70 pages • 2 hours read
Rachel BeanlandThe House Is on Fire
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2023A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Part 1, Chapters 1-13Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 1: “Thursday, December 26th 1811”
Part 1, Chapter 1 Summary: “Sally”
Content Warning: These Chapter Summaries & Analyses describe a large-scale tragedy, mass death, and grievous injuries, particularly burns. This section also discusses the historical circumstances of enslavement in America, including physical abuse toward enslaved people and outdated and offensive language to refer to Black people. This book also discusses rape, incest, child abuse, and the objectification of women in 19th-century American society.
Sally Campbell, her brother-in-law, Archie, and his wife, Margaret, are on their way to the theater in Richmond. Sally, recently widowed, has bought tickets to a Diderot play for the three of them, hoping to relive happier times when her husband was alive. As she makes her way through the cold to the theater, she reminisces about meeting and marrying her husband and the intellectual conversations they used to have.
The theater is packed, and the three must force their way through the crowd. It is full of Richmond elite, in town for the winter assembly season. Sally is greeted by an old acquaintance, Tom Marshall, who calls her by her maiden name, Sally Henry. Sally is annoyed by the fact that many men still only think of her only as Patrick Henry’s daughter. Marshall introduces Sally and Margaret to his companion, Alexander Scott, a new assemblyman. Mr. Scott is taciturn and unsocial, and after they part, Sally warns Margaret not to try to encourage marriage between them. Margaret agrees but says she worries about Sally being alone and that the people she enslaves don’t count as company. Sally is not ready to remarry, but she is saddened both by thoughts of her husband’s death and their lack of children.
Part 1, Chapter 2 Summary: “Cecily”
Cecily, a 19-year-old Black girl enslaved by a white Richmond family, is accompanying the 16-year-old daughter of the house, Maria, to the same play. Cecily has been enslaved by Maria’s family her entire life, working in the house due to her light skin. Maria’s older brother, Elliott, has been sexually abusing Cecily since they were children. Elliot has just revealed to her that when he gets married in January, he will take Cecily to his new house with him.
Worried over her future, Cecily is not particularly interested in the play. Maria joins her friends, and Cecily heads into the section for enslaved people, freed people, and the lower classes. She sits next to a heavily made-up white sex worker. The woman introduces herself as Augustine Saunders, and Cecily is surprised by being spoken to normally by a white woman. Cecily contemplates what Elliott told her.
Part 1, Chapter 3 Summary: “Gilbert”
Gilbert Hunt, an enslaved blacksmith, is on his way to see his wife, Sara. Sara is enslaved to a different family than he is, and it is hard to find time to see her. As he passes the theater Sally and Cecily are in, he thinks about how one day, he hopes to take Sara there as a freedman.
Arriving at the kitchen-house where Sara sleeps, they embrace and talk. Gilbert hopes to save up enough money to purchase their freedom. Their plans have been derailed, but Gilbert is still hopeful, and as he sits with Sara, he tells her that things won’t always be this way.
Part 1, Chapter 4 Summary: “Jack”
Fourteen-year-old Jack Gibson, a stagehand at the theater, is working the play. Jack loves Professor Girardin, the translator of the night’s Diderot play, who helped him continue his education after his father’s death two years before. He also gave Jack a place to live and got him his job with the Placide and Green Theater Company.
As the play nears the end, Mr. Placide and the senior stagehand discuss a problem with a pulley for the chandelier prop. Jack, constantly busy while the play is on, forgets to blow out a chandelier after a scene. Mr. Green, the other company manager, tells Jack to raise the chandelier into the flyspace, against Jack’s protests that it might set the backdrops on fire. After Jack raises the chandelier, two other stagehands attempt to move it again. Though Jack climbs into the rigging to attempt to blow it out, it hits a backdrop, setting it alight. The actor on stage, Robertson, yells out that the house is on fire.
Part 1, Chapter 5 Summary: “Sally”
Sally and the other patrons, hearing the call that the house is on fire, are at first confused and unsure if this is part of the show. It quickly becomes clear that the situation is serious, and the crowd panics, making it hard to reach the exits. Sally, Margaret, and Archie enter the crush of people attempting to leave. Ending up in front of a window, Sally and some of the other patrons break the glass. The crowd surges, and Margaret, Sally, and Archie are separated.
Sally runs back to find Margaret. They begin to move toward the stairs, but before they can get far, a man tells them that the stairs have collapsed. He jumps out a window.
Part 1, Chapter 6 Summary: “Cecily”
Cecily manages to quickly exit the theater due to her seat’s proximity to the exit. Outside, she begins to see people jumping from the second and third floors, many to their deaths. A fire brigade arrives, but to Cecily, it is clear that they have little hope of putting out the blaze. Cecily remembers Maria and rushes to go look for her. As she sees the bodies start to pile up, she realizes how massive the tragedy will be.
Part 1, Chapter 7 Summary: “Gilbert”
Elizabeth Preston, Sara’s enslaver, runs into the kitchen house and yells that the theater is on fire. Sara tells Gilbert that Louisa, Elizabeth’s daughter, is at the theater. Louisa loves Sara and taught Gilbert to read. He rushes around the theater green looking for Louisa, but no one has seen her.
Realizing that the stairs are gone and that people on the upper floors will need somewhere to jump to, Gilbert runs to the nearby house of the fiddler Sy Gilliat, who he knows owns a mattress. Sy answers the door but refuses to give Gilbert the mattress, saying that the Black people in the theater got out fine. He asks Gilbert whether he thinks any white people would run to save Black people before shutting the door in his face.
Part 1, Chapter 8 Summary: “Jack”
Jack and the other members of the company quickly escape out the stage door when the fire starts. Though there is some concern for Mr. Placide, who runs back inside to retrieve the money box, he manages to make it back out as well. Mr. Placide asks what happened, and Perry, one of the stagehands, says that the lit chandelier in the flyspace caused the fire. Jack admits to raising the chandelier into the flyspace but says that he did it on Mr. Green’s orders. Though he looks to Mr. Green to respond, he is suddenly overwhelmed by a coughing fit.
Part 1, Chapter 9 Summary: “Gilbert”
Gilbert rushes back to the theater, grabbing a ladder along the way. He sees a girl jump from a window and is relieved that it is not Louisa. Placing the ladder underneath a window, he recognizes Dr. McCaw inside it. Dr. McCaw tosses a young woman to Gilbert, which sends the ladder flying backward. Gilbert resolves to catch people from the ground, which he does till he is exhausted, and Dr. McCaw calls down that the fire is at his back. Gilbert offers to try and catch him, but he refuses as he knows he is too large. He instead asks Gilbert to catch his sister, a large woman. Gilbert braces himself, aware that all he’ll really be able to do is break her fall.
Part 1, Chapter 10 Summary: “Cecily”
Cecily comes upon the theater company. Mrs. Green begins to call out that her daughter, Nancy, is missing. Mr. Green says she was supposed to stay home, but one of the actors responds that he saw her going up to the upper floors at the start of the night with a big group of girls. Mr. Green runs toward the fire.
Cecily, who had been speaking to Jack, sees that he has begun to sob and wants to embrace him but doesn’t dare to. He asks her if the fire, Nancy, and she are a dream. Just then, part of the roof caves in. When Cecily looks up in the aftermath, the theater company has scattered.
Part 1, Chapter 11 Summary: “Sally”
Sally prepares the other women at the window to jump. A mother with a five-year-old daughter is unable to toss her out the window for fear of killing her, and Sally volunteers to do it. Calling out for someone to catch the girl, a man steps forward, and Sally throws her to him. He saves her, and Sally gets the girl’s mother to jump next. She tells the women to begin to jump and rushes to break open another window. Margaret and Sally find Mr. Scott passed out on the floor. They carry him to a window and get help from another woman to push him over the sill. Sally tells Margaret to jump first, but can’t bring herself to see if she survives. Sally lowers herself out by holding onto the sill, not wanting to land on anybody else. Hanging for a moment, she lets herself drop.
Part 1, Chapter 12 Summary: “Gilbert”
Gilbert, having been briefly knocked out by Dr. McCaw’s sister falling on him, awakens to see Dr. McCaw hanging from the window. His coat is on fire, and his suspender is caught, keeping him from falling. Gilbert quickly climbs the ladder and cuts him free. Dr. McCaw falls to the ground, severely injured but still alive. Gilbert puts out the fire on him and briefly considers leaving to look for Louisa but decides to stay, thinking “[M]aybe Louisa is alive […] because some man like Gilbert is working to save the lives of people he doesn’t know” (62). Gilbert picks up Dr. McCaw and carries him to the Baptist meeting house to get help.
Part 1, Chapter 13 Summary: “Cecily”
Cecily continues to look for Maria, hoping that she has somehow already made it home. She does not want to be the one to return to wake up Mr. Price and Elliot to tell them Maria is missing. Suddenly, Cecily hears Mr. Price calling for Maria. When Elliot begins to call Cecily’s name, she freezes, but Elliot does not see her. She realizes that Elliot and Mr. Price have no way of knowing that she survived, and if she runs away, she can be free. Though she wavers for a moment at the thought of abandoning her family, she knows that this is her only chance. Cecily takes a moment and then disappears into the night.
Part 1, Chapters 1-13 Analysis
These first chapters deal with the immediate catastrophe of the fire. As the situation becomes increasingly desperate inside the theater, the characters, both within and without, have to make it through an event that will change their lives. The horror of the fire is shown in these chapters, and vivid imagery and a quick narrative pace mirror the fire’s rapid spread. With the crush inside the theater, a night of entertainment turns into crawling over dead bodies to survive. As Sally prepares to jump from the burning theater she “looks out the window at the theater green. The grass is littered with bodies” (59). Cecily, too, recognizes how nightmarish the situation is as she runs: “People have begun to drag the bodies of victims into small piles, and Cecily forces herself to stop at each one, to look at the face of every woman she comes upon” (43). Cecily notes that rich and poor women alike are dead, characterizing the tragedy as something that touches everyone regardless of class or race. At the same time, the focus on dead women here establishes women’s marginalized place in society; while people think of women and children as being rescued first in crises, women disproportionately die in this fire as the men scramble to save themselves.
Adaptability is a common theme in these chapters, and the characters’ responses to the fire characterize them. Sally quickly adapts to the situation inside the theater, not only figuring out how to pry open windows and find her way through a crowd but also managing the people around her. Her work saving other women shows that she is brave and compassionate. Though she thinks “she has had quite enough of being the hero” (58), she knows she must continue to rise to the occasion simply because no one else will. According to the social order, there should be a man there to help them, but the women have been abandoned, demonstrating The Fallibility of the Powerful in a disaster. Cecily, too, must adapt to survive, but in a different way. Easily able to escape the theater, Cecily realizes she has to give up a great deal to run from her enslavers and thereby survive. Elliott’s continued threats to her life and body are allowed by the society she lives in. The fire is an opportunity for freedom but also requires personal sacrifice in allowing her family to believe she is dead and accepting that she will never see them again. She must make this life-changing decision in an instant, accept a lack of closure, and escape before the tragedy can be resolved. With this, she is characterized as quick-witted and self-possessed.
That the best option for Cecily, after having stared into the faces of the dead, is to hope that she is counted among them, says a lot about the injustices of enslavement. While the fire is devastating and its terrible effects are well explored in these chapters, it also exposes the wider nature of Richmond’s society. Cecily’s escape is made only possible by the belief that she died a terrible death, survival transformed into a dangerous opportunity. The realities of enslavement and racism are established in other scenes as well. Cecily has been sexually abused since childhood by Elliott, showing that as an enslaved person, she has been in danger her entire life. Likewise, Sy refuses to lend Gilbert his mattress to save white theatergoers, alluding to the racist violence to which both men—and Richmond’s Black community more widely—have been subjected. Ironically, segregation has largely protected the Black and lower-class communities during this crisis as their seats were closer to the exits; this implies that racist and classist policies intended to elevate white people above others can have the opposite effect, creating dangers instead.
Though there are personal choices that lead to loss in the face of the fire, there is also loss caused by chance. The desperation of tragedy shows itself here. The Greens rapidly go from tentative confidence in their family's survival to panic over the fact that their daughter Nancy is missing. When Margaret is separated from Sally, it is brutal and quick, far harder to remedy than it was to make happen. The woman who refuses to jump is frozen by the possibility of loss; as she looks out the window, her “face is streaked with tears. ‘My sister’s dead. Down there.’” (59) she tells Sally. She is unable to bring herself to do what she must to possibly survive due to the immediate reality of the chance that she won’t. Gilbert's desperate search for Louisa might have been solved by his heroic work with Dr. McCaw if she had happened to be at a different seat in the theater. Survival of the tragedy is, by and large, determined by luck. Despite the hierarchical society, the fire is an equalizer, with people from all backgrounds experiencing terror and loss.
