The Dutch House Literary Elements

Fiction

1940s through Present Day, Pennsylvania and New York City

First person: Danny Conroy

Tone: poignant, sympathetic, wistful, meditative, skeptical

Mood: nostalgic, thoughtful, frustrated, worried, trustful

Protagonist: Danny, Maeve; Antagonist: Andrea

Will Danny and Maeve be able to move on once they're thrown out of the Dutch House? Will they forget the troubles of their past and have happy, successful lives?

Andrea throws Danny and Maeve out of the Dutch House, forcing them to rely on themselves and each other, come to terms with their sense of family and their own identities, and negotiate the legacies of rage, frustration, guilt, and sadness.

1. Patchett foreshadows that some irrevocable break, tragedy, or altercation between Danny, Maeve, and Andrea takes place, but we do not know what it is for some time.
2. Andrea's strange behavior going out to get the paper one morning foreshadows the siblings learning of her mental breakdown.
3. Maeve talks about how she will have a heart attack or stroke because of diabetes, and she ends up having the former.

1. When Maeve returns from school and Andrea says, "Maeve, we've changed some things around since you've been gone" (55), this is an understatement because what Andrea has done has essentially cast Maeve out and replaced her with Norma.
2. "It's Dad. We've lost Dad" (Maeve, 82). Saying "lost" is an understatement of the fact that he died.

1. "The Turn of the Screw," a Henry James novella about a young governess who thinks there are ghosts in the house of the children she is watching (33)
2. "The Little Princess," a famous children's book by Frances Hodgson Burnett about a young girl whose father loses his money; she is forced to live in the attic and work in the boarding house she is staying at (56)
3. "Eisenhower or Stevenson" refers to the election of 1956 in which incumbent President Dwight Eisenhower was running against Democrat Adlai Stevenson (60)
4. Fluffy talks about the "Gatsbyesque" parties at the Dutch House, which is an allusion to F. Scott Fitzgerald's 1920s novel "The Great Gatsby" (235)
5. "Hansel and Gretel" (237)—Celeste calls Maeve and Danny the storybook siblings because of their wandering down memory lane
6. When Danny says there is "no story of the prodigal mother" (264), he is alluding to the biblical story of the return of the prodigal son

See the separate "Imagery" section of this ClassicNote.

Maeve says of Elna, "When she was gone it was unbearable and when she was home it was unbearable in a different way because we knew that she was going to leave again" (27).

1. Cyril and Danny both buy their wives large, dark houses that neither wife actually cares for
2. Maeve gets sick at roughly the same age that Cyril dies (Danny identifies this as a disturbing parallel)

N/A.

1. "The Dutch House grew quiet" (29)
2. "The cherry trees...[were] exhausted by the burden of so many petals" (118)
3. "This was a woman whose biology betrayed her at every turn" (194)