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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
Geraldine takes the top of the wedding cake home to put in the freezer, so she and Judge Coutts can eat it on their first anniversary. They have decided to save their money and go on a real honeymoon later on. So tonight, all they do is lie with each other, having sex and eating toast and smiling.
Just as Marn’s story overlapped with Evelina’s narration of life at the 4-B’s, the overlapping narratives again cross here, a testament to how the wedding has joined the novel’s disparate stories together. After so much obsessing over the past, both Geraldine and Coutts now look—with pragmatism and excitement—to the future.
Themes
When Geraldine finally nods off, Coutts reflects on how different this love feels: “old love, middle love, the kind of love that knows itself and knows that nothing lasts, is a desperate shared wildness.” Coutts is touched that the more Catholic Milk family has embraced his marriage, even though all of them—even Geraldine—know about his long romance with a married woman in Pluto, whom he calls only “C.” It feels marvelous and surprising to Coutts that he has been able to fall in love again.
Fascinatingly, the novel does not draw a sharp contrast between the childish fantasies of passion Evelina had and the “desperate shared wildness” of “old love” that Coutts now finds in middle age. Instead, Coutts suggests that a love that “knows itself” is a love that has experienced painful history, like his own past with C., but that still retains hope for whatever is to come.
Themes
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