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17. All Souls’ Day
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
Judge Coutts and Geraldine at last get married, though they refuse to get married in the church. Instead, they are married outside, on a day when the clouds in the sky seem to form a road to the afterlife. Coutts keeps crying, and Geraldine scolds him, but her joy and emotion are evident, too. Corwin plays the violin all night. “When we are young, the words are scattered all around us,” Evelina thinks. “As they are assembled by experience, so are we, sentence by sentence, until the story takes shape.”
Though Geraldine shares some of Clemence’s Catholic mores, she and Judge Coutts now forge their own synthesis of spiritual belief, finding faith in the land, the music, and each other. And as Evelina watches these two lovers come together, the novel’s two core narrators (Evelina and Coutts) are similarly knit into one family, “assembled by experience” and love into a single “story.”
Themes
