48 pages • 1 hour read
Stephanie Dray, Laura KamoieAmerica's First Daughter
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2016A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Summary
Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Character Analysis
Themes
Symbols & Motifs
Important Quotes
Essay Topics
Tools
BetaThemes
Duty Versus Happiness
Duty is a major theme in the novel and looms large in Patsy’s consciousness. She frequently comments on the sacrifices she makes in the name of duty for those she loves: “I still heard my mother’s reedy voice bidding me to take care of my father all of the days of his life. No one had ever asked me what I wanted” (141). In almost the same breath as her mother charges Patsy with the care of her father, she also advises her daughter to be happy: “Be happy. That’s what I want for you” (31).
Happiness and duty are often mutually contradictory states, and Patsy spends much of her life trying to create a balance between the two: “I passed through the days and weeks that followed in a confused haze, my thoughts preoccupied by my struggle to balance my heart’s desire with my lifelong duty” (201). Although she may feel an emotional tug of war between happiness and duty, Patsy always acts in accordance with her sense of duty. She never seriously considers putting her own happiness first.
Ironically, Jefferson reserves his greatest praise for his daughter’s dutiful behavior. He has apparently forgotten his own insistence, in the Declaration of Independence, that the pursuit of happiness is everyone’s right. While Patsy’s actions would generally be viewed as laudable, her devotion to duty is also self-destructive. She marries an unstable man because his fortune might save Monticello, and she rejects a man she loves because her father discourages the match. It isn’t until the very end of the novel, when Jefferson is dead and Patsy is free of her duty to watch over him, that she allows the prospect of her own happiness to become a viable option.
Public Persona and Private Interests
The contradiction between Jefferson’s public persona as a champion of freedom and his private affair with Sally is never examined: The subject is never mentioned among the participants, yet it infuses every page of the narrative. Jefferson’s choice of Sally for his mistress is off-putting for several reasons: Sally is Jefferson’s wife’s half-sister, Patsy’s aunt, the same age as Patsy, and a slave.
Any ordinary man would be condemned for pursuing such a liaison. However, Jefferson is also the author of the Declaration of Independence; his urges don’t align with his avowed principles. Perhaps the prevailing silence on the topic is precisely because Jefferson can never find a way to reconcile his public statements with his private actions.
Jefferson’s relationship with Sally is as much a conundrum to him as the subject of slavery itself. Both represent a conflict between public welfare and private interests. Jefferson heartily believes that all slaves ought to be freed, but his own financial survival as a planter depends on owning them. He articulates this dilemma only once in his letters: “But, as it is, we have the wolf by the ear, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go. Justice is in one scale, and self-preservation in the other” (482).
Patsy is aware of the way that the question of emancipation embeds itself in her father’s affair with Sally: “It also revealed my father’s paralysis on the matter of slavery, a paralysis brought about by his true intimacy with it. For there was one ‘wolf’ Papa could neither safely hold nor safely let go” (492). Even as Jefferson continues to exploit slave labor for financial profit and personal pleasure, he loftily declares that another generation will solve this thorny problem. His ultimate solution is to remain silent and do nothing.
Reputation Versus Truth
Patsy’s overwhelming sense of duty is motivated by a desire to be viewed as a respectable southern lady: “I cared about reputation and […] I’d sacrifice for it again and again. Reputation had toppled governments and lost people their heads” (526).
Jefferson’s desire to hide his affair stems, in large part, from his need to be respected. He explicitly tells Patsy just how important reputation is: “Reputation is everything. A soiled reputation in an ordinary person may reduce them to impoverishment, but a soiled reputation in someone like the queen may take down a government” (86-87).
After Jefferson’s death, Patsy takes great care in selecting which of her father’s papers to publish and which to destroy. Her motivation is to highlight his favorable attributes and preserve his reputation. Paradoxically, a good reputation becomes more important than truth. Patsy repeatedly tells the reader how often she has lied to preserve the appearance of respectability:
My heart is already heavy with sins and secrets and betrayals. I’m stained with the guilt of slavery. I have counted as a necessary sacrifice the blood of patriots. I have denied the truth written upon my own skin in the black and blue ink of bruises. I have vouched for the character of men without honor. I have stayed silent to avoid speaking the truth (4).
Ultimately, Jefferson’s glowing posthumous reputation is entirely due to the way in which Patsy manipulates the public’s perception of her father. Jefferson wanted to be remembered in a certain way, and Patsy’s careful editing of the record of his life ensures that he bears the reputation of a good man. The degree to which he was a good man, or wasn’t, can never be known.
Related Titles
By these authors
