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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
As Cordelia makes her way to Pluto’s town caf (cafeteria), she reflects that “the dead of Pluto now outnumber the living.” Since there are almost no businesses left in Pluto, the caf also serves as an office, a recreation hall, and even a meeting place for church groups. Years ago, the caf was a restaurant called the 4-B’s; before that, it was the Pluto National Bank, owned and operated by Neve Harp’s father.
Because the 4-B’s has been closed for a while, it is clear that Cordelia’s narrative takes place several years after the events of the previous chapters. This time jump then shows that in Pluto, a town with so much history, the past has crowded out the future; dead ancestors and dead business fill Cordelia’s memories of these streets, but in the present, these streets are mostly empty.
Themes
Cordelia was recently elected as president of Pluto’s historical society—though it is not easy to tell the history of a “dying” town, where the houses are losing value and the main manufacturing, a fertilizer plant, has gone bust. Together with her friend Neve (“one of the last of the original founding families”), Cordelia reflects on the events that have defined life in Pluto over the last century. Cordelia especially lingers on 1911, when a White family was murdered and three Indians were hanged for a crime they did not commit—“what was called at the time ‘rough justice.’”
Cordelia’s prejudice shows through here in the casual way she writes off the brutal, irrational vigilante violence as “rough justice” (further underscoring the novel’s suggestion that justice is an unreliable and deeply personal concept). Importantly, Cordelia’s story also references plot points from other characters’ narration but with a new lens. Whereas Coutts and Geraldine saw Pluto’s collapse as a kind of fitting punishment for the town’s violent roots, Cordelia sees this “dying” as tragedy. Whereas Mooshum and Clemence find the idea of a historical society painful, Neve and Cordelia take pride in their town’s settler-colonial past.
Themes
Cordelia recounts what happened to the seven-month-old baby girl found at the murder scene. The baby was adopted by Oric and Electa Hoag, even though Electa’s brother Tobek was suspected of the murders. The Hoags sent their adopted daughter to college, then medical school. The daughter then returned to Pluto, where she became the first female doctor in the area. She restored the house where the murders had taken place and leased the surrounding acres. The income from the acreage allowed the doctor to do pro bono work with less wealthy patients.
Though Cordelia uses the third person to speak about the baby girl found at the 1911 murder scene, her description of the girl makes it clear that Cordelia herself is the sole survivor of these murders. Structurally, then, Cordelia’s narrative becomes the ultimate proof of the region’s interconnectedness: Cordelia, seemingly a newcomer to the story, is actually the baby on the very first page.
Themes
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The only source of shame for this doctor—Cordelia herself—is her refusal to treat Indians. Though people assume Cordelia is bigoted, her refusal actually stems from the “unsteady weakness” she feels in the presence of Indians. Cordelia can’t decide if her long-ago love for a younger, half-Chippewa man was “a mad lapse” in judgment or a matter of “unquestionable fate.”
Even as Cordelia admits her bigotry, she tries to excuse it, suggesting that her discrimination against Indians stems not from her prejudice but from her attraction (the “unsteady weakness” she feels). But as with John Wildstrand and Maggie Peace, it is clear that these White peoples’ exoticization of their indigenous lovers fundamentally compromises these relationships.
Themes
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As Neve and Cordelia walk around the town, they gossip about their neighbors and relatives. Neve talks about her uncle Octave, whose stamp collection was more valuable than any of the assets in her father’s bank. Neve’s uncle was particularly concerned with collected “disaster” stamps, which had survived on letters sent during war or other crises. “Isn’t it strange,” Neve muses, “how time mutes the horror of events?”
In realizing the true monetary worth of the stamp collection, Neve (also the loudest champion of the town’s historical society) marvels at the tangible value history can hold. At the same time, however, Neve is removed enough—both from the “disaster” stamps and from the disasters in her own town—to see the “horrors” of the past as a “muted” curiosity rather than an immediate source of pain.
Themes
Neve and Cordelia spend their evenings quietly, watching T.V. and eating dinner alone. Both of them are amazed to realize how old they have gotten. Sometimes, Neve gets in dark moods, as when she reflects on her magnetic kidnapper Billy Peace, or when she discovers that some of Octave’s prized stamps were actually forgeries.
Though Neve and Cordelia spend much of their time alone, the narrative’s tone is peaceful rather than despairing. This suggests that even if their memories of the past are painful, the women also take solace in revisiting their personal histories, no matter how complicated.
Themes
Cordelia wonders why she does not have traumatic memories of the murders. People have told Cordelia that one of the Indians who was later hanged fed her while she cried in her crib. Other than the murders, Cordelia has led a charmed life, getting good grades and being elected prom queen. “The only thing is,” Cordelia reflects, “I was allowed to believe that the lynched Indians had been the ones responsible,” until Neve set her straight. Then, Cordelia recalls the strangely folded bills she often received in her childhood. Did these bills mean that the murderer was not Tobek but someone else, someone still alive?
The murder that catalyzed the 1911 hangings was a tragedy in its own right, but the relative ease Cordelia experienced in her youth and adulthood—especially in comparison to the violent deaths that befell Cuthbert, Asiginak, and Holy Track—speaks to the racialized injustice of life in Pluto. Crucially, the strangely folded dollar bills that Cordelia finds around town recalls the interaction Evelina had with Warren Wolde, when (shortly after attempting escape from the hospital) Warren tried to give Evelina a stack of neatly creased dollars.
Themes
Sometimes, when Cordelia lifts her murdered family members’ clothes to her face, she feels a “wild upsurge” of memories, painful and blurry. Other times, Cordelia worries that when she gives her history of Pluto to the University of North Dakota, she will not have captured “the truth.” And most of all, Cordelia is plagued by the question of why the murders were committed—“to what end the mysterious waste?”
Cordelia’s anxiety about not having captured “the truth” of her town is another moment of dramatic irony. After all, The Plague of Doves is structured as a series of connected (and often contradictory) narratives, highlighting that any one person’s view of history can be the “true” one. Cordelia’s view of the 1911 murders as “waste[ful]” underscores that for all the novel’s neat moments of poetic justice, most of life’s worst horrors never come to any sort of balanced conclusion.
Themes
About 20 years earlier, Warren Wolde had been trampled on by his family’s bull, and the wound got infected. Cordelia had treated Warren—but every time she went to tend to his wounds, Warren reacted with strange “horror.” Gradually, the horror melted into something tender, as if he were “shucking” off his normally fearsome personality just for Cordelia.
Warren’s ominous threats to his niece Marn—“it’s on you, you’re gonna kill”—now take on new resonance here, as the relationship between Warren and Cordelia comes into focus. Cordelia seems first to bring up a strange mix of terror and kindness in Warren, perhaps suggesting the guilt he feels towards her.
Themes
Years later, Warren dies peacefully in his sleep, succumbing to a blood clot. Soon after Warren’s death, Cordelia receives a package. When she opens the box, it is filled with folded bills, like those that Cordelia used to receive in her childhood. Curious, Cordelia asks around about Warren’s final days. A nurse tells her that Warren died soon after a man named Corwin Peace played violin at Warren’s nursing home. “It was the music that killed him,” the nurse reflects.
In giving these bills to Cordelia, Warren implicitly reveals himself to be her family’s murderer. The money, then, is Warren’s small attempt at restitution, a hope of tiny justice even in the face of injustice. Of course, Warren’s attempt is in many ways futile, especially given the deeply unfair fact that Cordelia unwittingly healed the man who killed her parents. Again, however, poetic justice steps in, as the violin music—recalling the “unearthly violin solo” that played when Warren committed the murders—ultimately brings Warren to a fitting, repentant end.
Themes
Back in the present, Cordelia reflects that she and Neve will need to disband the historical society. Cordelia wants to declare a town holiday so that she can commemorate the day she saved the life of her family’s murderer, but instead, she goes on a walk. “I take my cane to feel the way,” Cordelia explains, “for the air is so black I think already we are invisible.”
In disbanding the historical society, Cordelia seems—like the novel itself—to be trying to let go of the past. But in a narrative that so emphasizes the importance of history, moving on from history also means disappearing in the present; to stop trying to make sense of Pluto’s triumphs and terrors, Cordelia’s final words suggest, is to become “invisible.”
Themes
