The Dictionary of Lost Words

The motif of violence previously hinted at with Esme’s burned hand and Lizzie’s destroyed hatpin recurs in this section, as Esme is torn away from her home and sent to boarding school. She suffers physical abuse at the hands of teachers, and intense psychic distress when neither Harry nor Ditte understand the extent of the situation and fail to intuit that Esme’s letters home are not written in her voice. Feeling shame and abandonment, Esme goes to the Scriptorium hoping that the words will somehow bring her peace, but Harry again fails to grasp her inner turmoil. Instead, he suspects her of contemplating burning the papers collected there with the candle flame. This experience of seeking help and being turned away forces Esme to leave a piece of her childhood behind, a kind of painful maturation that influences her dynamic with the dictionary moving forward in the novel.

Esme develops a new relationship with the Scriptorium—one of the novel’s key settings. Instead of a place of childish games or mischievous word slip theft, it becomes a place of intellectual engagement and purpose. Esme takes on professional responsibilities, finding a new place in her father’s workspace and thus in his life. Esme is rewarded for her work with a desk of her own, and Ditte now addresses her with the title “Assistant” in her letters. Tellingly, however, the novel refuses to allow Esme to forget that she is a woman and thus considered inferior or mainly suitable for marriage, invoking the theme of Gender Dynamics: Her initial tasks are menial and deeply subordinate, and she meets Gareth, who is clearly positioned as a romantic prospect.

This section also again draws attention to the word “Bondmaid,” or a female enslaved person. This word plays a recurring role in Esme’s life, forcing readers to ask which women in the novel can escape the feeling of being bonded in the way it suggests. Esme feels a visceral disgust at the idea that this word exists at all; keeping it out of the Dictionary gives her “a feeling of accomplishment. I had been the cause of something that seemed to really matter” (112). Esme considers the morality of having words for ideas that should not exist, and what it means for these ideas to be included in the Dictionary—issues that are part of the theme The Relationship between Language and Community. In the letter that closes Part 2, Aunt Ditte also ruminates on the fact that only some words become part of the Dictionary—what does it mean for one word to be intrinsically worth more than another? Williams suggests that the worth and emotional responses ascribed to certain words reflect both personal and societal values. Language is not a neutral force, but one that both shapes and is shaped by culture.