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.
Themes
Fragmentation of Identity in Marriage
Dept. of Speculation explores how married life can fracture the individual’s identity through the perspective of the wife, the protagonist and first-person narrator. By writing the novel from the wife’s vantage point, Offill delves into the intricacies of assuming a wifely identity. For Offill’s narrator, marriage compels her to let go of her former sense of self to build a life with her husband. While the narrator does love her husband—and they share a generally happy relationship for the first seven years of their marriage—the institution of marriage robs the narrator of her independent identity. The novel subtextually implies that this phenomenon is socioculturally expected of women—they are meant to let go of their true selves to thoroughly inhabit the wife identity instead. For this reason, when the narrator discovers that her husband is having an affair, she worries that she’ll no longer be a wife, and therefore become no one:
General notes: If the wife becomes unwived, what should she be called? Will the story have to be rewritten? There is a time between being a wife and being a divorcée, but no good word for it. Maybe say what a politician might say. Stateless person. Yes, stateless (121).
This passage possesses a questioning, searching tone. The narrator is experiencing a crisis of identity in the wake of her husband’s affair, which augments her already tenuous sense of self.
Offill also uses the narrative point of view to reinforce her ideas about the entanglement of marriage and identity. For example, when the wife is first married, she still refers to herself using first-person pronouns on the page. However, after her husband starts having the affair, she begins to refer to herself using third-person pronouns and the moniker “the wife.” These shifts in perspective illustrate the wife’s attempts to cling to her wife identity after her husband betrays her while simultaneously highlighting the fragmentation of self that she is experiencing throughout the novel. At the novel’s end, she reclaims her first-person point of view, highlighting her newfound ability to reconcile with dichotomous parts of herself and to embrace her identity once more.
In the final chapters, the narrator learns how to protect her individuality while sustaining a healthy marriage after she returns to writing. She moves to Pennsylvania and begins to work on a new book project, bringing her back to the beginning. Returning to her artistic practice grants her a sense of autonomy over her future and a grounding in her essential self through a reconnection to her identity before her marriage. When she reacquainted herself with these fundamental aspects of her identity, she is better able to feel stable in her relationship with her husband. With the narrator’s consideration of the identity questions raised by marriage and her eventual discovery of a balance between her pre-marriage and wife selves, Offill offers an exploration of both the dissolution and rediscovery of identity.
Conflict Between Motherhood and Personal Aspirations
Dept. of Speculations’ explorations of identity and marriage are entangled with its concurrent explorations of how motherhood affects a woman’s personal aspirations. For the first-person narrator, becoming a mother fundamentally changes how she sees her artistic future. Ever since she can remember, she has wanted to devote her life to writing. Her recurring references to becoming “an art monster” at the beginning of the novel convey her longing to pursue an authorial career and her desire for it to dominate her life (8). After she becomes a mother, however, she is compelled, by the demands of both her family and her culture, to abandon these personal aspirations and devote herself entirely to her daughter. As a result, the narrator feels trapped in a life, body, and identity she doesn’t recognize and feels in conflict with.
Offill uses vivid scenes depicting the narrator’s home life with her daughter to convey the feeling of entrapment that can accompany motherhood. Because the narrator’s baby is colicky, she’s forced to spend her time singing, pacing, and dancing almost constantly to keep the child calm. Meanwhile, her days blend into each other without differentiation or stimulation. She has a peripheral social life—largely limited to her connections with her sister and the philosopher—and even finds that she’s “getting too cranky and old to teach” (66). The cumulative effect of these scenes suggests that domestic and maternal duties have ensnared the narrator in an insular, static realm that does not nurture her creatively. Because her personal life is limited to the confines of her apartment and the parameters of childcare, the narrator rapidly feels her artistic dreams slipping away.
The narrator also develops a habit of comparing herself to other mothers, a reflex that captures her fear of failing as a mother despite having sacrificed her artistic career. She reflects, “Some women make it look so easy, the way they cast ambition off like an expensive coat that no longer fits” (93). However, the narrator finds this abandonment of her desires more difficult. She recognizes that she is caught between two unsatisfactory options: Letting go of her artwork means feeling unhappy in motherhood, while spending less time with her daughter to develop her artistic practice means feeling guilty and disappointing her child. By highlighting these facets of the narrator’s experience, Offill shows how motherhood asks a woman to make sacrifices of fundamental parts of herself. While the father is meant “to be elsewhere,” as in the creation myths the narrator teaches her students, the mother is expected “to be everywhere” (63). With her exploration of the all-consuming nature of motherhood, Offill illustrates how motherhood challenges a woman to choose between her personal desires and her children.
Search for Meaning in Everyday Life
In Dept. of Speculation, the narrator’s marital, maternal, and domestic conflicts launch her search for meaning and purpose in her life. Before she is married, the narrator is focused on her artistic career, convinced it is her purpose and determined to prioritize it. When the narrator first gets married, she feels happy in her new life even though it isn’t what she anticipated for herself, and the same is true when she first gives birth to her daughter. Her emotional depictions of falling in love with her daughter underscore her deep love for her: “The baby’s eyes were dark, almost black, and when I nursed her in the middle of the night, she’d stare at me with a stunned, shipwrecked look as if my body were the island she’d washed up on” (23). The shipwreck metaphor captures both the consuming nature of the narrator’s maternal love and the isolation she shares with her daughter, shifting the narrative to address some of the negative aspects of her newly focused family life. Her daughter’s colic and her domestic isolation soon entrap the narrator in an insular, monotonous life. The quotidian no longer feels familiar and comforting but rather resembles solitary confinement—in Chapter 11, the narrator likens her time at home with her daughter to that of a prisoner’s experience in Alcatraz. This allusion underscores the intensity of the narrator’s feelings of restlessness, powerlessness, and purposelessness.
Over the course of the novel, the narrator begins to pursue meaning by reading, researching, talking to friends, doing yoga, visiting her sister, moving out of the city, and beginning a new book. On their surface, these activities appear mundane; however, in taking these actions, the narrator is trying to seize control of her life and actively change her circumstances. Her relationship with the philosopher is particularly significant in this regard: “Some mornings the wife goes to the philosopher’s house and […] [t]ogether, they come up with a theory of everything. The air feels electrified. She keeps waiting to ask if he can feel it too or if it is just some kind of weather in her head (149).” With the philosopher—whose moniker itself denotes notions of meaning and purpose—the narrator feels mentally awakened, and through their exchanges, she seeks out new ways of seeing and experiencing the world. Intellectual stimulation becomes an essential part of her search; through studying and reading—and incorporating allusions to other thinkers into her account—the narrator continues her pursuit of an enriched and meaningful life.
By the end of the novel, the narrator realizes her search for meaning by returning to her artistic practice. Throughout the novel, the narrator repeatedly references her nonexistent second book, but at the novel’s end, she finally begins to work on this project. By feeding her intellect, the narrator is also able to develop a new perspective on everyday life and find meaning there as well. She’s able to work through things with her husband and reorient to family life. With her return to her art, Offill argues, the narrator finds meaning and purpose that goes beyond her writerly aspirations to encompass every facet of her life.
Unlock all 26 pages of this Study GuidePlus, gain access to 9,150+ more expert-written Study Guides.
Including features:
