26 pages • 52 minutes read
Dept. of Speculation
A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 22-32Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 22 Summary
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of sexual content, death by suicide, suicidal ideation, and mental illness.
The narrative shifts into the third-person point of view; the third-person narrator refers to the protagonist as “the wife.”
The wife feels afraid when she notices changes in her marriage. One day, she and her husband go to a café. Over coffee, he asks her about when she was happiest. She realizes that when people ask this question, they want you to share a memory that includes them. She instantly feels something shift between them, but only asks him if he’s having an affair a month later. Around this time, he starts staying later at work and “misses putting their daughter to bed” (96). When she finally asks him, the husband admits he’s seeing someone else. The wife asks why, and he explains that his lover—referred to as the girl—is easier than she is. The wife tries making sense of the situation, referencing astronomers and poets.
Chapter 23 Summary
The wife reflects on the evolution of love over time. She references studies about people “newly in love” versus partners who’ve been together “long enough to have and raise children” (99). The wife wants to cry all the time but doesn’t know where she can go to be alone. She continues to think about other cultural marriage customs and child-rearing traditions. Finally, she tells the philosopher that her husband is having an affair; he’s shocked because the husband is so kind. The wife wonders if she did something to make him cheat on her.
Chapter 24 Summary
The wife starts going to yoga. She attends a class in a different neighborhood where she feels more comfortable crying in public. Eventually, her instructor starts teaching her privately.
In the meantime, she devotes more energy to her daughter. It feels easier to love her than to love the husband. However, the wife can’t stop thinking about when she first fell in love with him. She recalls when her neighbor’s husband had an affair and how the neighbor responded. She starts researching the likelihood of affairs in heterosexual marriages.
Meanwhile, every song she hears reminds her of her situation. Intermittently, she and the husband encounter each other in their local park where he goes to smoke. Sometimes he’s affectionate towards her but sometimes he isn’t. Eventually, they start meeting there to discuss their situation. The wife asks if he’s still with the girl and how they communicate.
Chapter 25 Summary
The wife discusses her situation with her therapist, who suggests the husband is only infatuated with the girl. The wife is skeptical. Sometimes she remembers things she did over the years that hurt the husband. She realizes she was often distracted but feels hurt when people discover her situation and are incredulous that she didn’t know about her husband’s infidelity. The wife wonders if she simply overlooked his unhappiness. Eventually, she starts working at a community garden to sort through her feelings. She still can’t make sense of whether she is a good or bad wife.
One day, the wife’s ex-boyfriend starts contacting her. He sends her music, reminding her of their past together. Meanwhile, she and the husband continue to share the same bed. He sleeps soundly even after his confession. One night, they have sex, and the wife apologizes for contributing to his loneliness. Not long later, the wife starts reading about infidelity online.
Chapter 26 Summary
The wife notices other men flirting with her. She wonders if this attention is new and imagines herself falling in love with anyone. Convinced that she’s floating away, she references poets and starts meditating on God. She continues crying and attending yoga, making excuses for her withdrawal. She stays in workout clothes all day, unsure of who she’s become.
Chapter 27 Summary
The wife listens to the husband’s radio show one night and realizes that all the songs he plays are for the girl. Her stomach hurts, and she feels suddenly nauseated. In the bathroom, she stares at her towels and underwear, noting how raggedy they are. In class a few days later, her student Lia comments on the meaninglessness of life. The wife hopes she knows she has more to live for, although she herself feels despondent.
Chapter 28 Summary
Not long later, Lia is hospitalized after attempting to die by suicide. The wife visits her. She brings her a notebook, but the nurses won’t let Lia have it. They sit outside and chat for a while. The wife notices parallels between how they feel, but she encourages Lia not to give up.
Chapter 29 Summary
The wife feels tired of married people. Her encounter with another couple at a party augments her frustration. Meanwhile, she jots notes for herself about marriage, infidelity, divorce, and middle age. She feels terrified that she’ll lose the husband. One day, she recalls the letters she and the husband used to write to each other. They’d always put “Dept. of Speculation” as the return address. They both still have the notes. Thinking of them, the wife starts laughing and talking to herself.
Chapter 30 Summary
The wife starts joking about divorce and death by suicide in the classroom. Her students only appreciate the latter jokes. Then one day, someone recommends that she read a book on adultery. The book makes her feel uncomfortable, but it also makes her pity the husband.
Chapter 31 Summary
To cope, the wife reads philosophy, talks to her sister, and gets her hair done. After the haircut, she’s supposed to meet up with the husband and the girl. She buys boots for the occasion, but they’re very uncomfortable. The outfit she dons also feels wrong, but she reminds herself she’s trying to prove that she’s cooler than the girl.
Chapter 32 Summary
The wife imagines one of her students writing the story of her meeting with the husband and the girl. She imagines every facet of the story she’d critique. Although they’d had plans to all get together and talk, the girl refused to see the wife at the last minute. The wife got upset and started yelling, demanding a 10-minute audience with the girl. From her place on the rainy walk, the wife could see the girl upstairs in the window, refusing to come down. Finally, the husband emerged, apologizing. The wife remarked that the girl had nice eyes and bangs.
Chapters 22-32 Analysis
In these chapters, the narrator’s complex relationship with her husband furthers the novel’s theme of the Fragmentation of Identity in Marriage. When the narrator begins to notice that something is changing in her marriage, her perspective, tone, and narrative approach all reflect that change. In Chapters 22 through 32, the narrator begins to refer to herself as “the wife” and to her husband as “the husband,” whereas in the preceding chapters, she refers to herself as “I” and to her husband as “you.” The first and second-person pronouns affect a more intimate tone that enacts the trust, love, and security the narrator feels with her husband in the early years of their relationship. By way of contrast, the shift into the third-person perspective in this excerpt highlights the couple’s estrangement from each other and the narrator’s estrangement from both her husband and herself. This relational, emotional, and psychological distancing occurs because of the husband’s affair, one of the novel’s few definable plot points that further segments the narrator’s sense of self.
As a work of literary fiction, Dept. of Speculation toys with conventional notions of grammar, language, plot, and narrative structure to evoke complex emotional experiences and philosophical concerns. Offill is known for her inventive style, which she evidences in this text. Her unexpected linguistic patterns, tense and point of view shifts, and incorporation of literary allusions and references throughout these chapters evoke the uncertainty and fragmentation of the narrator’s identity, emphasizing her internal conflict. These literary devices are tools that Offill uses to evoke the narrator’s ineffable experience and to immerse the reader in her distinct psyche by using patterns that mimic her stream of consciousness. For example, the opening page of Chapter 22 appears as follows:
How Are You? soscaredscaredsoscaredsoscaredsoscaredsoscaredsoscaredsoscared
soscaredoscaredscaredsoscaredsoscaredsoscaredsoscaredsoscaredsoscaredsoscared
soscaredscaredsoscaredsoscaredsoscaredsoscaredsoscaredsoscaredsoscaredsoscaredscaredsoscaredsoscaredsoscaredsoscaredsoscaredsoscaredsoscaredsoscaredscared
soscaredsoscaredsoscaredsoscaredsoscaredsoscaredsoscaredsoscaredsoscaredso
scaredsoscaredsoscaredsoscaredsoscared […] (95).
This passage immediately signals a break from the controlled sentence structures and narrative style the narrator uses in earlier chapters. The linguistic disruption mirrors the marital, emotional, and personal disruption the narrator experiences when she discovers that her husband is seeing another woman. In the pages that follow, a third-person voice assumes control of the narrative and mirrors the separation that the narrator feels from herself, the world around her, and the home and family life she believed she was living with her partner.
These chapters also incorporate an increasing number of intertextual references and literary allusions, another formal choice Offill makes to enact the narrator’s Search for Meaning in Everyday Life. After she discovers that her husband is having an affair, the narrator’s already tenuous sense of purpose falters even further, resulting in a further disconnect from her identity. She therefore struggles to make sense of what she is feeling and experiencing. Desperate to understand what she might have done to worsen her husband’s loneliness or to make him “unkind and ungood and untrue” (100), the narrator begins to rely more heavily on other thinkers, writers, artists, historians, or philosophers to understand her own experience. By looking to these other individuals and incorporating their ideas into her own account, the narrator actively illustrates her search for meaning. Her once predictable life has suddenly become unfamiliar and she reaches for other perspectives from which to understand her identity, relationship, and marital future.
The narrator’s new pastimes of reading the adultery book, researching divorce and infidelity statistics online, and attending yoga classes also convey her desire to make meaning of her senseless new circumstances. When she is first “advised to read [the] horribly titled adultery book,” the narrator feels embarrassed and skeptical, hiding “it around the house with the fervor another might use to hide a gun or a kilo of heroin” (124). However, her recurring references to the book and incorporation of passages from it throughout the subsequent chapters illustrate her reliance on it. Not unlike the narrator’s new yoga instructor, the book becomes another guide in her search for meaning. Yoga and reading offer her insight into her husband’s infidelity and her feelings of betrayal that she cannot otherwise reach on her own. They also offer her forms of structure and stability that she’s lost because of her husband’s affair.
However hurtful and destructive, the husband’s infidelity also acts as a catalyst, spurring the narrator to confront her banal reality and look even harder for ways to understand her experience, her wants and needs, and her purpose. The husband’s affair also operates as another narrative device that Offill uses to interrogate tired marital traditions and relational patterns—and to emphasize how such sociocultural customs disadvantage the woman—or wife and mother figure.
Unlock all 26 pages of this Study GuidePlus, gain access to 9,150+ more expert-written Study Guides.
Including features:
