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Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Plague of Doves, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Ancestry, History, and Interconnection
Punishment vs. Justice
Land, Ownership, and Dispossession
Passion vs. Love
Faith, Music, and Meaning
Summary
Analysis
John Wildstrand, president of the National Bank of Pluto, is married to Neve Harp—but he is having an affair with Maggie Peace. One day, John opens his door to find Billy Peace, Maggie’s younger brother, pointing a gun at him. Calmly, Billy tells John to come with him into his car. As John walks out, he wonders how the young, awkward Billy, orphaned as a child, built up the courage to do such a thing.
Immediately, John Wildstrand’s story (as one of Judge Coutts’s former clients) brings together yet more strands of Pluto lineage. John is a descendant of Eugene Wildstrand, making him Evelina’s cousin on her mother’s side—even as his wife Neve is Evelina’s paternal aunt.
Themes
First, Billy demands $10,000, insisting that John provide for his baby, which Maggie is soon to bear. This sum seems paltry to John, who suggests Billy will need $50,000 instead. John’s mind flashes to his long nights with Maggie. Often, these nights make John cry, grieving “what his grandfather had done to a member of her family, long, long ago.”
John’s love for Maggie seems in part motivated by a desire for historical justice, as if by weeping in intimate moments with Maggie over what happened “long, long ago,” John can attempt to repent for his grandfather’s cruelty. Indeed, perhaps some of John’s willingness to participate in Billy’s ransom plan stems from the fact that John is determined to make sense of his own family’s complicated legacy with the Peace clan.
Themes
John and Billy brainstorm how John can take such a large sum from the bank without raising Neve’s suspicions. Billy wonders why John doesn’t just leave Neve, but John explains that if he leaves Neve, he will lose all his money (as her father owns the bank). John reflects on the cozy, unsatisfying life he leads with Neve, and he acknowledges that Maggie would probably not be with him if it weren’t for his money.
Again, the small, closed-circuit set-up of Pluto and its environs means that almost every town institution—the banks, the courthouses, the historical society—is controlled by the same interwoven group of relatives and friends.
Themes
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Finally, John suggests that Billy should kidnap Neve and ask for the $50,000 as ransom money. Billy hesitates but eventually agrees, promising John that Maggie will never find out about the plan. John gazes at Billy with pity, noticing how much the boy looks like his sister—they share “that impenetrable Indian darkness.”
John’s reflection on Billy’s “impenetrable Indian darkness” suggests that John’s real love for Maggie and Billy is also tempered by racial prejudice and exoticization. The fact that John so often looks at Billy with pity suggests John’s limited perspective.
Themes
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The next night, John feigns sleep as Billy begins his abduction of Neve. When John opens his eyes, he sees Billy wearing a cinnamon-colored mask, making him look like the gingerbread man. The kidnapping goes mostly smoothly, and every time something goes wrong, Billy is able to improvise. Neve, however, fights back with all her might, making John “obscurely proud.”
As John continues to underscore Billy’s vulnerability, sweetly comparing him to the gingerbread man of children’s fairytales, he is able to distract himself from just how violent this kidnapping plot really is. John’s surprising “pride” in Neve suggests that love and desire are never straightforward—for even as John conspires against Neve, he also finds himself rooting for her, a feeling “obscure” even to himself.
Themes
Soon, John has paid the ransom and he and Neve are reunited. In the weeks after the kidnapping, Neve remembers her kidnapper as giant and god-like, a description so at odds with reality that it shocks John. Neve is also more sexual, demanding reassurance of John’s love and asking him to make her “helpless” just as her kidnapper did. John thinks that if Neve had behaved like this earlier, maybe he would never have started up with Maggie—but now, it is too late, and he feels only despair at Neve’s advances.
Neve’s description of Billy as “god-like” is foreshadowing, hinting that something sexual happened between her and her kidnapper. And in another instance in which romance and sex are confusingly tied up with violence, the kidnapping (and whatever happened sexually to Neve in the process) seems to have improved John and Neve’s relationship.
Themes
John goes to see his father-in-law at the nursing home, which has been endowed with Harp money. When the old man drifts off, John thinks about Maggie: the baby will be born in four months, and though he rarely gets to see Maggie, he knows she is happy, living in a nearby town with Billy. Overcome, John kisses his father-in-law on the forehead. Suddenly, the old man sits straight up in bed—“you bastard,” he yells at John.
Even the nursing home is part of this family inheritance, as Neve’s wealthy father (the founder of the bank) has used his money to build this retirement home, too. It is also interesting to note the premium the narrative places on instinct and intuition—though John’s father-in-law has no reason to suspect John of any wrongdoing, he senses it anyway, feeling John’s betrayal even in his declining state.
Themes
One day, Neve announces that she knows who her kidnapper was: she saw him in a school play. Sure enough, Billy starred in the town’s recent production of A Comedy of Errors. To avoid being found out, Billy drops out of technical college and joins the army, devastating Maggie. Impulsively, John ends his marriage, moving in with Maggie—even though, since Billy left, Maggie will no longer speak to John.
Shakespeare’s famous play A Comedy of Errors, with its fractured family ties and disguises, forms a funhouse mirror to the events of John and Billy’s own lives. Additionally, it now becomes clear why John Wildstrand was in Evelina’s list of family members with “deathless” romantic passions: even though Maggie rejects him, John remains determined to alter his entire life for her.
Themes
When the baby is born, he reminds John of Billy. Looking into the baby’s face, John realizes that Billy Peace is “a kind of Christ figure,” exactly the kind of “god” Neve had suspected him to be. John also realizes that Billy has told Maggie about the kidnapping, which is why she now ignores John. Billy writes to Maggie from the army, saying he is plagued by visions (“look at what you did!” Maggie weeps to John). John despairs, knowing that Maggie will never forgive him.
Generations ago, Joseph Coutts attributed some sort of otherworldly power to Lafayette Peace. Now, Lafayette’s descendant Billy appears to have a spiritual force behind him, though Billy’s visions seem less about any particular doctrine (Christian or otherwise) than they do about Billy’s own, increasingly unorthodox spiritual beliefs.
Themes
One day, Neve makes an insurance claim on the few shared possessions John has taken with him. When John brings his things back, he is surprised to see that Neve looks radiant. Neve asks John if there was another woman all along, and John admits there was. With a flash, John realizes that Billy and Neve had sex when Neve was kidnapped, a realization that makes John tell Neve the truth about her abduction. When Neve bursts into tears, John finds himself confusingly attracted to her, and they have sex. Afterwards, John declares that he has “always” loved Neve. Neve goes upstairs and calls the police.
In some sense, Neve’s calling of the police on John represents the most straightforward moment of justice in the novel: a crime has been committed, and now law enforcement will apprehend the criminal. Yet even this seemingly cut-and-dry instance of crime and punishment is complicated by Neve’s own betrayal, by John’s revelation of his confused feelings, and by the intimacy they share. No wonder, then, why Judge Coutts lamented that justice is always “prey to unknown dreams” (and to the everyday intensity of romantic passion).
Themes
If houses and land boundaries help many of the characters in the novel feel that they have achieved some of kind of “mastery,” then moments at thresholds—between plots of land, or on the edges of doorways—are the ultimate form of chaos, reminding the residents of Pluto just how elusive their sense of control really is. Besides, as Geraldine once pointed out, history is nothing but what happens in the most important split seconds, like the moment John invited Billy to “come in.”
Themes
