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Chapter 25
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Babel, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Colonization and Racism
Language, Translation, and Power
Race, Gender, and Intersectionality
Violence and Nonviolence
Complicity
Summary
Analysis
From an early age, Letty demanded the same things from the world that a man would. She worked hard for everything she got. If she were a man, she would have been admitted to Oxford and hailed as a genius. Instead, her older brother Lincoln went to Oxford. Lincoln struggled with his studies. At one point, Letty confronted him and told him not to squander the opportunity, especially considering that Letty would have done anything to be in his position. Letty and Lincoln argued, and Letty finished the argument by telling Lincoln she wished he were dead. The next morning, a police officer came to their house and said that Lincoln was dead after being run over by a cart.
This section provides a backstory about Letty to provide context for how she became the person she is and why she ultimately betrayed the Hermes Society and her friends. This passage establishes that, growing up, Letty felt the full force of sexism directed against her, as sexism prohibited her from pursuing her goals while her brother benefitted from the privileges of being a White man in English society. The novel suggests that that experience of discrimination could have led Letty to understand other forms of discrimination that her friends face, but Letty doesn’t seem to make that connection.
Themes
Letty then went to Oxford. She was glad to be there, but she faced humiliation after humiliation as people discriminated against her because she was a woman. She saw how differently people treated Robin and Ramy compared to how they treated her, and she noticed that faculty members more readily engaged them in conversation. After Robin killed Professor Lovell, everything changed. Suddenly, her friends talked about nothing but injustice and defeating England’s empire. Letty didn’t disagree with them, but she saw empire as inevitable. In her eyes, there was no point opposing it.
Again, Letty experiences discrimination but doesn’t seem capable of connecting those experiences to other forms of discrimination, like racism, that her friends face. Instead, she is fixated on her own experience of the world and seems unable to see beyond it. That is part of why when her friends begin discussing the systemic injustices they are complicit in as students at Babel, Letty feels like there’s nothing to be done. In other words, the novel suggests that Letty is able to be blithe about the impacts of colonialism because, as a White woman, she is not subjected to its worst impacts and because she lacks the empathy to understand how others are affected by the Empire’s racist brutality.
Themes
Still, Letty supported her friends and wanted to help, as long as things remained peaceful. When the Hermes Society brought up the possibility of using kidnappings and bombings to achieve its aims, Letty thought it was a step too far. She thought her friends were squandering the opportunities that Oxford gave them, just like Lincoln did. And it would lead them all either to prison or to be hanged. She decided then that if she could not save her friends, she would at least save herself.
Again, Letty shows that ultimately she is more concerned with herself than others. The novel also reinforces the hypocrisy of people who condemn the Society’s use of violence while supporting the British Empire. That is, while Letty thinks the Society’s violence is a step too far, she then turns around and kills Ramy to save herself, making her hypocrisy clear.
Themes
