Ann Patchett’s The Dutch House: The family finds its place.

 

Psychology, Psychological Meaning, Dutch House, Ann Patchett, Psychoanalysis

Freud was famously interested in repetitive dreams.  My most reliable dream – though it has come with significant alterations in each new rendition – often after a year’s absence or more – is of a house.  This house, in all of its various mutations, in inevitably a mansion.  It has always had a third floor, and on this floor there are various things that belong to someone else – usually the former owner – and generally there are collections of things – it is a veritable museum – one that I feel somehow beholden to maintain.  Perhaps – in some versions of this dream – I will be the curator of the collection.

So imagine my surprise to read a book about a family that buys a house, filled with things provided by another family, and lives with these things across three generations.  It sounded straight out of my dreams.  There are differences, of course.  This house is secured by the father, a formerly poor man who comes to Philadelphia from Brooklyn, with his wife Elna, whom he “rescued” from becoming a nun.  They had been living together a military life – in small spaces with their young daughter Maeve.   He is now making a much better living through buying real estate and he surprises Elna with the house, the Dutch House.  He thought she would love it, but she did not.

Freud maintains that, when we interpret dreams, we should listen to the particular associations of the dreamer.  We need to understand what it means to this particular person.  Freud was not a fan of those books where items in dreams are interpreted based on content.  But he did make one exception.  For the house.  He said that the house is so frequently associated with the self that it is invariably interpretable as a symbol of the self. 

But when a house is a symbol of a family, how are we to interpret it?  Well, it helps that a figure enters into the house after the family is more or less settled there.  The Mother and Father have a second child; Danny, the hero of this story.  And this child, who is swiftly abandoned by his mother, so swiftly that he has no memory of her, is then subjected to a wicked step mother Andrea, who casts Maeve out – even before his father’s death, and, after the death, disowns them both.  As one of my friends noted, this is the stuff of fairy tales and there is a compelling quality of the story to this point.

The sister and the brother return, year after year, to sit in their car outside the house and remember what is inside it – the wicked stepmother and their two stepsiblings, whom they feel sorry for because they are saddled with a woman who loved the house, and the money that went with it, and not their father – and not them.  Is this really her house?  Is she the one it is meant for?

The Dutch House is called that because the family that built it was, of course, Dutch.  The books in the extensive library are all written in Dutch – a language that cannot be read by the current inhabitants.  The Living Room is dominated by the portraits of the Dutch couple – a couple who were childless.  They built the house with the proceeds of a contract for selling cigarettes to the Army during the first World War, but after the war, their contract ran out and they had to sell off the land around the house, which was subdivided and, by the time they both died, it was in disrepair.

The father, then, bought it for cheap.  And, when he tries to inhabit it, to make it theirs, the father orders a portrait painter to come paint his wife and himself, to take the place of the portraits of the Dutch people, but Elna demurs.  She actually wanted to become a nun and to serve the poor.  She has no interest in being a rich wife in a rich house.  And the father doesn’t want to pose for a painting that will be paired with the Dutch wife – that makes no sense.  Since the portraitist has already been paid half, he agrees to paint the daughter – who falls in love with the man who is so attentive of her as he paints.  And her portrait hangs in the front room across from the Dutch couple’s portraits.   

Fortunately, when Maeve is painted, she is only ten and the artist isn’t a lecher, but he is, apparently her first and last love, other than her brother, Danny, whom she raises when they are apparently orphaned by the loss of the father – they have not heard from their mother since she left the house.  The brother attaches all of his affection to his sister – and puts up with her sending him to the finest schools to get back at the wicked stepmother by draining the funds in the only trust that applies to him – he even goes to med school to drain them further.  He has no interest in medicine – something he claims to share with half of the students there, though they are generally trying to live out their parent’s dreams of glory, not their sister’s dreams of revenge.

Ultimately he marries, and his wife, who likes his sister to begin with, ends up hating her, which is convenient.  His wife blames his sister for everything she hates about her husband (just as he has blamed his mother for everything he hates about his sister, and just as his sister blames their stepmother for everything she hates about their mother).  All of this misdirected hatred – useful in the interim – is ultimately going to be difficult to reconcile in the end.

The Dutch family built the house to entertain.  The third floor is a ballroom, and their coachman’s daughter, raised in the carriage house, remembers the parties they threw with fondness.  The house was fully alive when they inhabited it.  But then first the Dutchman died, then the wife, and there were no heirs and precious little money for upkeep, so it fell into disrepair, despite the coachman’s daughter’s best efforts to maintain it when she stayed on as caretaker after the Dutch woman’s death.  The caretaker was kept on as nanny after the sale of the house, and then she became the father’s mistress when the mother disappeared.  She was shown to the curb when she struck Danny with a serving spoon (his first memory) on the day the father made clear to her that he would never marry her.

This is ultimately a story about a father who hopelessly misunderstood his wife – and had a son who, in a very different way, and despite having a feel for his sister, hopelessly misunderstood his wife, Cecilia.  That said, he was able to connect with Cecilia as a human being.  More importantly, both parents were able to connect with their children – and, in particular, their oldest daughter May – who is a kind of second edition of Maeve.  May is a wonderfully headstrong girl who makes her way in the world, becoming her own person – entering and being wildly successful at the world of entertainment.

I am skipping a lot at this point.  Partly that is to keep this post to a reasonable length, but also because the second half of this book doesn’t live up to the promise of the first half.  Another friend commented that Ann Patchett, the author, wanted to write about an evil character.  And she created Andrea, the stepmother, to play that role.  Unfortunately, I don’t think Ann is an evil person – and, fortunately for Patchett, I suspect she has had limited access to evil people.  I’m reminded of the author of the play Rabbit Hole being told by his teacher at Julliard to write about what terrified him and his thinking, “I’ve got nothing.”  Then his child was born – and he thought, “OH,” and he wrote about what it would be like to lose a child.  Ann is trying to imagine evil – to conjure it out of the air, but she, like Elna, is too compassionate to appreciate evil.  In one of the great and harrowing moments in this book, Elna ends up nursing Andrea.  Lavishing the love and affection on the evil stepmother that she withheld from her children right in front of their eyes.  And she seemed largely unaware of the impact that having left them had on them – and that, on returning, nursing their nemesis, now demented, would have. 

In so far as Patchett wanted Andrea to be the evil one, she couldn’t sustain her evilness.  She somehow felt for her in her isolation.  Patchett, like Elna, had more empathy for the character whose evilness isolated her than for those who were “merely” mistreated. 

This makes for unsatisfying reading, and the book ends too quickly.  In the ending that Patchett came up with, May buys the house and, though she only lives there part time, when she is there it is filled with people who are having a party – it is finally lived in as it was meant to be.  This is a lovely use of the house metaphor and a lovely conceptual ending.  It suggests that, over the course of generations, this family – and by extension all of us – can come to figure out how to live in – how to own – how to make use of all that has been given to us.  Not the material of the physical house, but the features of ourselves that we inherit.  The stuff that comes from millions of years of evolution and generations of living know-how that lead us to be potentially competent human beings.

At some point the stuff in the house becomes ours.  We learn how to read Dutch, and we learn how to put ourselves out there in a prominent way so that our best features are known and shared by others.  Patchett needed a few more tools to make this story work on the page and for us to be satisfied that this family did finally make it, but the idea that we can do that is one worth having.

OK, I’m being a little unkind to Patchett (and am about to commit her sin).  She is too nice to write this book.  She has inherited a house that she can move into with grace.  There is nothing wrong with that – but it is what it is.  To pretend that she can write about the wicked stepmother without having known her is asking too much of her…  I am accusing Patchett of being a person of a certain kind of privilege – someone who can move into a space and inhabit it with grace.  To own it.  Because that space has never been contested by others who don't want her to have that space.  But this doesn’t allow her to move into all spaces – she has to know more viscerally what it means to be disowned before she can write about what it means to own what doesn’t feel like one’s own.

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