57 pages • 1 hour read
Kate QuinnA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Roses appear throughout The Rose Code as emblems of the mathematical beauty and mystery associated with codebreaking, as in this quote from Chapter 12:
Her nose was almost touching the paper in front of her, the letters marching along in a straight line over her rods, but somewhere behind her eyes she could see them spiraling like rose petals, unspooling, floating from nonsense into order (106).
Roses are associated with Beth, who is lost in the pattern of a rose when she first appears. Later, she nicknames the code that Dilly left unsolved at his death the Rose Code, after Dilly compares the code to a rose during Beth’s last visit with him. Comparing codes to roses translates the appeal of cryptanalysis into a broadly accessible symbol for beauty, which makes Beth’s fascination with her work more relatable. This, in turn, clarifies Beth’s priorities: For her, code comes first. In view of her obsession, Beth’s questionable choices appear more forgivable. When she sits among the wilted and dying roses of Clockwell Sanitarium, she earns the sympathy of Mab, Osla, and readers alike.
Quinn and her characters make repeated allusions to events, situations, and characters from Lewis Carroll’s novels, including Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and its sequel, Through the Looking-Glass (1871). In these novels, a girl named Alice travels through absurd fantasy worlds where normal rules of logic don’t apply.
References to Carroll’s work are sprinkled throughout The Rose Code, and they take on symbolic significance as real events are replaced by or compared with fantastic ones. Upon her arrival at BP, Beth jokes about the hands of the clock possibly running backwards, a reference to Carroll’s Sylvie and Bruno. When the book club founded by Mab and Osla discusses Through the Looking-Glass for their second meeting, they become the Mad Hatters Tea Party. Beth is frequently associated with Alice, under whose name she is admitted to Clockwell Sanitarium; when she escapes, she thinks to herself, “Alice escaped the looking glass, Giles. And now she’s coming for you” (551). Beth thinks of Dilly as Carroll’s eccentric White Knight. When Dilly introduces a new, complicated code to his team, he calls it a “proper jabberwock” in reference to a nonsense poem from the same volume (220). When Beth fears that she has lost her ability to decrypt messages, she feels herself to be “banging on Wonderland’s gates until her fists bled, and everything remained locked” (581). Beth’s use of concepts from Carroll’s fantasy world to represent the best and the worst periods of her life—from her intoxicating days codebreaking with Dilly to her humiliations at Clockwell—suggests one reason she may have found Carroll’s fantasy world to be such a rich source of comparison in the first place. Everything is so disproportionate, exaggerated, and confusing that it makes a perfect match for wartime England.
Hats appear in several contexts as markers of various thematic significance. Francis notably recalls a girl in a hat as the one bright, sustaining memory from his youthful military service. When Mab happens to lecture him on the importance of hats, he proposes to her almost instantly, feeling that she has embodied the girl in the hat. She goes on to purchase a copy of the hat Francis remembered at great expense and difficulty.
Following Francis’s death, however, Mab disowns her new identity, destroying the hat. A few days later, as Mab lies grief-stricken, Harry and Giles offer her another hat: the Mad Hatters’ so-called “topper,” which Osla describes thus in an edition of “Bletchley Bletherings”:
Picture a Dickensian stovepipe festooned with false flowers, ancient Boer War medals, Ascot plumes, etc. The topper is worn in dunce cap fashion by any Mad Hatter to propose the Principia Mathematica for the monthly read (that’s you, Harry Zarb), preface every statement with “I’m sorry” (ahem, Beth Finch), or otherwise wet-blanket the proceedings (131).
Though Mab doesn’t make much of their gift, the ridiculous hat carries the (perhaps unintended) message that Mab is behaving foolishly in drawing away from her friends at the moment of her sharpest grief.
Named after the chemist’s shop near which Beth found him, Boots is a stray dog that Beth picks up on her way home from BP the night after she helps her team decode Italian battle plans. When Mrs. Finch sees the dog, a schnauzer, she wants nothing to do with him or his fleas, but Beth stands up to her for the first time in her life. Boots thus comes to represent Beth’s growing independence and will. When, after another trying but successful period at work, Beth comes home to find that Mrs. Finch threw Boots out of the house, she recovers the dog, then moves out immediately, showing that she considers her autonomy, as embodied in her care over Boots, to be non-negotiable. Beth and Boots are separated during Beth’s time at the psychiatric hospital, when her personal freedom is at its lowest. After escaping from the psychiatric hospital, Beth learns that Boots is alive and well, which she considers to be “the best omen in the world” (551), a sign that Beth’s own will survived as well.
Dilly uses a riddle to explain the importance of lateral or sideways thinking to Beth. When he asks which direction a clock’s hands go, she suggests that they move clockwise. “Not if you’re inside the clock,” he responds (111). Beth adopts his phrase “inside the clock,” a sort of cousin to Lewis Carroll’s “through the looking-glass,” as a metaphor for her own situation during her stay at the aptly named Clockwell Sanitarium. Quinn even uses “Inside the Clock” as the heading of those sections of the postwar narrative that follow Beth’s activities inside the psychiatric hospital (comparable sections following Osla and Mab use city names for headers). By emphasizing the role of perspective in assessing what is real or true, Beth holds on to her own perception of the truth within an institution that seeks to stamp its own narrative on her.
By Kate Quinn
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