43 pages • 1 hour read
Gallant
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Themes
Choosing One’s Home
The first line from Grace’s journal that Olivia reflects on in the novel is Grace’s assertion that “Home is a choice” (3). For Olivia, this statement is a “riddle” that she can’t make sense of, in large part because the concept of “home” as a place that is safe, welcoming, and nurturing is outside of Olivia’s lived experience. Through the first half of Gallant, Olivia is offered little choice about the places and people that might offer her a home: Merilance is populated by girls and matrons who ostracize Olivia because of her disability, and Gallant, where she is forced to relocate, is owned by Matthew, who desperately wants her to leave. Though Olivia has a familial claim to Gallant, the house itself is not a physical space that is knowable or comforting to her. At every turn, the house shows her a new, discomfiting revelation about herself or her past. It’s impossible for Olivia to think of home as a “choice” because home has only ever been one thing for her—a place she cannot understand filled with people she’s better off not knowing.
As Olivia begins to explore Gallant and the world on the other side of the wall, she comes across the master, who has a very different conceptualization of what “home” means. When the master tells Olivia why he drew her back to Gallant, he says “I could feel you out there, like a piece of me. A missing bone. You are mine, and she refused to bring you home” (301). The master is a character who craves a feeling of wholeness and cannot figure out how to sate the feeling of absence that defines him. For the master, “home” is a place where he can feel comfortable with himself, even if this means controlling all of the people in his life in order to do so.
By the end of the novel, Olivia does make a choice about what “home” will mean for her, and it’s a choice that starkly contrasts the master’s concept of “home.” Gallant never becomes a space that is safe for Olivia; even at the novel’s end, she is still plagued by visions from the master and she knows that she’s doomed to the same fate as all of the Priors who have come before. Olivia chooses to make Gallant her home in spite of the fact that the house, and the people in it, will always be beyond her control. For Olivia, “home” becomes a place in which she can make peace with the challenges of life that are beyond her control, alongside the people in her life who will help her cope with it.
The Perils and Powers of Inheritance
Like many Gothic novels going all the way back to The Castle of Otranto, Gallant is a narrative that is intimately concerned with the dangers of inheritance. Olivia, like every other Prior, inherits an especially grim fate in choosing to take on Gallant: She will be persecuted by visions in her dreams until she dies by suicide, is driven to release the master, or her perception breaks from reality. In telling Grace and Olivia’s stories, Schwab articulates one of the core tragedies of the narrative of doomed inheritances: that the danger of the inheritance doesn’t become real for the character until they choose to pursue it. Both Grace and Olivia know that something threatening waits for them on the far side of the garden wall. Grace says in her journal, “I wanted to see it for myself. I wanted to know if it was real, or if I’m expected to grow and wither here for nothing more than superstition” (136). Olivia chooses to cross the wall because she wants to know more about what happened to her mother. Olivia, like Grace, is “damned” not only by her fate as a Prior but also by choices she makes of her own free will in trying to determine whether or not her fate is real.
Gallant diverges from other Gothic novels, though, in exploring some of the ways in which Olivia’s choice to investigate her inheritance actually gives her power. Olivia is an exceptionally active and curious character who searches for ways to overcome adversity. In crossing the wall, she discovers that her part human, part shadow heritage grants her certain powers when she crosses the garden wall, such as summoning ghouls and bringing dead things to life; these powers do aid her in eventually vanquishing the master. More importantly than this, though, Olivia’s quest to discover the truth of her inheritance is a knowledge-building and community-building endeavor. Olivia is able to defeat the master when her mother couldn’t in part because she develops a resource denied her mother—a community whose pooled knowledge gives them all strength. Grace’s search for answers leads her to Olivia’s father, who is taken from her; she succumbs to the Prior’s inheritance after she loses this connection. Olivia, by contrast, mitigates the effects of her fate by forging connections with Matthew, the ghouls, Hannah, and Edgar. Ultimately, Olivia finds a way to accept a doomed inheritance because of the community she builds in confronting it.
Finding Connection in Communication
Communication is fraught for Olivia even from the novel’s opening pages. Her classmates ostracize her because of her speech disability, and the matrons make few attempts to accommodate alternative means of communication that would enable Olivia to be a more active presence at Merilance. Gallant is brimming with characters who don’t communicate with speech, from Olivia’s father and the master’s shadows, to the ghouls of Merilance and Gallant; Schwab even explicitly links Olivia with the ghouls on account of the erasure both experience because of their method of communication (234). Many of these characters are figured as being powerless because of their inability to speak. The shadows, for instance, have no desires or thoughts of their own outside of what the master tells them to do. The only shadow who does search for a means of communication—Oliva’s father—is brutally punished for his transgression. The master, by contrast, is empowered because of his ability to speak. The master controls the actions of his minions through speech; he generates fear through speech (227); and he brings Olivia to Gallant through written speech. In the master’s world, the binary of having power/being powerless neatly correlates with the binary of speaking/non-speaking.
Olivia disrupts this binary throughout the novel and, in doing so, finds types of connections that are inaccessible to the master. Because of her disability, Olivia is constantly searching for alternative and varied means of communication: she speaks sign language with Edgar, communicates in writing with Hannah, and draws pictures for Matthew (on account of his learning disability). By fighting to communicate with the people in her life, Olivia is able to forge intimacies that would otherwise have been unavailable to her and the people around her. Matthew, for example, is initially deeply mistrustful of Olivia and the threat her presence represents. She is able to gain his trust, though, by finding modes of communication that make sense to him, whether it’s using pictures to ask questions or spending time allowing him to teach her the piano. Olivia forms bonds through the give-and-take of searching for means of mutual understanding and, in doing so, she creates relationships built from respect. The master’s communication, by contrast, is a top-down expression of power; he never truly understands his shadow’s motivations (such as Olivia’s father’s) because he doesn’t value the connection-building power of communication.
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By V. E. Schwab
