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Chapter 36
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in My Brilliant Career, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Womanhood
Class and Poverty
Ambition, Respectability, and Pride
Love
Maturity and Suffering
Summary
Analysis
Sybylla gives Harold her letter as he leaves. She watches him go, and her life seems to stretch out before her like the barren road Harold rides along. She knows that she has better fortune than millions of other people, but knowing the troubles of others does not make one’s own suffering easier.
As Harold rides away, Sybylla compares her life to the barren road. Harold was her last prospect for a possible future. With him gone, she has no way of knowing what her life will become. Throughout the story, Sybylla has acknowledged that she is more fortunate than many other people, as if to preemptively silence readers who might have that same criticism. Here, she explains why she feels her own feelings are valid, despite the various privileges she enjoys: knowing that other people have worse lives does not make her life better.
Themes
Mrs. Melvyn chastises Sybylla for not paying attention to the laundry, and when Sybylla accidentally breaks a cup, Mrs. Melvyn scolds her at length. Sybylla notes that the type of life in which a broken cup warrants a lecture is the uneventful, narrow life she is opposed to. Sybylla remembers a time her mother was all “gentleness and refinement,” but years of labor, poverty, and neglect from Mr. Melvyn have weighed heavily on Mrs. Melvyn.
Even with her future uncertain, Sybylla knows she wants more from life than panicking about a broken cup. Mrs. Melvyn once lived a more interesting life, one that allowed her to retain the “gentleness and refinement” that characterize a proper lady. Sybylla blames her mother’s exhaustion not only on the hard work of farming, but also on the way Mr. Melvyn has mistreated her. This might be another reason Sybylla is reluctant to marry: she has seen the impact a bad husband has on her mother.
Themes
Sybylla wishes she and her mother understood each other. She wishes she shared Mrs. Melvyn’s orthodoxy, or that Mrs. Melvyn shared her ambition. But Sybylla’s need for passion and motion is beyond Mrs. Melvyn’s understanding, just as Sybylla cannot grasp Mrs. Melvyn’s piety, cheerfulness, and “heroic struggle” to run the family.
Sybylla doesn’t hate her mother, but she doesn’t believe their relationship can be salvaged. They are too different to ever understand each other. However, Sybylla’s description of her mother makes clear that she respects Mrs. Melvyn. She views Mrs. Melvyn’s attempts to keep the family afloat as a “heroic struggle,” which contrasts the many times Sybylla acknowledged herself as an unconventional heroine.
Themes
If lives were told through music, some would be played by great orchestras, and others common pianos or penny whistles. Sybylla believes that her life could be played by nails jangling in a rusty pot. She wonders why she writes, and why anyone writes. She has described her life, and she hopes to make a purpose of it. In the meantime, she is the member of her family who waits outside pubs to help her drunken father. What does it matter, she thinks, if it makes her more bitter and godless?
Sybylla’s tendency toward self-deprecating humor returns as she claims that the story of her life—which her audience is nearly finished reading—is worthy of no instrument greater than nails in a pot. She muses about the purpose of writing and the purpose of her life more broadly. She hopes to find a greater purpose one day, but as of now, her purpose is to help her father back from pubs. This task weighs on her emotionally, but at least it is a purpose.
Themes
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Sybylla receives letters from Gertie and Mrs. Bossier informing her that Harold has left Five-Bob Downs to travel the world. Mrs. Bossier and the rest of Sybylla’s family wonder why Harold visited Possum Gully, since he never proposed to Gertie, but Sybylla never answers that question.
Sybylla set Harold free, and he has taken that opportunity to leave the country entirely and expand his horizons. Sybylla respects his privacy, and her own, by keeping the details of their engagement a secret.
Themes
