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Part 5, Chapter 5
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Razor’s Edge, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Wisdom and the Meaning of Life
Social Norms and Conformity
Trauma and Self-Destruction
Snobbishness, Social Status, and Cosmopolitanism
Truth and the Problem of Evil
Summary
Analysis
A fortnight later, Elliott arrives in London. He tells Somerset that the wedding between Larry and Sophie didn’t happen. Three days before the proceedings, Sophie disappeared. She was supposed to meet Isabel for a dress fitting but wasn’t there when Isabel arrived. Larry searched everywhere for Sophie but couldn’t find her. Elliott, Somerset, and Isabel all think that she probably returned to drinking. A few months later, Somerset has finished the first draft of a new novel and thinks he deserves a holiday. He takes a ship from the Riviera headed toward Marseilles. In Toulon, Somerset gets off the ship and walks along the seaside. Suddenly, he sees Sophie sitting at a table with an empty glass in front of her. She invites him to have a drink.
Isabel apparently tries to help usher Sophie into a marriage with Larry by arranging for a fitting for a wedding dress. Aside from Isabel’s more nefarious actions (which will be revealed later), that approach also shows the problems with Larry and Sophie’s relationship from the beginning. Trauma led both Larry and Sophie to reject their lives in Chicago, which no longer made sense to either of them. Larry sought a new understanding of the world through spiritual insight, but Sophie never found a new way to understand the world for herself. Instead of allowing Sophie to make her own choices, Larry literally hypnotizes her. He does so to try and help her, the novel suggests, but also to try and move her closer toward marrying him, something the novel suggests is doomed to fail not because Sophie is inherently flawed but because people, including Larry, seek to deprive her of agency.
Themes
Sophie explains to Somerset that she didn’t marry Larry because she didn’t want to be “the Mary Magdalen to his Jesus Christ.” Sophie says that before the wedding, she hadn’t had a drink or opium for three months. She went to Isabel’s apartment the day of the dress fitting, but Isabel was out at the dentist with her daughter. Sophie spied a bottle of alcohol and decided to try it. At first, she thought she’d just smell it, but before she knew it, she’d swallowed a whole glass. Then another. One thing led to the next, Sophie says, and she went to visit a man named Hakim, who could get her opium. Afraid that Larry might find her if she stayed in Paris, she got on a train to Toulon, and she hasn’t left since. After Sophie finishes telling Somerset what happened, her boyfriend, a sailor, returns, and Somerset leaves.
Sophie’s assertion that she didn’t want to be Mary Magdalen to Larry’s Jesus Christ shows that she didn’t want to go along with a narrative devised by Larry that deprived her of agency. In that story, Larry would be the savior and Christ-like figure while Sophie would be the person rescued. Sophie’s decision to reject that narrative and spurn marriage with Larry is similar to Larry’s decision not to return to Chicago to marry Isabel as Isabel wanted. The difference is that in Larry’s case, he eschewed a conventional life in favor of spiritual pursuits, whereas Sophie returns to self-destruction.
Themes
