53 pages • 1 hour read
Kathleen GrissomThe Kitchen House
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2010A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
The Kitchen House
The kitchen house is the physical space where Belle, the main kitchen help, lives. It’s a building that sits close enough to the big house that the slaves can transport food back and forth easily, but it’s far enough away to clearly separate it from the big house. The kitchen house is symbolic of Belle’s struggle between two worlds and of Lavinia’s understanding of home.
Once Belle leaves the big house, the kitchen house becomes her home. The kitchen house symbolizes her fall from James’s grace. Once, she lived in the luxury and open affection of James in his well-furnished home, and now lives in the minimal kitchen house as a slave. Belle’s move to the kitchen house symbolizes that she is no longer his daughter but a slave. It also makes the statement that he loves her secretly; the kitchen house, although slave housing, is incredibly nicer than the slave quarters that house the field slaves. Whereas the field slaves have rampant sickness, little to eat, and lean-to shelters, the kitchen house has delicious food and is well-insulated. Letting Belle be the head kitchen help and live in the kitchen house is James’s way of demonstrating his love for Belle.
For Lavinia, the kitchen house symbolizes home. Once she is orphaned and sent to Belle to live as an indentured servant, the kitchen house is where Lavinia grows to love Mama Mae and Belle, where she becomes best friends with Beattie and Fanny, and where she learns that the color of one’s skin shouldn’t dictate their lot in life. Even when she’s older and living with Martha’s sister, she looks back to the kitchen house as home. Once she’s living in the big house as Marshall’s wife, she still sneaks away to the kitchen house because it’s where she feels most comfortable.
Laudanum
Laudanum is an opium-based liquid that doctors widely prescribed in the 18th century to treat a wide variety of ailments. Laudanum use was extremely common and highly addictive. Martha is first prescribed laudanum to help her cope with the deaths of her children, and similarly, Lavinia begins taking it to numb the pain of her situation. For both women, laudanum becomes symbolic of escape.
When Martha takes the drops, she often sleeps, and when she awakes it’s into a dream world where Lavinia is her deceased little sister, Isabelle. She uses laudanum to escape the unbearable pain of losing so many children, but she also ends up escaping her responsibilities. While on the medicine, she’s too incapacitated to see that Mr. Waters is sexually abusing her only surviving child, Marshall. In her own helpless state, she’s unable to help him. Eventually, she escapes from reality for so long that she’s unable to return.
Similarly, Lavinia uses laudanum to escape the unbearable feelings of powerlessness over her situation. When she moves into the big house with Marshall, he becomes physically and sexually abusive toward her and Beattie. When she confronts him, he beats her so badly that she doesn’t want to talk about it to anyone. Afterward, she feels truly helpless, realizing that she has no voice or say over her own life. Feeling like she must accept the injustice around her, she resorts to laudanum to numb her pain. Once she takes it, she becomes apathetic to Marshall and her daughter. However, while Martha remained on laudanum and severed her relationship with Marshall as a result, Lavinia feels guilty about the way the drug has come between her and her daughter, and she quits as a result.
Loss
Loss is a constant motif throughout the novel. Each character’s experience of loss shapes them, and loss is the only constant that binds each character together. The loss of Lavinia’s parents is the catalyst that brings her to James’s plantation, and it’s that loss that makes her continually search for the connection of family in the people around her. Once Lavinia is older, she loses those connections when she moves in with Martha’s sister. She feels great loss once she marries Marshall and returns to the plantation, realizing that the familiarity and nostalgia of her childhood home will never be the same.
Martha is a character who has experienced the most physical losses. By the end of the novel, she has lost four children, and has no relationship with Marshall, her only surviving child. She loses her husband to yellow fever, and she eventually loses her sanity. In her only cognizant moments, she believes that Lavinia is her deceased little sister, Isabelle. The physical losses in her life leave her incapable of handling her remaining reality.
Belle’s greatest loss was when James forced her to leave the big house and live as a slave instead of as James’s daughter. She feels resentful towards Marshall and Sally because they get to live the life she once had just because they’re white. Although her grandmother educated her, her prospects at a free life are slim because she doesn’t want to leave the plantation—the only home she’s ever known. Instead, despite James’s desire for her to leave the plantation with free papers and start a new life, she refuses and always longs for what she’s lost.
The novel ends with the loss of many of the characters’ mother figure, Mama Mae, and with the death of Marshall’s actual mother, Martha. Throughout the novel, several people die, including the patriarch James, Dory and her baby Henry, Campbell, Jimmy, Mr. Waters, and Sally. Most of these deaths represent a loss, though some of them, like the deaths of Marshall, Mr. Waters, and Belle’s intended, the living characters expressly plan or consider fortuitous.
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By Kathleen Grissom
