Summary
In the scene that opens the novel's third section, Isobel is attending Mass one Sunday in summer and feels the grace of God descend upon her. The words of a sermon delivered by a visiting priest bring the sensation of grace to Isobel. After Mass is over, Isobel is eager to preserve her state of grace, a task which will entail avoiding conflict with her sister Margaret and her mother. She thus performs mealtime chores without complaining, and goes to visit her great-aunt, Auntie Ann, even though Margaret was supposed to check in on this relative. Visiting Auntie Ann—who offers Isobel lemonade and lets Isobel sit and read a book called The Wide, Wide World—is not an ordeal by any means, but Isobel reflects that she will need to be vigilant to preserve her state of grace going forward.
As time passes, Isobel's mother becomes irked with her daughter's calm demeanor. She takes Isobel's state of grace as a state of sulking and superiority, and becomes visibly angry when her daughter refuses to tell her what is really going on. Isobel recalls that her mother's insistent, nagging manner had at one point driven her father to violence; during a meal, he had suddenly grabbed a knife and leapt at her. Exasperated, Isobel's mother finally turns her attention away from her "sulking" daughter.
Soon, there is a new development with Margaret: the school that Margaret attends is going to put on a play, a production of Shakespeare's Twelfth Night. The performances are being organized by Miss Ferguson, a dynamic young teacher, and Margaret herself is taking a role in the play. However, the performances are especially notable because they will involve boys from a nearby school. Margaret relays this fact to Isobel, urging Isobel not to tell their mother, and Isobel agrees to secrecy. Even without knowing about the boys, Isobel's mother resents Margaret's participation, believing it to be a distraction from Margaret's schoolwork and an excuse for Margaret to stay away from home later than usual.
A new problem arises when Isobel's mother discovers that Margaret has brought makeup home. Margaret claims that the makeup is for the play. Isobel's mother claims that Margaret is using the makeup to pursue boys and laments her daughter's presumed delinquency and ingratitude. Isobel, for her part, has begun reading about the lives of the saints, hoping to absorb the virtue of selflessness that she will need in order to perpetuate her state of grace. She is unsettled by the lifestyles of deprivation that the saints endured, and reflects that while the saints tried to help the poor, her own family is itself poor.
In the meantime, Margaret grows nervous as the play itself nears. The eventual performance of Twelfth Night, which takes the form of "scenes" from the play as opposed to a full rendition of Shakespeare's script, is unimpressive and is quickly put out of mind even by Margaret herself. Nonetheless, Isobel's mother continues to bemoan her children's seeming selfishness and her role as a parent. She walks around, repeatedly saying, "Who'd be a mother?" Isobel tries to perform her chores conscientiously, but still bears the brunt of her mother's irritation.
One day, Isobel and Margaret are visited by their Aunt Noelene, a woman who successfully manages a dress factory and is one of the two sisters of their deceased father. The other sister, Aunt Yvonne, made a good marriage and lives on the countryside. Aunt Noelene is not physically attractive, but does wear exceptional clothes. Although she exchanges a few pleasantries with Isobel's mother, the sore topic of the death of Isobel's father quickly springs up. Isobel's mother accuses both Aunt Yvonne and Aunt Noelene herself of neglecting their brother in a time of illness; Aunt Noelene briefly and pointedly brings up the problems in her brother's marriage, but abandons this topic, leaves some money and a bag of clothes as presents for her two nieces, and departs.
Once Aunt Noelene has left, Isobel and Margaret inspect the clothes. Among the most attractive items is a yellow dress, which has been designated for Isobel but which Isobel, in her state of grace, decides to give to Margaret. Margaret tries the dress on; Isobel is impressed but the girl's mother demands that Margaret give the dress to Isobel. When the girls decide not to make the switch, Isobel's enraged mother rips the dress off Margaret. Isobel responds by loudly cursing her mother's action. While Isobel's mother is satiated by this show of aggression, Isobel realizes that her carefully maintained state of grace has finally been lost.
Analysis
Although this section confronts a variety of loaded topics—from Margaret's maturation to the death of Isobel's father—"The Grace of God and the Hand-Me-Down" is structured primarily around Isobel's experience of grace. Isobel is preoccupied with maintaining this special state. Having already been exposed to Isobel's independent and imaginative streak in the two preceding sections, however, Witting's reader may well intuit that Isobel's grace will not last. Yet when it does guide her life, Isobel's grace leads to new problems and complications. Isobel's mother is simply put out by her daughter's attempt at virtue. Even Margaret refers derisively to the newly demure and obedient Isobel: "Perhaps she's been converted. Saint Isobel of Plummer Street" (32). Isobel has somewhat successfully removed herself from direct conflicts, but has not done much to improve how her family views her.
By featuring in this section a self-effacing version of Isobel, Witting gives herself room to explore conflicts that center on other characters. (Isobel is present, but mostly observes and contemplates.) The first such conflict involves the school production of Twelfth Night, a stage of the narrative that temporarily makes Margaret more than a background character. The altercations, here, are driven by Margaret's growing independence and by Margaret's possible rejection of strait-laced morality; after all, she realizes that the boys in the play could raise her mother's ire. As the younger daughter, Isobel has not yet faced the prospects of boys, makeup, and teenage rebellion in quite the same way. Yet what Margaret goes through is perhaps a sign of things to come—of worse conflicts to come, perhaps, considering that Isobel is the less favored of the two Callaghan daughters.
Isobel's passive, non-participatory role allows Witting to introduce a second point of tension: the relationship between May Callaghan and her sisters-in-law. The dislike between May and Aunt Noelene is mutual, and traceable to a few clear causes, particularly Aunt Noelene's better financial state and May's resentment surrounding her husband's death. Aunt Noelene, at least according to Isobel's mother, is guilty of neglecting her "only brother when he was dying in hospital" (46). However, the basic differences in personality between these two women should not be overlooked. Isobel's contentious, insecure mother may resent the self-possessed, generous Aunt Noelene for much the same reason that she resents her own intelligent, thoughtful daughter—because Aunt Noelene has the exact positive traits that she does not, and that whips her into anger.
The presence of Aunt Noelene also recalls one of the overriding messages of "The Birthday Present." Both in that earlier section and in "The Grace of God and the Hand-Me-Down," almost everybody except Isobel's own mother proves encouraging, welcoming, and kind. Neither Aunt Noelene nor Mr Mansell does anything that is really out of the ordinary or that would be seen by a reasonable parent as an imposition: they simply give Isobel thoughtful, attractive, and small-scale gifts. And Aunt Noelene may inadvertently give Isobel something more, presenting the young girl with the model of independence and proper conduct that her mother so regularly fails to provide. Of course, it is possible to read Noelene's easily granted gifts and confident self-presentation as part of a power struggle with May; to do so, however, may be to lapse into some of May's own kind of suspicion and paranoia. Sometimes a present is just a present.
Such efforts to map out new conflicts and new potentialities within Isobel's world are accompanied by one major omission. "The Grace of God and the Hand-Me-Down" is notable for how little emphasis it puts on Isobel's literary interests, which arise mainly during her short visit to Auntie Ann. And although Twelfth Night plays an important role in this section, it is of interest mostly as a rite of passage for Margaret and a source of adolescent fascination for Isobel. Its imaginative and literary qualities are barely mentioned. Nonetheless, the fact that Isobel's state of grace is so quickly ruptured is a sign that Isobel may soon return to her first devotions. Religion—and the religion of May Callaghan, no less—has offered Isobel an impermanent version of transcendence and enlightenment. Literature and storytelling, which have been her refuges throughout the earlier sections of the novel, may be the forms of transcendence that endure.
