Summary
Hurtle moves into the Courtneys' house and navigates his integration into the family. While the Courtneys went to great and peculiar lengths to adopt him, there are times when they do not seem to expect his company. Hurtle observes that mealtimes are often very cold and the family members do not speak much to each other. When Hurtle calls Rhoda his sister, she shouts back that they are not siblings and calls him common. The relationship between the children ebbs and flows. Despite Rhoda’s insults, she sees Hurtle as her companion and wants him to assume that role. Hurtle loathes Rhoda, the way she tortures their governess, Miss Gibbons, and represents a life so different from the one he is accustomed to at his former home on Cox Street. That is, until he sees in her a perfect subject for a painting – sad, deformed Rhoda who cannot find a place in the world.
The Courtneys decide that Hurtle should refer to them as “Father” and “Maman.” They legally change his last name to Courtney, and insist that he will live with them forever. Hurtle draws members of the family and while they do not see a likeness, they think his pieces have virtue as works of art. When they give him drawing lessons to hone his craft, Hurtle argues with his teacher about the kind of art he wants to make. Hurtle draws the teacher jumping off the roof and Maman confirms that the man killed himself.
Hurtle paints a graphic image of his teacher dying in red paint on his wall, which makes Maman very upset – she’s worried that her child is disturbed. Father lashes Hurtle several times as punishment and then feels immediate remorse for his actions. Maman says again how much he hurt her by painting that scene on the wall, and then she tells him about her new cause: vivisection, the practice of experimenting on animals for science. Nearly in tears, Maman recounts anecdotes of shrieking dogs and insists that her children will never grow up cruel.
Father brings Hurtle to Mumbelong, one of the family properties, where Hurtle is introduced to many people as “the boy,” as though he had always been a member of the family. Hurtle observes that Father seems to take very seriously the activity on the property, even though everything that happens there seems to be more of a dream than real life. One night when Hurtle asks the eccentric cook what he is writing, he tells Hurtle that he is trying to work on a novel, though he worries he has not had enough experiences yet. And for the first time Hurtle speaks his dream out loud: that he is going to be a painter, a very great, very important painter.
When Hurtle and his father return from Mumbelong, Maman has had the suicide scene painted over and says that the man who covered it declared that whoever painted it in the first place must be some kind of criminal. Rhoda says that she liked it, which Hurtle dismisses, saying that she could not possibly have understood it. Maman, thrilled to have everyone back in the house, has everyone together for dinner during which Rhoda says that she is going to write poetry. Maman encourages her to do so, saying they might end up with two geniuses on their hands, which incenses Rhoda.
After dinner Maman brings out Planchette, a kind of ouija board that spells out the answers to their questions with a piece they all place their fingers on. After asking questions about the weather, Maman asks the board if there is anyone else, to which it only answers in jumbled letters. Hurtle asks what he will be, and Maman excitedly shouts that it spelled out painter. She asks what kind of painter he will be and the board tells them he will be an oil painter. When Rhoda asks what she is going to be, the board spells “woman,” which Maman proclaims is a noble fate.
The family goes on holiday for Christmas, and Hurtle and his parents obsess over Rhoda, bringing her to events and buying her clothes “to make her forget about herself” (120). Hurtle goes to museums and sees painting that shift his sense of what is possible in the form. In a resort town on the Breton coast, Hurtle accidentally walks in on Rhoda washing herself, and the image burns in his mind as something he must paint.
When they return home, the war has broken out in Europe. Though they speak of it often, and Maman thanks God that her husband and son did not have to fight, it feels very distant, and not very real. Rhoda begins lessons at the home of another girl her age, Boo Hollingrake, when Maman and Father decide that Rhoda should not be sent to school. Hurtle grows more solipsistic, and begins to see more behaviors in Maman that bother him.
Maman insists that Rhoda needs a birthday party and invites Boo and all the other girls to the house. When the girls go off to gossip, Hurtle hides in the bushes and eavesdrops on them. The girls run up the house but Boo stays behind and calls for Hurtle, and then they kiss on the stairs until Mrs. Courtney comes looking for her. While Maman does not catch them outright, she tells Hurtle that she hopes he will never do anything to make her ashamed of him. She insists that he is a gentleman, to which he argues he is not, he is an artist.
Time passes and they forget, more or less, about the war, other than Mr. Courtney’s absence from the house while he spends time at the properties to vaguely help with the war effort. A close friend of the Hollingrakes, the man Boo was meant to eventually marry, gets killed. Hurtle sees her in the post office one day when she is very solemn. She says she hears he is becoming an artist, and asks if he paints from life. That night, Hurtle lies to his mother that he has enlisted.
Analysis
The significance of naming conventions continues in these next chapters. Hurtle drops his last name, Duffield, and becomes a Courtney. That Mr. and Mrs. Courtney insist on this, and use it to signify that he really is one of them now, shows that they truly believe their name carries more value than the name he was born with. But just because it was changed does not mean his old name was erased – when Rhoda and Hurtle get into a spat and he says she is his sister now, she uses his old last name to insult him, showing the slipperiness of this kind of identity shifting. Furthermore, the Courtneys make an ordeal about deciding what Hurtle should call them: they insist on taking on parental terms, even though he has parents of his own, so that he may feel closer to them, but they skew them slightly; the French (Maman) and the formal (Father), which keeps him at a distance.
The relationship between art and life becomes more complex and developed once Hurtle moves in with the Courtneys. While he is now of a family with the time and money to cultivate artistic inclinations, he takes issue with the way bourgeois values interact with art: he does not respect his teacher, who would sooner churn out robots than individualists, and while he initially found beauty in the Courtneys house, he comes to see it as quite sterile, quite distant from the pulse of real life that drives the kind of art that moves him. Additionally, while Maman wants him to be all kinds of things – educated, charitable, a gentleman, etc. – Hurtle realizes that his priorities are different, and much more specific. He only wants to be an artist, and he does not see that fitting in with anything else.
White has created a pattern within which we can follow Hurtle’s artistic journey: he sees something he is not supposed to see, and then he is moved to depict it in paint. Some of these observations are more subtle; with his teacher, for instance, he picks up on some subtly in his persona that he is not well, that he is unhappy and depressed (he noticed this despite the Courtneys trying to hide it from him, always making excuses for the teacher’s absences.) With Rhoda the pattern is more explicit – he literally walks in on her, opening a door that was meant to be closed, and sees in her naked body something compelling about her form. This pattern continues throughout the novel.
If class is one subject circling throughout the novel, gender is another one. As the point of view remains almost entirely with Hurtle throughout the duration of the novel, save for a few moments, we do not get any direct commentary on the disparity between what is allowed of the men and what is allowed of the women. Hurtle’s misogyny is less of an explicit dislike or violence toward the women in the novel and more of an ignorance – ignorance that they might have artistic interests too, that they might be more than just formal inspiration for him. This is evidenced most explicitly in Rhoda: Rhoda who wants to write poetry, Rhoda who wants to go to school, Rhoda who wants to be more than just a woman.
The scene where Maman brings up her new charity case is a significant one, for it is the first time vivisection – the title of the book – is mentioned. It follows the scene where Hurtle has painted the image of his teacher jumping to his death on his wall, and Maman is crying, saying how she prays her children will never be cruel, not like the people who torture animals for science. There is irony in her cause in that she has taken in a child who is not her own for her own kind of experiments, albeit social ones. But more so, the symbolism introduces the idea of dissection for the sake of understanding; White seems to posit that this is part of the work of the artist.
