Gallant

Matthew’s death at the end of the novel puts Olivia in a difficult position: If she chooses to leave Gallant, the master will forever try to lure her back to use her blood to escape; if she stays at Gallant, she knows that she’ll be haunted just as Matthew and her mother were. After her initial journey to the shadow realm, Olivia plans on leaving Gallant to “flee into a city, become a vagabond, a thief” (242). What changes for Olivia between that moment and the Epilogue? Why does she decide to succumb to the same fate as all of the other Priors? Schwab’s narration never offers definite answers to these questions, but some of Olivia’s actions and attitudes in the Epilogue speak to the shifts in her interiority. The Epilogue opens with Olivia working the rose beds, just as Matthew used to; it’s taken her “weeks to clear the ruins” (330) of the master’s rampage. Olivia is no stranger to manual labor; most of her time at Merilance was spent working the kitchens. Prior to this gardening episode, Olivia always resented the labor that was asked of her. At Gallant, though, Olivia enjoys the gardening so much so that “the soil felt good under her hands” (331). The difference between labor at Merilance and labor at Gallant is that Olivia is now part of a network of people she cares deeply about, people who benefit from her efforts. In choosing to stay at Gallant, Olivia has found purpose; she is no longer a rootless girl producing labor for an uncaring school system, illustrating the theme of Choosing One's Home.

Olivia’s integration into the familial network at Gallant is underscored by the novel’s closing image. In it, Olivia sits at the piano with Matthew’s ghouls and she begins to play “just like he showed her” (334). This interaction solidifies the idea that Olivia, because of her disability and willingness to engage in varied modes of communication, allows for more fluid dialogue between the inhabitants of Gallant; she helps make the household a more functional and productive network. This final scene also functions as a symbolic passing-of-the-torch between Olivia and Matthew. In the previous scene at the piano, highlighting Finding Connection in Communication, Matthew takes the lead, showing Olivia how to play. Here, Olivia takes the lead, becoming the one who makes the music. Olivia’s final actions in the book solidify her place as the head of the household and the final Prior who can fulfill the family’s duty, navigating The Perils and Powers of Inheritance. 

In Gallant’s final pages, Olivia also reflects on the idea of dreams. Dreams appear in many ways over the course of the novel. There are, of course, the literal dreams that plague the Priors and impact their mental health; many characters have “dreams” in the sense of aspirations, such as the Merilance girls who dream of a life outside of the school (25); and Olivia often criticizes untenable desires as “dreams” (303). In all these cases, dreams represent a kind of liminality that is central to Gallant: Dreams are an in-between space between sleeping and waking, and dreams are also unrealized desires. Olivia spends much of the narrative struggling with how to cope with this liminality. Her mother seems to reject it entirely, telling Olivia that “dreams can never hurt you” (333); the master, by contrast, wants Olivia to become subsumed by the liminality, to live in the shadow-realm where she only has dreams of her parents to sustain her. In Gallant’s final moments, Olivia seems to find a middle ground between her mother and the master. She realizes that what her mother said “isn’t true. Dreams can make you hurt yourself, dreams can make you do so many things, if you’re not careful” (333). Olivia accepts a difficult truth that Grace was never able to and, in this act of acceptance, equips herself to deal with the Prior’s curse more fully than any other Prior has been able to. Though Olivia’s fate at the end of Gallant remains ambiguous, Olivia’s clear-eyed acceptance of needing to live in the liminal spaces of her life suggests a more hopeful ending than any other member of her family was able to find.