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12. The Daniels
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Plague of Doves, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Ancestry, History, and Interconnection
Punishment vs. Justice
Land, Ownership, and Dispossession
Passion vs. Love
Faith, Music, and Meaning
Summary
Analysis
One day, Warren comes up to Marn. “It’s on you, I can see it,” he announces, mysteriously. When Marn asks what he means, Warren is firm: “it’s on you. You’re gonna kill.” Shortly after this conversation, Marn and her family put Warren in a state hospital. Billy crystallizes his beliefs, focusing now only on “spirit” (rather than ideas of god or the devil), and both of Marn’s parents pass away. Strangers call the house all the time, having heard Billy on the radio and hoping to join his church or give money.
Warren’s whispered warning to Marn suggests that he recognizes a murderous instinct in her (“it’s on you, I can see it”) because he, too, has committed great violence. Tellingly, Warren is institutionalized while Billy, arguably just as unwell, only grows in influence—suggesting that the line between insanity and inspiration is blurry and determined by who holds power.
Themes
Billy starts recruiting more and more people to his cause (“the kindred”). First, he is only interested in people who are especially organized or insightful. But as time passes, he also accepts “the wounded, the ones with something missing.” On one of their many trips south, Billy preaches to a group of women who pray with snakes. Marn instantly connects with the serpents and even uses “pictures” with them, encouraging the snakes to imagine warm rocks and hot sun. The women give Marn two snakes to keep as her own.
Like many cult leaders, the purity of Billy’s initial vision is compromised as he faces the financial and logistical challenges of keeping his organization alive (as evidenced by the way Billy lowers his standards for membership). The return of Marn’s “pictures” when she touches the snakes suggests that, for the first time since marrying Billy, Marn is returning to her own sense of self and belief.
Themes
One time, Billy asks Marn to show him “pictures” of his childhood in Milwaukee, where he and his parents lived before they died. At first, the images are cheerful, but then other flickers of Billy’s past surface—“the strap, the belt, the spike-heeled shoe”—and Billy begs Marn to stop. Another time, Billy comes into Marn’s room late at night and threatens the children. This frightens Marn, and her fear spooks the snakes, causing one to bite her. Marn thinks she might die, but after a week, she realizes the poison has made her stronger. “I was the poison,” Marn thinks, “and I was the power.”
In this vital passage, Marn’s “pictures” reveal to readers (and perhaps to Marn herself) that Billy was abused as a child, a fact that might help to explain why he acts so abusively now. Marn’s relationship with the snakes, where she takes on the creatures’ “poison […] power,” calls back to other reptile symbolism in the novel. Just as Father Cassidy once remarked that salamanders were manifestations of “the devil,” Marn now finds a venomous force in the snakes. And just as salamanders helped humble Father Cassidy, Marn hopes that her snakes might be able to do the same to Billy.
Themes
Marn convinces Billy to let her go to Seattle to raise money for “the kindred.” On the way there, Marn’s snakes convince her that she must leave Billy and bring her children with her. When Marn returns, she stops for breakfast in the 4-B’s, the diner where she sometimes works as a waitress. This diner is the only place where Marn ever feels normal. Marn pays for her breakfast with money she raised in Seattle (“undeclared” to Billy) and vows that she will not eat a full meal again until she and the kids have escaped.
Though Marn does not attempt anything like Billy’s violent control, her own unreliability is evident here, as she begins to assign her decisions entirely to the snakes. Marn’s abiding loyalty to her children once again underscore the narrative’s insistence on family and lineage above all else (even religious fervor).
Themes
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By the time Marn gets back to the farm, she is convinced of her plan. Billy has come to greet her, though Marn knows he probably deputized one of his many lovers to do the work of preparing for her arrival. Then Marn goes in to see her children. Though Billy has forbidden calling them by their given names, Marn still thinks of them as Judah and Lilith.
As in many cults, Billy has now warped his spiritual beliefs entirely for his own material, carnal ends, taking advantage of his female followers sexually. Billy’s refusal to use his children’s names—both of which reference disgraced characters from the New Testament—represents yet one more way that Billy is distancing himself from any established Christian doctrine.
Themes
When Marn and Billy are at last alone together, Billy asks about the trip. Marn is relieved that Billy has not noticed the change in her demeanor, until he quietly says, “if you ever leave me, Marn, I will take the children.” Then Billy and Marn have sex, in a way that is both painful and intensely pleasurable for Marn.
Often, romantic love and passion are seen as precursors to building a family. But for Marn, passion and family have become diametrically opposed, as Marn’s strange attraction to Billy makes it that much harder for her to bring her children to safety.
Themes
The next morning, Marn shows the rest of the kindred what she has raised in Seattle. The money is good, but it is still not enough—three people from the group will have to get jobs outside the farm. Billy’s followers join hands in a circle, praying to decide who will start new jobs. While the rest of the kindred are “imaging gold,” Marn looks around the circle, afraid.
Billy’s followers are now obsessed with money, the very commodity Billy initially demonized (as when he had his early congregants cut up all their credit cards). The fact that Billy uses words like “imaging” further suggests his hypocrisy, as he tries to steal Marn’s logic of “pictures” to bolster his own doctrine.
Themes
Marn decides to keep a “mental diary of important moments.” In some of the moments, Billy is abusive to Marn and the children; in some moments, he is tenderly sexual; in others, he is needy and sad. Marn starts sleeping with her snakes curled up in the bed she shares with Billy. Billy claims to hate this, but Marn notices that the smell of the snakes attracts Billy, too.
Stylistically, the almost poetic nature of Marn’s prose here reflects the intensity and irrationality of life in such a damaging cult. Just as Marn finds herself somehow drawn to her fear of Billy, Billy is compelled by the snakes, though he senses that they threaten his power.
Themes
Marn’s favorite job on the farm is cooking, though food is scarce, as no one really knows how to farm. One day, in the middle of cooking, Marn goes to check on her children. When she does, Judah tells her that Billy has decided to give him “Schedule,” one of the group’s punishments, because Judah was unruly. To protect her son, Marn volunteers to go to Schedule in his stead.
Even with so many people on the farm, no one seems to have any idea how to tend to the land. And perhaps it is unsurprising that after centuries of settler-colonial dispossession and redistribution, humans now feel alienated from the very agricultural traditions they depend on for survival.
Themes
To prepare for Schedule, which involves standing up straight for hours on end, Marn runs a long loop around the farm. Then Marn does her Schedule. The first two hours bring numbing pain and terrible boredom. But soon, Marn’s “pictures” start to come, and she imagines her snakes telling her to poison Billy with their venom. Warren flashes across Marn’s mind: “It’s on you, I can see it, you’re gonna kill.” Marn collapses, overcome by her visions.
Marn’s snakes here take on real spiritual power, as they push her to a decision—murdering Billy—that has seemed like Marn’s destiny all along. Warren’s reappearance here underlines the pivotal role he plays in the narrative, even if that role is not yet totally clear.
Themes
To avoid Billy’s anger at Marn’s failure to complete Schedule, she tells him that her “pictures” involved their sex life. For an entire night, Marn has vigorous sex with Billy, determined to “rule him so that he could hurt no one.” At the end of it, Billy falls asleep, and Marn plunges a syringe of snake venom into his neck. As he dies, Marn gets a series of “pictures”—staging Billy’s death to look like a suicide, her children’s calm gaze as they run. And “oh yes,” Marn says, “I got us eating those eggs at the 4-B’s, me and my children, and the land deed in my name.”
In this lyrical, frightening passage, several of the story’s central themes come together. In order to protect her family, Marn has to turn her passionate sex with Billy into something murderous rather than life-giving, filled with death rather than being (as Evelina might say) “deathless.” Yet even more than lust and desire, what bolsters Marn through this act of terrifying bravery is her knowledge of land ownership. The only thing Marn feels she needs to build life after Billy is the “land deed in my name,” proof that even if property is a form of artificial “mastery” (in Judge Coutts’s words), it is also the single most essential key to power and safety.
Themes
