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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
Joseph J. Coutts is a teacher, hoping to instill in his pupils a love for Latin, but his students are not inspired. Instead, the only consistently good thing in Joseph Coutts’s life is his relationship with his landlady, Dorea Swivel. But Joseph cannot see a future with the homely Dorea, so when he meets a man named Reginald Bull, who’s planning to go on a town-site expedition on the Dakota-Minnesota border, Joseph is eager to join. Bull promises they could make millions and ensures Joseph that their guides—Henri and Lafayette Peace—will keep them safe.
Structurally, Judge Coutts’s section of narration begins to mirror Evelina’s, as a personal, present-day story gives way to a grandparent’s tale. The convoluted family lines of this region now grow even more tangled, as it becomes clear that before Cuthbert was hanged, his older brothers Henri and Lafayette were celebrated as local guides. And though it is never outright named, the town-site expedition Joseph goes on here is explicitly colonial in nature, as it is premised on the idea that White settlers can establish legitimate claim over indigenous lands just by surveying them.
Themes
A few nights before he is bound to leave, Joseph Coutts tells Dorea his plans. That night, for the first time in a while, she does not come to Joseph’s bed. Without her warmth, Joseph struggles to sleep. The only way he can get some rest is by thumbing through The Meditations, which advise him to “throw away idle hopes […] and come to his own aid.”
While Joseph claims not to have deep feelings for Dorea, his sadness at her absence testifies to a deeper passion that what he is willing to admit to himself. The individualistic focus of The Meditations, Marcus Aurelius’s most famous Stoic text, sharply contrasts with the more communal logic at play in other parts of the story.
Themes
In addition to Bull and Henri and Lafayette Peace, Joseph Coutts is joined on his trip by Emil Buckendorf and a cook named English Bill. Bill also brings along his dog, a short-haired terrier. For his part, Joseph Coutts only brings along The Meditations and a picture of Dorea in a locket, as if he knows he will need her stern, plain features to ground him on his journey.
By moving back and forward through time, the novel endows even seemingly straightforward plot points with dramatic irony, as readers must grapple with the fact that soon after taking this trip with Joseph and Henri, Emil Buckendorf will murder their little brother.
Themes
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The men set out with their oxen and their provisions, but the deep snow means that they can only move about eight miles a day. At night, they sleep crowded together in one bed, warming each other with their bodies but disgusting each other with their farts. When Henri jokes about the bad smells, Emil is offended. Henri and Lafayette also sleep with their arms curled around their shared fiddle, as if the instrument were a baby.
Emil is quick to anger on this trip, perhaps foreshadowing his cruelty in the vigilante hangings. It is also crucial to note the appearance of the fiddle, which is first associated in the novel with the “unearthly violin solo” in the prologue, and which will become more important later. Just as this town-site expedition helps explain the founding of Pluto as a town, the appearance of a fiddle here helps explain the beginning of that instrument’s significance for the present-day characters.
Themes
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One day, it snows so much that the men cannot even put up their tent or start a fire. When Joseph Coutts falls asleep, he fears he may never wake up. But the next morning, he awakens to Henri playing the fiddle while Lafayette beats a drum. Their song has a “stirring joy” to it, and Joseph is grateful that they miraculously survived the night.
The “stirring,” healing sound of Henri’s fiddle music foreshadows the relationship Judge Coutts will develop with fiddle music later in the narrative. Here, the violin seems to presage a kind of religious “miracle,” allowing the men to survive the deadly cold.
Themes
But the journey does not get easier as the men continue on. Soon, the first ox collapses, and the men kill it for food. Tired and hungry, Joseph Coutts starts to dream of Dorea. The other men, too, begin to fantasize about the women they have left behind, particularly Bull, who almost dropped out of the trip because of a love affair.
Evelina is not the only character dreaming of a “deathless romantic encounter.” Indeed, all the men on this town-site expedition similarly turn to passionate memories to help them survive—or at least distract from—their dire present circumstances.
Themes
A month after they set out, the men reach their destination. Their food is running low, and English Bill’s terrible cooking gives all the men stomach problems. One night, the men are in such distress that Bull breaks out the medicine his lover gave him, a kind of laudanum. For the first time in weeks, the men sleep well, and in the morning, they survey the land with a hand compass and a chain.
Laudanum, a common sleeping medication in the mid-19th century, is a kind of diluted opium, now known for its addictive properties. The fact that the men expend their last reserves of energy to survey the land demonstrates just how much the White settlers of this era prioritized deeds, boundaries and other markers of property ownership.
Themes
The days pass, and the men kill and eat their final ox. Though they are wasting away, the laudanum keeps them happy. Henri and Lafayette kill two buffalo calves by disguising themselves as wolves, and the men eat well, temporarily replacing the laudanum with meat. As they wait for the provisioner to arrive with more food, the expeditioners start to build a cabin.
First through their fiddle playing and then with their superior hunting techniques, it is evident that Henri and Lafayette are doing more than their share of work to keep the town-site group alive. Knowing that Emil survived only because of these brothers’ skills then reframes his later killing of Cuthbert as even more tragic and unjust.
Themes
Lafayette saves Bill’s dog from a wolf, and Bill grows eager to help the Peace brothers however he can. Bull, however, feels increasingly hopeless. Eventually, he decides he will walk back to his hometown. Shortly before Bull leaves, the ice melts, flooding the men’s cabin. An otter floats in with the water, and Joseph Coutts kills it, though to do so brings tears to his eyes.
Joseph’s connection to the otter signifies a connection between humans and the natural world that surrounds them. But more than that, Coutts’s tears demonstrate his empathy and identification with his victim, a common thread in a town where victims are often deeply connected (by blood, history, or romance) to their perpetrators.
Themes
At last, the men’s bad fortune comes to an end. First, Bill’s dog finds a pile of birds, frozen in the snow. Then, the dog catches a squirrel, two catfish, and even a snapping turtle. By the time Bull makes his way back to the camp, starved almost to death, the other men are full and back to health. Tenderly, Joseph Coutts holds Bull in his arms as Bull dies.
The first thing Bill’s dog finds to eat is a group of birds, perhaps foreshadowing the doves that will, a few years later, take over the town founded on this very site (Pluto). For Bull, so desperately in love that he tried to return home, passion is quite literally deadly, a lesson Joseph Coutts will later quietly internalize in his own life.
Themes
Eventually, the provisioner does arrive, though by the time he gets to the camp, he has eaten or lost most of the food he meant to bring. Still, the provisioner has waded through freezing water and fallen through cracked ice to get there. Joseph Coutts wonders what will await him when he dies. For the first time, he envies the Peace brothers for their Christian faith.
The provisioner’s commitment to coming, even though he no longer has much to offer the town-site explorers, speaks to the depth of care members of this remote community are capable of showing to each other. Though faith (Catholic and otherwise) is often a source of pain or hypocrisy in the novel, here, Joseph acknowledges the power spiritual belief has to make death feel less terrifying and mysterious.
Themes
Henri explains that Lafayette is the more religious of the brothers. When Joseph Coutts frets aloud that he will die, Lafayette comforts him by taking off his crucifix necklace and wrapping it around Joseph’s neck. Then Lafayette goes into the woods without a word. “We will have meat tomorrow,” Henri promises. While they wait, Joseph shows Henri the picture of Dorea in his locket. Henri says Dorea is beautiful, which Joseph thinks is the only lie Henri has ever told.
Lafayette’s strong religious belief seems to give him an almost otherworldly confidence, whether that means playing “stirring” fiddle music or promising “meat” in a barren wasteland. In a neat parallel, by allowing himself to truly miss Dorea Swivel, Joseph also accesses some of his own kind of faith—sourced not from a higher power, but from a quiet, intimate love affair.
Themes
Lafayette does indeed bring back food, having killed an old moose. The next week, more provisions arrive, and the men grow strong enough to return to camp, with no money (though in possession of deeds for the seemingly worthless land). When Joseph Coutts returns home, he knocks on Dorea’s door, only to find she has married another man.
Even if Joseph Coutts writes off the land here as worthless, this is the land that will become Pluto—and those who have deeds to it will be able to prosper off this expedition for decades to come. Joseph’s disappointment at losing Dorea foreshadows Judge Coutts’s own romantic trials, two generations later.
Themes
A few months later, Joseph Coutts finds Bull’s old girlfriend, a relative of the Peace family, and tells her how much Bull loved her. She is sweet but confesses that she does not remember what Bull actually looked like, and her honesty makes Coutts decide to marry her. Coutts rereads Marcus Aurelius in his Meditations: “thou hast embarked, thou hast made the voyage, thou hast come to shore; get out!” With those words, Coutts decides that he has been cured of “town fever” and decides, instead, to become a lawyer.
Joseph’s marriage to Bull’s old girlfriend seems less motivated by passion than it does by a desire to preserve his friend’s legacy, even in a somewhat unusual way. It is especially important to note how Joseph juxtaposes the wild danger of “the voyage” with his decision to become a lawyer, hoping to reestablish calm and order in his life after the turmoil of his “town fever” surveying trip.
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