37 pages • 1 hour read
Thomas SavageThe Power of the Dog
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1967A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 7-9Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 7 Summary
Rose spends a lot of time thinking about the past, her parents, and her modest upbringing. She recalls her high school graduation and the fact that she made the floral arrangements for the ceremony. She was not an excellent student, but she was creative and had a special gift for flower arrangements. She snaps back to the present and wonders if other people spend so much time reminiscing about their distant pasts.
For his part, George is almost always enthralled by the things he discovers about Rose. He is also acutely aware of Phil’s growing contempt and scorn, and like Rose, he ponders moments out of his past that highlight the bluntness of Phil’s derision. He recalls a particular Christmas during which his mother made him wear a blue dressing gown with slippers. Phil openly mocked George then, and George suspects that when Phil is with the ranch-hands, he does the same thing. Even Phil’s parents were not free from his antipathy, and when The Old Gent defended George on that particular Christmas, saying that he too had a gown, an unsurprised Phil very cynically but casually confronted his father. Phil implicitly accused the Old Gent of being more like an eastern gentleman than a rugged western man.
Chapter 8 Summary
The narrator discusses the difficulties Mr. and Mrs. Burbank had at giving dinner parties. Because they were from back east, and from a wealthy lineage and old money, they had a hard time finding common ground with the locals out west. Likewise, the locals had similar difficulties trying to feel comfortable at the dinner parties where identifiers of wealth, such as finger bowls and expensive silver flatware, made them sense how out of place they were.
Back in the present, the dinner preparations are underway for the governor’s visit to the Burbank ranch. Rose is suffering from mounting anxiety, and when George tells her that the guest list will only consist of the governor, his wife, George, Rose, and Phil, her anxiety increases. She was hoping that the size of the party would take pressure off her. The governor and his wife arrive, and the two couples spend an awkward moment outside, during which the men discuss the tires on the governor’s car. Finally, Rose breaks the deadlock, and they go into the house. The governor’s wife notices all the signatures of wealth inside the home. She becomes envious and resentful of Rose because she fell into that wealth without doing anything to earn it as the governor’s wife had done. As the dinner approaches, Phil is noticeably absent, which bothers Rose more than the others. She senses his absence as a slight against her and begins to dwell on it, which increases her already high level of anxiety. Once dinner is finished, George asks Rose to play the piano. She obliges, and begins with a very basic number, but when George asks her to play another song, Rose freezes and cannot remember how to play it, despite having done so many times before. This causes George some embarrassment, and Rose feels the weight of letting him down. She attributes her lack of focus to Phil’s absence and the motivation behind it. Shortly thereafter, the Governor and his wife depart. Phil returns to the house, and George apologizes to Phil for asking him to dress nicely. Phil refuses to accept the apology.
Chapter 9 Summary
Spring arrives, and once again Phil is out castrating the bull calves. He marvels at how sharp his knife is, despite the work of castrating fifteen-hundred head of bull calves. As the outfit begins a cattle drive, Phil becomes disgruntled because the trail that would normally take them on a straight route has been diverted over the years by farms fenced off with barbed wire. Phil detests the farmers, primarily because they originate from different countries such as Sweden and Finland. He sees their purpose as futile because the land here is dry, hard, and not conducive to farming. Also, it rattles Phil that these people do not speak English, or “United States” as he calls it.
Peter finally arrives at the farm, and while Phil never speaks to him or Rose, he refers to Peter as “Miss Nancy,” an insult mocking what Phil sees as Peter’s effeminate characteristics, specifically his lisp. Phil and the ranch-hands mock and laugh at Peter behind his back. One day, Phil goes to the creek where he bathes and spends time by himself. There is an old shack there that he and George constructed when they were kids to hide from their parents while they smoked and chewed tobacco. As Phil is about to enter the creek, standing naked, he hears a rustling in the brush behind him. He turns to see Peter standing there, eyes wide and terrified. Peter had innocently wandered into Phil’s secret spot. Feeling his space violated, Phil covers his body and screams in rage at Peter who vanishes.
Chapters 7-9 Analysis
Rose’s personal history is narrated in Chapter 7 and one of her defining characteristics is her love of and skill with flowers. As symbols, flowers can have many different interpretations. One way to view Rose is that, like the flowers she is so skilled at arranging, and like her name itself, she is beautiful but fragile. When she is transported to the ranch, an arid place where flowers cannot thrive in the soil, she also dries up and withers. And Phil, with his own brand of harshness, and dryness, provides an accelerant which makes Rose wither even more quickly. When Rose recalls moments from her childhood, she remembers “[t]he flowers, the flowers, the voices and the flowers,” and “[s]he wondered if others concerned themselves with such fragile recollections, searched among such shadows and dusty voices—and for what? For herself?” (132). By returning to fond recollections of the past, she searches for nourishment that will sustain her despite the hostility that surrounds her.
The dinner for the governor does not go well for George and Rose. For one thing, Rose feels as though she is out of her league. She can sense from the governor’s wife that her insecurities are confirmed. The governor’s wife envies Rose and, in her own elitist mind, seems to agree with Phil that Rose has worked a scheme enabling her to transcend her class without doing anything to earn it. Additionally, Phil’s absence from the dinner is an act of sabotage against Rose. He knows that Rose will take it as an indictment against her, and that his quiet protest will make her question herself further. When Rose is asked to play piano, she declines and speaks dismissively of herself. She says, “‘You can scarcely call it playing…Before my first marriage, I played the piano in a pit in a moving picture house.’ She smiled. ‘And I’m terribly out of practice’” (152). Rose sets a low bar for herself because she does not believe that she is as skilled as George says she is. Moreover, in her mind Phil has shown her what a skilled musician should sound like.
Lastly, when Phil goes to his swimming hole, the narrator highlights just how significant the place is to Phil: “The spot was precious, and must never be profaned by another human presence” (169). The narrator tells readers that this secret swimming hole is the one place Phil can be naked. Readers also learn about the little shack which George and Phil built as kids to hide out from their parents and smoke cigarettes. Even though the shack by this time is overcome by nature, it is still a place that only Phil, George, and “once one other” knew about. The other person is presumably someone brought to the grove by either Phil or George, but since the grove means absolutely nothing to George, most likely it was Phil who shared the secret with the other. Of all the characters mentioned in the book, the most likely explanation of this “other” is Bronco Henry. The implication here is that Phil’s esteem of Bronco Henry is based on more than just his appreciation for what Henry taught him about ranching. It suggests that there may have been a sexual relationship between the two.
