45 pages • 1 hour read
Rachel JoyceMiss Benson's Beetle
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2020A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Part 1, Chapters 1-8Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 1: “Adventure!”
Part 1, Chapters 1-4 Summary
This summary section includes the chapters entitled: “The Golden Beetle of New Caledonia, 1914”; “What Are You Doing with My New Boots?”; “A Really Stupid Woman”; and “Just Get Rid of It!”
Margery Benson is a 10-year-old English girl in 1914, whose four older brothers have gone to fight in WWI. Margery’s father is a mild-mannered clergyman who spends most days in his study. To amuse his daughter, he shows her a book entitled Incredible Creatures with illustrations of species that may or may not exist. Margery’s attention is riveted by a small golden beetle, “Oval in shape and gold all over, it was incandescent […] as if Nature had taken a bit of jewelry and made an insect instead" (5).
From that moment, Margery vows that she will find this golden beetle, which is supposed to live only in New Caledonia. A specimen has never been captured, so the insect is still technically undiscovered. While Margery peruses the book, her father receives a phone call giving him the terrible news that all his sons have been killed in combat. Without saying a word to his daughter, he takes a revolver out of his desk drawer, goes out into the garden, and shoots himself.
In September 1950, Margery is now a 46-year-old teacher at a girls’ school. Her country has survived yet another world war, and many items are still being rationed four years afterward. Margery isn’t happy, finding both her life and her job to be dull. One day in class, she intercepts a note that her students have been passing featuring a caricature of her. She believes that their grotesque depiction of her is correct. Fed up with her circumstances, Margery impulsively steals the gym teacher’s lacrosse boots, a fire extinguisher, and several other small items and runs from the school building. The gym teacher pursues Margery until Margery slams a door on her fingers.
Back in her tiny flat, Margery decides that she needs to make dramatic changes before her life is entirely over. She remembers her vow to find the golden beetle and believes the idea would have pleased her father. Since New Caledonia is an island in the South Pacific under French occupation, Margery needs to plan an expedition that includes an assistant who can speak French.
She places an ad for such an assistant and receives four replies. She rejects a letter of application from someone named Enid Pretty immediately because of poor spelling and general messiness. Margery interviews the other three applicants. One, a war veteran named Mundic, grows angry when Margery contradicts his knowledge of their destination and “[tells] Margery she was a stupid woman [who would] get lost in the rainforest and die in a hole” (21). After Mundic leaves, an applicant named Miss Hamilton appeals to Margery as a better version of herself.
Back at home, Margery flashes back to her childhood. After the death of her brothers and her father’s death by suicide, her mother packs up and moves them to live with her father’s twin sisters. They are very religious and keep a gloomy household. Margery’s mother dies soon afterward, and Margery is left entirely in the care of her aunts. Despite her lonely childhood, Margery cultivates a keen interest in beetles.
Part 1, Chapters 5-8 Summary
This summary section includes the chapters entitles: “A Small, Crushing Feeling Somewhere Beneath the Rib Cage”; “A Bit of Fun”; “Where Is Enid Pretty?”; and “Getting There Is Half the Fun!”
After hiring Miss Hamilton, Margery goes into a flurry of preparation for her expedition. The day before her departure, Margery gets an abrupt refusal from her potential assistant. News of Margery’s theft of the gym teacher’s shoes reached the ears of Miss Hamilton as well as the police. With no alternative, Margery hastily scribbles a note to Enid Pretty, the applicant with terrible spelling, and tells her she’s hired. Enid responds nonsensically, writing, “bear miss denson. Please to acept! pink hat!” (36).
Meanwhile, the rejected applicant Mundic has formed a grudge against Margery, upset at how Margery “laughed when he’d said there’d be snakes” and believing she needs his help because she is a woman (37). Mundic stalks Margery obsessively to learn the details of her expedition, including her departure and return dates.
The following day, Margery waits impatiently at the train station for Enid to arrive. Margery cuts an outlandish figure with her pith helmet and insect net, but Enid tops her, wearing heavy makeup and with hair “[that] was such a luminous shade of yellow you could have shut her in the dark and still found her” (42). Passersby are amused by the odd couple. The two women almost miss the train when Margery’s hip locks up and she can’t move, but Enid commandeers a porter, shoves Margery’s hip back in place, and gets them onboard.
Margery and Enid have an even tougher time boarding their ship to Australia, as Enid neglected to arrange for a passport and Margery’s strange collection of bug-capturing equipment prompts a search of her belongings. In another room, Enid convinces an official to let her onboard, and the two women must race to the dock before the ship sails. Once onboard, Margery is appalled by Enid’s non-stop talking; she skips from one subject to the next with no continuity of thought. Enid also refuses to let a porter touch her locked red valise, which features the initials “N.C.”. Although she admits that she is married, Enid is hesitant to reveal details of her life.
The cabin the two women share is another source of aggravation for Margery: “It would have been a squeeze for a single person, but for a big one and her excitable, nonstop-talking assistant it was less a cabin, more a cupboard” (52). That night at dinner, Enid regales their tablemates with stories of Margery’s association with the Natural History Museum and their intention to capture a very rare and valuable beetle. Margery is irked because she doesn’t want any of the passengers to know their business. Late that night, she awakens to find Enid riffling through one of her suitcases.
Part 1, Chapters 1-8 Analysis
The first chapters of the novel focus heavily on the theme of embracing one’s purpose in life. Joyce takes the reader back into Margery’s early years to relive the day when she first glimpsed a picture of the elusive gold beetle. Joyce uses a limited third-person literary perspective from Margery’s point of view, clearly establishing Margery as the novel’s protagonist. Later chapters from the point of view of minor characters and passages from Mundic’s perspective serve to create dramatic tension and irony, as the reader becomes aware of information that Margery does not have.
Margery’s fixation on the beetle signifies its importance to her future as she realizes that not everything in the world has already been discovered: There are still opportunities for her to make her mark. This bold childhood sense of purpose contrasts with the life that Margery lives four decades later. Significantly, it takes another group of children, her female students, to literally draw her a picture of what her life has become. Margery is mortified by their caricature, and this inspires her to make radical changes and finally commit to her childhood dream. Margery’s realization that her current life and past aspirations are in conflict forms the inciting incident of the plot, motivating her expedition to New Caledonia.
The motif of clothing is tied to this psychological wake-up call as Margery notes the dowdy suit and oversized shoes her students draw her wearing. The hybrid outfit she chooses for travel is actually even more outrageous: a pith helmet, insect net, sensible suit, and lacrosse boots. This mismatched outfit signifies how Margery is still caught between the unsatisfying life she leads and her hope for a better future. It will take several more segments of the book to transform Margery into the complete attire and mindset of an adventurer. Her discordant outfit is contrasted with Enid’s flashy fashion choices and her non-stop chatter, emphasizing the opposite natures of the two women. However, Margery’s impulsive theft as she leaves the school hints that Enid and Margery will eventually find common ground as both desire unconventional lives for women in 1950s England. Enid’s own experiences with the loss of family and death by suicide also suggest that Margery and her assistant will connect on a deeper emotional level than Margery initially assumes is possible. This narrative arc—in which two characters presented as opposites eventually find common ground—is a typical dynamic in novels exploring the intersection of friendship and identity. Joyce emphasizes the differences between the two women early in the novel to increase the dramatic stakes of their developing intimacy.
Joyce also immediately introduces the theme of feeling haunted by the past and confronting past traumas. Margery’s life is forever changed by the death of her entire family because of World War I, and the loss of her parents impedes her ability to realize her childhood dream of scientific discovery. Similarly, Mundic is deeply psychologically unwell following his traumatic experience as a veteran of World War II. His inability to distinguish his haunted past from the present causes him to fixate on Margery’s expedition to New Caledonia, as Mundic seeks to re-establish his own sense of capability and control. His chauvinistic idea that Margery needs his help because she is a woman also increases the reader’s awareness of the gender constructs of the time period of the novel. The threat Mundic poses to Margery’s quest, Enid’s unclear motives and mysterious past, and the psychological and material obstacles of Margery’s expedition establish clear conflict and plot momentum that will motivate nearly all of the action that follows these early chapters.
