47 pages • 1 hour read
Alice HoffmanThe Invisible Hour
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.
Prelude-Part 1, Chapter 1Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 1: “The Here and Now”
Prelude Summary
Content Warning: This section discusses life in and escape from a cult, abortion, physical abuse, death and grief, and suicidal ideation.
The novel opens with an italicized description of Mia Jacob escaping from the cult-like Community. She has been discovered with a cache of novels, which are forbidden for children and women in the Community. She is locked in a barn overnight to wait for her punishment the next day, when she will be whipped in the field and branded. She has hidden a hammer, which she uses to break the lock and free herself. Although the Community burned her books when they found them, she saved one: The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne. She escapes in the dark, cutting herself on thorns and making her way through the forest to the nearby town. She runs to the library, where the door will be open.
Part 1, Chapter 1 Summary: “Across the Universe”
Ivy, Mia’s mother, was born and raised in an affluent neighborhood in Boston. Ivy’s father, Ken, was a wealthy banker, but Ivy didn’t fit the expectations of her suburban neighborhood. Her primary support was the family’s maid, Helen Connelly, who gave Ivy the key to her house in case of an emergency. As a teenager, Ivy gets pregnant with the first boy she sleeps with. Noah is a sophomore at Harvard and refuses to have anything to do with Ivy, afraid that he’ll lose his parents’ support. Ivy’s father, Ken, slaps her when she tells her parents about the pregnancy. When Ivy hears her parents discussing sending her away and making her give the baby up for adoption, she runs away. Her father regrets his decision and hires a detective to find her. When the detective finds her married to cult leader Joel Davis in Western Massachusetts, Ken hides it from his wife and never says Ivy’s name again.
Joel is a handsome and compelling ex-convict who was willed 200 acres of land by his late wife, Carrie Oldenfield Starr. The philosophy of the Community requires complete obedience to the rules: avoid all forms of vanity, break completely with one’s birth family, treat all children as common property of the Community, and share all wealth and possessions. Transgressions result in public shaming, as rulebreakers are forced to wear a placard with the letter associated with their wrongdoing. Women who break the rules are treated especially harshly: They are branded with the associated letter on their upper arm.
When Ivy arrives at the Community, Joel is captivated by her. He tells her that she’ll never be hurt again—exactly what she wanted to hear from her father and her boyfriend. For a month, Ivy acclimates to the Community, impressed by Joel’s kindness to those less fortunate. During this time, Mia’s friend, Kayla, who told her about the Community, is jealous of Joel’s attention to Mia. Joel impregnates Kayla, a violation that will result in her dismissal from the Community, but terminating a pregnancy is absolutely forbidden. When Ivy picks apples in the orchard, Joel kisses her; two days later he proposes, and she accepts.
When Mia is born, Ivy falls deeply in love with her daughter. However, the Community requires that all children be raised communally by designated caregivers in a dormitory. Ivy is allowed to spend one week with her daughter and visit the nursery to feed her, but Mia belongs to the Community, not to Ivy. Ivy swallows her pain when Joel tells her that she must be an example to other women as his betrothed, but she secretly writes a letter to Helen, asking her to tell Mia that she belonged to Ivy if Mia ever comes to Helen.
Shortly before Ivy and Joel’s wedding, Kayla knocks on their door, and Ivy ignores her. Kayla takes herbs to try to end her pregnancy and dies in the woods. Her body is found the following spring, and Joel buys Ivy red boots as a kind of silent apology.
On her wedding day, Ivy is reminded of her close relationship with her father, who regularly took her to the library. She thinks of the solace and joy she found in books but tries to accept the life she now has. During the celebration of the wedding, Ivy asks Evangeline, who helps run the Community, to let her hold Mia, but Evangeline refuses, telling Ivy to enjoy her day. Ivy sees the beauty in the night and in the celebration, but she feels like she’s made a terrible mistake.
Prelude-Part 1, Chapter 1 Analysis
Mia’s copy of The Scarlet Letter ties her escape and the Community to Nathaniel Hawthorne and his novel. While The Scarlet Letter is initially presented as a physical object, one of a few items that Mia brings with her, it soon takes on a greater narrative resonance as Ivy’s experiences with the Community are revealed. Ivy, like The Scarlet Letter’s Hester Prynne, is marked by her puritanical neighbors with a letter indicating her failures. Ivy, like Hester, has a child out of wedlock, which causes her social problems, but her love for her child is powerful enough to overcome any obstacle. The Scarlet Letter’s central theme is therefore aligned with Ivy’s own story: a mother’s willingness to accept punishment and judgment to protect her child.
The narrative structure indicates that despite the novel’s early focus on Ivy, The Invisible Hour is primarily Mia’s story. The Prelude is in Mia’s first-person point of view, but the first chapter shifts to a close third-person point of view, which will continue as the narrative follows all its major characters. The first-person narration never returns after the Prelude. Hoffman’s choice to begin the novel with Mia’s voice demonstrates that this is Mia’s story while allowing Hoffman to dip into the perspectives of other characters to craft a rich, multifaceted narrative.
The Prelude and first chapter introduce the theme of The Liberating Power of Literature. Through Mia’s escape plans and Ivy’s memories of the Athenaeum, the library emerges as a motif that supports the novel’s exploration of literature’s power. Hoffman establishes Ivy’s love of literature, and her experiences at the library connect to the relationship she lost with her father. The contrast between the passion Ivy feels for books and the Community’s prohibition against reading novels mirrors the contrast between Ivy’s free-spirited nature before coming to the Community and the controlled, hidden nature she develops in the absence of literature. Ivy’s constrained position reveals how a lack of access to literature can be weaponized as a tool of subjugation.
Similarly, both Mia and Ivy take a risk in running away from the known, highlighting the theme of Choice’s Risks and Rewards. Mia’s escape is to the books and the library; she describes a novel as the “key” to her liberty from the Community, and her choice yields the reward of freedom. In a reversal of Mia’s escape, Kayla and Ivy both run away from their familiar lives to join the Community, and both must make choices about unplanned pregnancies. Kayla’s choice to try to stay in the Community and have an abortion leads to her death in the woods. Ivy chooses to keep her child but is too afraid to risk losing her by leaving, so she stays in the Community, where she will ultimately die in the orchard.
This section also introduces the symbol of apples, which will come to represent female power even as the apple’s biblical associations are weaponized by Joel and the Community. Ivy and Mia have a familial connection to apples; apple orchards in the Blackwell area were the origin of the Jacob family’s wealth, one of Ivy and Mia’s ancestors is rumored to have been Johnny Appleseed, and “Ken Jacob liked to say that apples ran in their blood” (12). The Community, too, is tied to apples since it runs an apple farm, with Ivy in particular taking solace in the Community’s orchards. Ivy is found by the private detective in an apple orchard and photographed with Mia, the same orchard where Joel first kisses Ivy. Ivy loves working in the orchards because she feels hidden there, indicating the theme of The False Security of Invisibility. The novel’s representation of apples also draws on the fruit’s biblical associations: Joel’s justification for harsher punishments for women is that they must avoid being like Eve, connecting the symbol of apples to the story of original sin.
Ivy’s red boots emerge as another symbol in this section. After Kayla’s body is found in the woods, Joel gives Ivy the red boots as an apology for Kayla. The boots become the representation for Ivy of what could have been had she listened to her friend instead of staying invisible.
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