each other and she does the thing she has perfected. Her specialty. To absent yourself, to make yourself vanish” (103). While the act of making herself disappear is self-preservative at the moment, the practice can have deleterious effects on mental health, especially for someone who’s been incarcerated and then forced back into the real world. When Iris removes Esme from Cauldstone, the director barely registers her existence, saying, “It’s not unusual for patients of ours to…shall we say, fall out of sight” (39). Esme’s trick works within Cauldstone, but once released, she roams Edinburgh and is attacked by old memories; her coping mechanisms fail, and she loses her grip on reality. The novel begins with Esme staring at the vanishing point in the distance from her Cauldstone window. A term used in visual arts, the vanishing point is a place on the canvas where two parallel lines recede into the distance and eventually converge, giving the painting perspective; as the lines fade into the vanishing point, they eventually disappear. Leaving Cauldstone is Esme’s vanishing point, where her parallel existence inside the psychiatric hospital merges with that of her family members on the outside; at the convergence, the reader hears Esme’s story before she vanishes forever.