45 pages • 1 hour read
Elizabeth GilbertCity of Girls
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2019A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Free Spirits
Most of the characters who populate the play City of Girls and the novel of the same name are wildly eccentric. Vivian is the prime example of a square peg in a round hole. She comes from the wealthy class, which generally respects tradition and avoids scandal at all costs. Her only ally within her conventional family is Grandmother Morris, who dresses vividly and teaches her granddaughter to become an expert seamstress.
Vivian’s parents take the same disapproving view of eccentric Grandmother Morris as they do of their own daughter. They are appalled when Vivian gets kicked out of Vassar after her freshman year, and they simply don’t know what to do with her. The book states that the wealthy never speak of anything unpleasant, so the Morris family gets rid of its most eccentric member by sending her to live with oddball Aunt Peg in New York.
For the first time in her life, Vivian comes into her element when she meets people who are even more free-spirited than she is. Peg runs a chaotic production company where everything is in a perpetual state of disarray, yet plays are miraculously performed on time. She is married to a man that she never sees, a charming ne’er do well. Billy is a genius as a script doctor and show promoter, but he lives like a jet-set playboy and bilks his wife out of the proceeds from their smash play. Peg is also involved in a long-term lesbian relationship with Olive. The union is odd because Olive demonstrates no eccentricities at all.
Celia is a glamorous hedonist who chases sensual pleasures every night after the curtain comes down. She soon makes Vivian her accomplice in these exploits. Vivian eventually learns a hard lesson about the downside of being a free spirit when she tries to reconcile her behavior with the nation’s strait-laced moral values.
The Field of Honor
The second major theme of the book is an extension of the first. When Vivian first expresses her free-spirited nature, she is an emotionally immature nineteen-year-old. In later years, she says of her exploits with Celia:
Our friendship was always destined to have been momentary—a collision of two vain young girls who intersected at the zenith of their beauty and the nadir of their intelligence, and who had blatantly used each other to acquire status and turn men’s heads. (390-91)
When Vivian is exposed in a compromising ménage à trois, she runs away from the situation. It isn’t until decades later that she begins to act like an adult. The concept that adults don’t run away from unpleasant situations is articulated most eloquently by Olive when she talks about the field of honor. Her father taught her the expression to explain that some choices come with painful repercussions and that an adult must face the consequences of poor decisions.
Much of the novel consists of Vivian running away from unpleasant conditions in her own life. She flunks out of school and runs away to New York to escape her family’s condemnation. When she later makes a mess of her relationship with Edna, Olive must step in to perform damage control. Vivian flees right back to Clinton to avoid the scandal in New York. While there, she becomes entangled in an unfortunate engagement and looks for a way out. The war provides a convenient excuse for her to rid herself of the relationship. When Peg arrives to request her help with a show in New York, Vivian flees yet again to avoid the discomfort of living with her family.
It isn’t until Vivian meets up with Frank years later that this childish pattern changes. Her first instinct is to flee from Frank as well rather than deal with the vile comment he made about her morals decades earlier. Instead of behaving like a child, Vivian finally grows up at the age of forty-five. Her decision to enter the field of honor at last changes her life for the better; it gives rise to her life’s most meaningful relationship and demonstrating that free-spiritedness and emotional maturity are not mutually exclusive.
“The World Ain’t Straight”
When Vivian abashedly confesses her promiscuous past to Frank, she expects him to condemn her. Instead, he says, “the world ain’t straight” (428). This expression sums up the notion that social codes of conduct are devoid of real moral authority. Both Frank and Vivian have judged themselves harshly because they apply the yardstick of conventional morality to their actions: Frank’s supposed cowardice in the navy and Vivian’s promiscuity.
Frank’s statement implies that most codes of conduct are trivial compared to the immensity of life itself. The conventional morality of mid-twentieth-century America is the most trivial of all. A vast number of characters in the novel behave in ways that would invite disapproval and censorship from the strait-laced hypocrites who uphold tradition, but Vivian and her friends go on living their lives in unconventional ways that defy meaningless standards.
Peg remains married to a man who lives on the opposite coast. She maintains a long-term lesbian relationship with Olive. Vivian engages in fleeting sexual relationships to satisfy her urges. She then goes into partnership with Marjorie, who dresses strangely and has a baby out of wedlock. The two women raise the child themselves. Baby Nathan never fits the stereotype of a normal boy’s rough and tumble behavior. Even Vivian’s romantic relationship with Frank is unconventional in that they never touch, kiss, or engage in sex. They simply talk. All this eccentric behavior indicates that people can live their lives in ways that diverge sharply from accepted codes of conduct because life is bigger than rules.
Although Frank is the character who first articulates the idea that “the world ain’t straight,” he is his own severest critic. When an ex-sailor reminds him how jittery he was during the war, Frank falls into a spiral of guilt at his own cowardice. It takes Vivian to remind him such judgments lack moral authority.
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