65 pages • 2 hours read
Edith WhartonSummer
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 1917A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Chapters 16-18Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 16 Summary
Charity, determined to avoid being the subject of malicious gossip in North Dormer, resolves to return to the Mountain. She starts walking early in the morning; despite her morning sickness, she forces down food in order to avoid becoming weak. She passes the abandoned house where she and Harney met so often. Her plan is to have Liff Hyatt bring her to stay with her biological mother, whom she is sure will be kind to a daughter “[…] who was facing the trouble she had known” (125). She experiences dizziness and weakness prior to being found by Liff. He is bringing the minister, Mr. Miles, to the Mountain to see Charity’s dying mother, Mary. Charity has the sense of being entirely alone in the world but refuses to tell the kindly minister what is troubling her.
The houses on the Mountain are mere shacks, and as Charity, Liff, and the minister approach, they learn that Mary has died. The squalid conditions in her shack are primitive and dirty. When one young woman asks Charity’s identity, in a hostile tone, the minister advises that Charity is Mary’s daughter. “‘What? Her too?’ the girl sneered” in response (130). Mary’s dead body is grotesquely swollen, and several bystanders imply that she died of alcoholism. When the prayers have been said, the local men carry Mary’s body to an open grave on her old mattress. No coffin is available for her burial. Despite Mr. Miles’s protest, Charity insists on remaining on the Mountain for the night.
Chapter 17 Summary
Charity spends the night in the shack of Liff’s impoverished mother. The young woman reflects upon what her mother’s life might have been like and tries to reconcile this with her image of a merciful God. Prior to this time, her closest brush with poverty was the “[…] poor thrifty Mrs. Hawes and the industrious Ally” as opposed to the “savage misery of the Mountain farmers” (136). She imagines how different her life would have been had she grown up on the Mountain and makes desperate plans to save her own child from such a fate. Devoid of all skills, Charity plans to move to Nettleton, pay a decent family to mind her baby, and, like Julia Hawes, work as a prostitute. Weak and hungry but intent upon leaving the area, Charity eats a piece of bread left on the table and leaves a chemise behind in payment.
As she continues to struggle up the hill, Charity sees the familiar shape of Mr. Royall driving his horse and buggy in search of her. The minister advised him of her whereabouts, and he simply says, “‘I come up for you’” (140). He recalls that he came to retrieve her from the Mountain on a similarly cold day and wonders if he has done a good job in raising her, to which she replies, “‘Yes’” (140). They stop for a hot drink and breakfast at a nearby comfortable home, at which point Royall offers his third marriage proposal, noting, “‘I’ll never feel any way but one about you; and if you say so…when you come back home you’ll come as Mrs. Royall’” (142). She starts to respond that she wants to be fair and infers that she must tell him something, but he remains composed and says that he is of an age to know “[…] the things that matter and the things that don’t (143).
Chapter 18 Summary
The pair board the train to be married in Nettleton, and the exhausted Charity realizes that Royall’s presence gives her “[…] for the first time, a sense of peace and security” (144). She is physically weak and experiences a sense of unreality as they advance to the local minister’s house to participate in a simple marriage ceremony. As Royall slips a ring that is too big for her on her thin finger, she realizes for the first time that they have married.
Later, despite her increasing nausea, she agrees to dine with Royall in the same fashionable hotel where she and Harney had been unable to get lunch reservations. He sends her up to their room early, and she spends a terrified period awaiting his arrival and the possibility of having sex with him; however, he merely spends the night sitting up in a chair next to her bed. She realizes that he is aware of her pregnancy and has married her in order to protect her.
The following day, Charity uses the money Royall gives her to purchase a wardrobe to instead buy back the brooch Harney gave her from Dr. Merkle. She sends a simple letter to Harney, advising him that she has married Royall and will always remember her time with the young man. Advised by Charity that she has elected to spend her wardrobe money by having Ally make dresses for her in North Dormer, Royall states that she is a “[…] good girl” to which she responds, “‘I guess you’re good, too’” (153). That evening, they return home to the red house in North Dormer where they had both lived for so long.
Chapters 16-18 Analysis
Faced with an extreme crisis involving an absent lover and an unintended pregnancy, Charity attempts to return to the Mountain; however, Harney is no longer in the area to persuade her to return to North Dormer. Her plan is to find her mother and to appeal to her for assistance, hoping that the older woman will be inclined to help a daughter whose first pregnancy parallels the circumstances of her own. The young woman relies heavily on the innate maternal instinct of the same biological mother who easily relinquished her as a child to Royall; however, irrational thinking appears to cloud her judgment. Charity arrives only to find that Mary, her mother, has died—seemingly, of alcoholism. There is a great dichotomy between Wharton’s descriptions of the older woman’s decimated, bloated corpse and the image of Charity creating a new life.
Conversely, a parallel exists in the situation: There is no final home in the form of a coffin in which to bury Mary, just as there is no home or sanctuary for Charity and her unborn baby.
The living circumstances on the Mountain cause Charity to reconsider the definition of what might constitute true poverty. Previously, the relative lack of extravagance enjoyed by the Hawes family of North Dormer served as the young woman’s frame of reference. This changes when she spends the night in the shack of a grandmother who relinquishes her only blanket to her guest and sleeps on the floor as she warms her grandchildren with her own body. A circular pattern is completed when Royall, having driven his horse through the freezing winter night to find Charity, rescues her from the deplorable living circumstances of the Mountain once again. In turn, Charity’s desire to escape the predictable safety of her hometown is replaced by gratitude for the sense of safety and well-being provided by the older man.
Royall notes that age has taught him perspective; the same might be said of Charity. He does not allow her to finish her sentence when she begins to allude to her pregnancy by Harney. Royall’s decency and goodness, while paired with his admittedly flawed personality, outweigh the excitement and romance that she sought and found with the unreliable Harney. Apparently resigned to a conventional small-town life, Charity still needs a tangible reminder of her sexual adventure with Harney and spends the wardrobe allowance given to her by her husband, Royall, to ransom Harney’s brooch from the unethical doctor who demanded it as payment. Having exercised a great deal of power over Royall’s household for some time, Charity will now do so as his wife. He tells her that she wants to be “[…] took home and took care of” (142); she advises her new spouse that he is “good.” The pair, formerly foster father and adopted daughter, are now a newly married couple. They return to their home in North Dormer.
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By Edith Wharton
