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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
Marn Wolde is 16 during the “drought-dry” summer when she first encounters Billy Peace. Billy is thin and tense, and though Marn is intrigued by him, she isn’t yet experienced enough to flirt. Besides, Marn has very little experience with men: the only ones she has ever really encountered are her tender, quiet father and her old uncle Warren, who is erratic and prone to sudden rages. Though Warren owns the farm the Woldes all live on, Marn has never seen him plant anything.
Though Marn Wolde has almost never been mentioned in the novel before, her connections to the rest of Pluto’s community make her feel familiar. First, she has a crush on Billy Peace, no longer the scared little boy he was in the previous chapters. And second, her family owns the land the 1911 hangings took place on, an act of violence impossibly at odds with the tender agriculture Marn’s father practices.
Themes
At first, Marn thinks Billy is a traveling salesman, but he assures her that the only thing he has come to sell is the “spirit.” Marn is skeptical, but out of boredom and curiosity, she goes to see Billy preach at the fairgrounds. As she leaves the house, Warren calmly predicts that Marn will soon end up in “hell.”
Evelina’s family has often fought over the difference between Catholic cosmology (with its orderly divide between heaven and hell) and indigenous belief. Now, similar debates are replicated in Marn’s life, as Warren’s ominous, punishing view of faith (centered on “hell”) contrasts with Billy’s looser, more personalized concept of vaguely Christian “spirit.”
Themes
Billy is not the first speaker at the fair ground, but he is the most captivating. Billy shouts at the crowd to stand and discusses politics in the Middle East and China. Then, Billy decrees that “the Antichrist […] is the plastic in our wallets,” so he goes around and cuts up his congregants’ credit cards. Marn is dazzled, feeling as if she is “too young to stand” against these words.
The last time the novel dwelled on Billy, he was doing dangerous military work abroad, work that led him to be plagued by visions. Here, though Marn finds Billy’s sermons attractive, the scary incoherence of those visions is (to readers) obviously reflected in Billy’s worryingly nonsensical speech.
Themes
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Afterwards, Billy invites Marn to pray over another preacher’s dying mother. When Marn arrives, she is surprised to see Billy speaking in tongues. But suddenly, Marn gets one of her “pictures”—an image in her mind “so brilliant and detailed it seems real.” Marn tells the picture to the preacher’s mother, and she is gratified to see that her vision comforts the dying woman.
Though the novel operates mostly in realism, every so often, magic or folkloric elements make their way to the fore. Marn’s pictures are perhaps the most truly magical realist plot point in the entire story, as her “pictures” actually do reveal future insights and past secrets, so vivid in her detailed imaginings that they somehow become “real.”
Themes
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