45 pages • 1 hour read
The Last September
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Part 2, Chapters 5-8Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 2: “The Visit of Miss Norton”
Part 2, Chapter 5 Summary
That night, all of the occupants of Danielstown except Sir Richard and Lady Naylor struggle to sleep. Hugo is angry, while Francie feels despondent at the emotional distance between them. Laurence waits for raiders to come to the house, but they never do. Lois plays the gramophone downstairs until Laurence knocks a chair against the floor.
Marda sets off in the morning toward town to send a telegram to her fiancé. Livvy arrives just as Marda leaves, and she asks to speak to Lois privately. She shows a ring hidden on a necklace under her dress and admits that she and Mr. Armstrong are engaged. She tells Lois the story of how he met her in Cork and admitted to being in love with her. Lois remembers one of the days she and Livvy spent with Mr. Armstrong and Gerald.
Laurence comes in, asking after Marda. He stays briefly, and when he leaves, Livvy notes that he always blushes when he sees her. She returns to the topic of her engagement and shares how she wishes Mr. Armstrong would be more active rather than leaving things like their marriage up to her to handle. She is also afraid of telling her father she is engaged to an army man. She tells Lois that if Lois and Gerald were engaged, that would help get the ball rolling. Lois tries to avoid the subject.
Part 2, Chapter 6 Summary
Lady Naylor and her neighbor Mrs. Carey walk and talk as the young people play tennis. Lady Naylor admits that she thinks Marda’s engagement will end, but she also admits to being glad Marda is leaving soon, as she suspects there might be something between Marda and Hugo – an interest on his side, at least.
Marda recognized Hugo’s interest in her immediately on her arrival. Ever since, she has tried to annoy and irritate him to prevent his interest, but her attempts have failed. She recalls the way their fingers brushed as he passed her a candle the night that nearly everyone in the house struggled to sleep.
Laurence tells Marda he thinks she should stay. Mrs. Carey and Lady Naylor think about the differences between the young people around them and their own youths. Lady Naylor thinks every young person should be a rebel in their youth, but that the young people around her have no sense of adventure. They note that it’s a shame when someone is “born middle-aged,” referencing Laurence’s peculiarities.
Part 2, Chapter 7 Summary
Hugo, Marda, and Lois take a walk outside. Lois has fallen behind, and Hugo is increasingly angry because of his feelings for Marda. They come upon an abandoned mill, and Marda, trying to get away from Hugo for a time, convinces Lois to go into it with her. While Hugo smokes outside, they come upon a sleeping man. He pulls a gun on them and questions them. They admit to living in Danielstown, but they have no other information for him. He tells them they had better stop taking walks; if they have nothing better to do with their time, he says, they had better stay in their house while they still have it. In the face of the gun, Lois thinks that she must marry Gerald.
Hugo hears a gunshot and races in, calling out for Marda by her first name. He shouts at the girls to let him pass into the room they came from, but they refuse to budge, even as Marda’s hand bleeds from the bullet. Lois swears there is no one in the mill, and Marda says that the person they came upon hadn’t eaten much for four days and his gun accidentally went off. Hugo yells at Lois, saying she deserves to be shot. His outright fear over Marda reveals to Lois his feelings for the young woman. When she bandages Marda’s hand outside, she notes it, saying Hugo is “being awful about you” (185). Marda brushes this aside and says that she will be gone soon anyway. Lois is losing her regard for the man. At Lois’s worry over anyone discovering the man they found, Marda promises not to tell even her fiancé in England. Privately, Marda decides she does not want to give her fiancé any reason to confirm his beliefs that Ireland is “dangerous as well as demoralizing” (187). Hugo, now calm, follows the two women back toward the house for dinner.
Part 2, Chapter 8 Summary
The next morning is busy with Marda’s preparations for departure. Lois offers to help her pack in order to avoid Livvy, who has come to visit. Lois and Marda do not broach the topic of the prior day’s experience. The house’s inhabitants come to Marda’s room in turn to offer help or, in Hugo’s case, a parting gift from his wife. Lady Naylor sends Lois out to greet Livvy, and the two girls walk outside in the rain. Livvy asks if anything is wrong between Lois and Gerald, but Lois avoids the question. Hugo determinedly avoids looking at Marda as much as possible, and Marda observes that she managed to avoid him having an opportunity to say things to her that he should not. Only a few of them watch and wave as the car carries Marda away to the train station, wondering at how she had quickly become dear to them. Lois visits the spare room where Marda slept and notices the pillow retains the shape of her head.
Part 2, Chapters 5-8 Analysis
The second half of Part 2 provides more rapidly rising action through Lois and Marda’s encounter with an IRA soldier, although much of the rest of this section follows a similar pattern to the rest of the novel, with slower action. The dangers of the war begin to impinge upon Danielstown and its surroundings, both through Lois and Marda’s encounter and through Bowen’s use of describing Danielstown visually as foreshadowing:
[…] the cream façade of the house was like cardboard, high and confident in the sun – a house without weight, an appearance, less actual than the begonias’ scarlet and wax-pink flesh. Begonias, burning in an impatience of colour, crowded over the edge of heart-shaped beds (167).
The house itself and the flaming colors and words like “burning” hint at the destruction coming to Danielstown. The IRA soldier in the abandoned mill provides a more direct and sinister warning: “’It is time,’ he said, ‘that yourselves gave up walking. If yez have nothing better to do, yez had better keep within the house while y’have it’” (181). The threats of war are no longer far-off happenings, but since Marda, Lois, and Hugo speak of the event to no one, the rest of the characters maintain their detached, naïve ways of viewing the conflict.
The run-in with the IRA soldier offers a fleeting moment of epiphany, a literary tool used by many modernist authors. Lois says to herself in the face of the soldier’s gun, “‘I must marry Gerald’” (182). She also recognizes a “passingly intimate” feeling she shared with Marda as a result of the experience (187). Both thoughts provide a momentary step forward in Lois’s struggle to define her Personal Identity During Political Upheaval, helping her to recognize more definite feelings about what she wants and feels.
However, The Protections of Power and Privilege at Danielstown intervene in Lois’s steps toward character growth. Her feelings for Gerald are enough to spur her to action later on, but in the second half of Part 2, Lois quickly turns back to the mundanities of her daily life as she is surrounded once more by the Big House and the arrogant self-assuredness of her family and friends. The stagnancy of Danielstown protects Lois from the uncertainty her own feelings. Indeed, this section of the book is marked by avoidance and subterfuge: Lois avoids Livvy and her own feelings, Hugo tries to hide his feelings for Marda, and Marda insists she will not tell her fiancé about what truly happened at the mill, because she does not want to “confirm Leslie’s opinion that her country was dangerous as well as demoralising” (187). The events in the mill give the characters first-hand experience with the war and The Decline of an Empire. Marda is Irish by birth and upbringing, and despite her plans to live in England with her future husband and her seemingly detached view of the war, she refuses to risk further tainting outsiders’ views of her home. The threats of the IRA soldier demonstrates the already-begun process of political and social decline. His words reveal that the Protections of Power and Privilege offered by the Big Houses are reaching their limit.
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By Elizabeth Bowen
