The Lost Apothecary

In both timelines, betrayal proves to be a persistent and disruptive force. It compels characters to abandon their normative lives and operate in brand-new registers, doing things, out of hurt and anger, that they might not normally do. Frederick’s betrayal initiates Nella’s poison-dealing, resulting in the first time she ever significantly diverges from her mother’s licit path by selling a deadly toxin. Nella recognizes this situation with Frederick as “the same heart-wrenching journey of every woman to whom [she has] sold a poison” (135). The network of poison-dealing that blooms from Nella’s own experience of betrayal allows other mistreated women to level concrete, deadly consequences at their male abusers, circumventing a heavily gendered 18th-century society unlikely to censure these men for their offenses. By operating well outside the legal and social bounds of her world, Nella gives these women a similarly extralegal and extra-social avenue for removing a source of their own torment—the men in their lives.

Penner demonstrates that betrayal can also fundamentally alter a person’s way of thinking. As it is carried out by a once-trusted person, one of betrayal’s chief violences is its capacity to render all other human connections tenuous in the minds of its victims, regardless of the actual strength of those bonds.