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Part 1
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Wife of His Youth, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Race and Class
Love, Loyalty, and Honor
History and Identity
Community and Solidarity
Summary
Analysis
The house is prepared for the ball. Mr. Ryder, sitting on his porch, searches through a Tennyson poetry collection to find good quotations he can use for his marriage proposal. Reading through “A Dream of Fair Women,” he takes note of verses that mention “divinely fair,” “sweet pale,” and “rare pale” women. He decides the passage about a “pale” woman won’t be appropriate, because Molly Dixon is the palest woman he expects at the ball, and she still has a “rather ruddy complexion,” along with a lively manner. He decides instead on a passage about Queen Guinevere, describing her as “a part of joyous Spring.”
Mr. Ryder’s love for poetry, as well as the ball, are markers of class status. At the same time, it was not uncommon at this time for formerly enslaved people to place a great emphasis on reading and educating themselves, since these were privileges associated with freedom. Mr. Ryder’s love for poetry may be rooted in similar associations and desires. His focus on passages having to do with light-skinned women emphasizes his obsession with “upwards absorption” into the white rice.
Themes
Literary Devices
While reading through the poetry collection, Mr. Ryder hears his gate open and sees a small, elderly Black woman approaching him. To Mr. Ryder, she looks like a memory of the “old plantation life.” He greets her, and she asks him if this is where Mr. Ryder lives. Identifying himself as Mr. Ryder, he asks if she came to see him. She says yes, and tells him she is looking for her husband. She says Mr. Ryder has a reputation for being an important person in this town, and she’s wondering whether he’s heard anything about a mixed-race man named Sam Taylor looking for his wife, Eliza Jane.
Eliza Jane’s appearance, mannerisms, and speech starkly contrast both Mr. Ryder and Molly Dixon. She is older than Mr. Ryder, who is middle-aged, which already associates her more strongly with the past of slavery—unlike Molly Dixon, who is presumably not old enough to have lived through the Civil War. This accounts for Mr. Ryder’s association of Eliza Jane with “old plantation life.” She is also clearly of a lower class status than Mr. Ryder, a fact that is emphasized through her speech, which is highly deferential and written in a heavy African American English dialect.
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Literary Devices
Mr. Ryder thinks for a moment, then tells Eliza Jane that, although there used to be many such cases right after the war, it’s now been so long that he’s forgotten them. But he invites her to tell her story anyway, so that he might remember. Eliza Jane says she was once enslaved to a man named Bob Smith in Missouri. When she was a girl, she married a man named Jim, but after his death she remarried to a free-born, mixed-race man named Sam Taylor. He was an orphan and worked as Bob Smith’s apprentice.
Mr. Ryder’s comment that there “used to be many such cases right after the war” hints at the dislocation that followed the Civil War. People who had been separated by slavery or the war searched for family, friends, and loved ones during this time. Sam Taylor’s background—free-born, but working in conditions that were very similar to slavery—shows the precarious and limited “freedom” that even free Black people faced in pre-Civil War America.
Themes
One day, another enslaved woman, Mary Ann, told Eliza Jane that Bob Smith was going to sell Sam. Eliza Jane told her that wasn’t possible, because Sam was free. But the woman insisted that she had overheard Mr. Smith saying he needed the money, and so he was going to sell Sam, knowing that no questions would be asked as to whether Sam really belonged to Mr. Smith. When Sam came back from the field that night, she told him that Mr. Smith was going to sell him, and so Sam ran away. Before he left, he promised Eliza Jane that when he was 21, he’d return to help her run away, or save up the money to buy her freedom.
It was not uncommon at this time for free Black people to be sold into slavery, because there were so few legal protections around free status. This is another instance of how slavery limited the freedoms of everyone who was considered “Black” in pre-Civil War America, regardless of skin color or legal status. The chain of events in this passage—Mary Ann warning Eliza Jane, Eliza Jane warning Sam so that he could escape, and finally Sam promising Eliza Jane that he would help her escape too—demonstrates the solidarity that existed among enslaved people.
Themes
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Eliza Jane believes that Sam would’ve kept his promise if he could, but he hadn’t been able to find her. Bob Smith had learned that she’d warned Sam about being sold, and he had her whipped and sold away. Then the Civil War began, and after it ended, everyone became scattered. She went back to the Smiths’ home, but Sam wasn’t there, and she couldn’t find out anything about where he was now. But she knew he’d been there to look for her and must’ve left to look for her in different places. Ever since then, she’s been looking for him—she tells Mr. Ryder this as though “twenty-five years were but a couple of weeks.”
The difficulties that Eliza Jane faces in finding Sam demonstrate how slavery often broke up families and relationships permanently. Her determination to find him, searching nonstop for 25 years, characterizes her as extremely loving and devoted.
Themes
Eliza Jane is sure that Sam Taylor is looking for her, too, because she meant so much to him—unless he’s sick or has somehow forgotten his promise. She visited New Orleans, Atlanta, Charleston, Richmond, and many other places in the South, and then she came to the North. She believes she will find him someday, or that he’ll find her, and then they’ll both be as happy together in freedom as they were before the war. She smiles, a faraway look on her face.
Eliza Jane’s certainty that Sam will still love her, and that he’s still searching for her after all these years, is another example of her intense love and devotion to him. The fact that her search has been so geographically scattered is also a testament to the havoc that slavery (and its aftermath) wrought on enslaved people’s relationships.
Themes
Mr. Ryder looks at Eliza Jane curiously after she finishes her story. He asks how she’s been living all these years. She tells him she’s been working as a cook and asks if he happens to know anyone in need of one. Mr. Ryder asks if Eliza Jane really expects to find her husband—after all, he might be dead. She’s sure he isn’t dead, because she believes she sees “signs” and “tokens” that he’s still alive—only this week, for instance, she dreamed three times in a row that she found him.
Mr. Ryder’s curiosity in reaction to Eliza Jane’s story foreshadows that her story might mean a great deal more to him than he initially lets on. Eliza Jane’s certainty that her husband isn’t dead, based only on dreams and other supernatural signs, is another indication of her love for him.
Themes
Mr. Ryder points out that Sam Taylor might have married another woman, since marriages made in slavery had no legal standing. But Eliza Jane insists that her husband would’ve never married another woman, unless he found out she was dead. Something has been telling her all these years that she’s going to find Sam before she dies.
Marriages under slavery had no legal status, because sales so often broke up couples and families. Eliza Jane’s certainty that Sam would’ve nonetheless honored his marriage to her all this time, and never would’ve married another woman, again shows her love and faith in him. Mr. Ryder’s objections here seem to hint at a need to convince himself, and not just Eliza Jane, of the argument that her husband might be justified in marrying someone else.
Themes
Literary Devices
Mr. Ryder objects that Eliza Jane’s husband might have “outgrown” her and “climbed up in the world,” so that he would no longer want her to find him. Eliza Jane insists that Sam wasn’t that kind of man. He was good to her but wasn’t much good to anyone else, because he wasn’t a hard worker on the plantation. She expects she’ll have to support him if she finds him, because he never worked more than he had to. But then again, he was free-born and didn’t get paid for his work on the plantation, so she doesn’t blame him. Maybe he’s done better for himself since running away, but she doesn’t expect much.
Again, Mr. Ryder’s objection seems to suggest that he may have some kind of personal connection to her story—after all, he himself has “climbed up in the world” since the Civil War. His remark that Sam might not “care to have you find him” hints at the dilemma that Eliza’s story confronts him with. There is some dramatic irony in Eliza Jane’s claim that she would have to support her husband if she ever found him. She assumes that someone who might not want to work hard under slavery wouldn’t be a hard worker in conditions of free labor, either, although she immediately qualifies her statement by saying that Sam’s apparent idleness may have simply been because he was free-born and not paid for his work.
Themes
Mr. Ryder observes that Eliza Jane might have passed by her husband on the street a hundred times in the past 25 years. Eliza Jane doesn’t believe this, saying there is no one else like her Sam. She tells him she’s carried his picture with her all these 25 years. Mr. Ryder asks to see the photograph, saying it might help him remember if he’s ever seen the man before. She pulls out a parcel that’s fastened to a string around her neck and shows him a daguerreotype of a man. Mr. Ryder stares at it for a long time. It’s faded with age, but the man’s features are still clear. Mr. Ryder slowly hands the photograph back to Eliza Jane.
A daguerreotype was a type of early photograph that was popular in the mid-19th century. The photo is, by nature, a symbol of identity—some aspects of one’s identity stay the same over time, while others alter, just as the photograph has faded even as the features remain clear. Mr. Ryder’s close attention to the photograph again suggests some kind of personal connection to Eliza Jane’s story.
Themes
Mr. Ryder tells Eliza Jane that he doesn’t know any man in the town going by the name of Sam Taylor, but if she leaves him her address, he promises to give the matter some attention. If he finds out anything, he’ll let her know. Eliza Jane gives him her address, thanks him warmly, and goes away.
The fact that Mr. Ryder asks Eliza Jane for her address so that he can get in touch with her later again suggests that he feels some sort of connection to her and her story, though he doesn’t yet reveal what the connection is. It may be that he’s simply moved by her devotion to Sam, or it may be that he’s hiding something more important from her.
Themes
Mr. Ryder writes Eliza Jane’s address down in the poetry collection he was reading earlier and stands up to watch her curiously as she walks down the street. When he loses sight of her, he goes up to his bedroom and stands for a long time in front of his mirror, looking thoughtfully at his own reflection.
Mr. Ryder’s curiosity toward Eliza Jane again hints at his personal connection to her story. Standing in front of the mirror suggests that he is comparing himself to the young man he’d just seen in the photograph, and it heavily foreshadows that Mr. Ryder himself might be Eliza Jane’s long-lost husband.
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Literary Devices
