The Second Mrs. Astor: A Heartbreaking Historical Novel of the Titanic

“Everything in the Force household, and in Madeleine Force’s world, was exactly as it should be, and everything was exactly as it always would be.”

This note from the third-person narration sums up how Madeleine’s world is regimented by the expectations, activities, and customs seen to befit a young woman of her station. While Madeleine would never act to hurt her family, a hint of rebellion is a strong thread in her character.

“Another moment between them, stretching long and strange and lovely somehow, filling her with both elation and dread, because Madeleine understood then that, despite what she’d said to her mother, she knew she stood at the edge of a very steep cliff, and falling off of it would mean either flight or annihilation.”

This early moment in her courtship with Jack reflects Madeleine’s maturity and self-possession, strong aspects of her character. She tries to be sensible and not lose her head over a man she cannot have, but she is falling in love. This passage, an example of the vivid figurative language used throughout the novel, uses the cliff to suggest how Madeleine’s interest in Jack is leavened with a fear of rejection, while the cliff might also hint at the difference in their social stations, upper middle class versus ultra elite.

“She was wearing a Fortuny gown of dove silk with glass beading along the shoulders (brand new, perhaps a little much for the evening, but Katherine had declared it perfect), and the long, tiered folds of the overskirt floated above the floor as they walked, rippling and falling like the wings of a slow-skimming moth.”

This description of Madeleine’s designer gown hints at the wealth to which she is accustomed, while the passage also shows that she is trying to present herself well for Colonel Astor. The moth-like fluttering of the overskirt suggests at once the disquieting effects of new attraction, more often compared with butterflies, and the risk posed to Madeleine. Like a moth drawn to a flame, Madeleine is drawn to Jack. This passage is another example of how the rich imagery of Shana Abé’s figurative language works on several levels at once.

“He might have been any country gentleman relaxing beside her […] His hair was mussed from the wind and his driving cap, but she liked that about him right now, that informality that made him more human than myth […] He might have been any ordinary gentleman regarding her from beneath those gilded lashes, but he wasn’t. He definitely wasn’t.”

On their picnic, Madeleine shares a growing closeness with Jack, enhanced by her sense that she is privileged to see behind the myth of Colonel Astor to the man beneath. The “gilded” lashes, however, hint at his stature as well as the Gilded Age from which he is descended and which, in some ways, his massive wealth and family name still represent. These, the elements that make Jack Astor more than ordinary, will also prove to be the grounds on which Madeleine is judged as less than worthy of a Knickerbocker.

“But it did hurt. A petty little wound, this photograph, that photograph, this mention in the papers, that one. Each one chipping away at any thought she might have had of privacy, of control of her own face or figure or destiny.”

This passage hints at how Madeleine feels that her representation in the papers injures her sense of self. What Jack sees as a necessary evil and Mrs. Force thinks of as Madeleine’s job, Madeleine envisions as tiny wounds that cause injury. She perceives these invasions as constant reminders of her weakening autonomy over her own life, despite her original perception of marrying Jack as a source of freedom and adventure.

“John Jacob Astor is no ordinary man. He carries a storm on his back wherever he goes, a tempest of unremitting scrutiny […] Aligning yourself with the colonel, with his family—with all that would entail—means this storm will never end for you. Ever.”

Continuing the theme that Jack is something more than ordinary, Madeleine’s father warns her about the price of celebrity and what will follow if Madeleine has a relationship with Jack. The metaphor of the storm for the unrelenting pressure, an example of the novel’s pervasive use of figurative language, hints at disaster that awaits for the couple.

“It was a ring, a white oval diamond the size of a filbert catching the sun, instantly smarting her eyesight. She had to look away from it to see clearly again, just as she did for the camera flash explosions that followed her now.”

The use of photographers’ blinding flashbulbs to describe the brilliance of the diamond engagement ring creates a loaded simile. Through the novel, Madeleine has mixed feelings about the jewels Jack showers on her. She believes that they reflect her value and worth to him, and she also uses them as a sort of shield or glamor when she must present herself to the public as Mrs. John Jacob Astor. However, the jewels also represent the celebrity that comes with Jack’s wealth and family name, and that celebrity has a cost in terms of their privacy and Madeleine’s freedom.

“Her happiness belonged to her, to her and Jack, a sweet and fragile thing she wanted to nurture, to hold close, not turn into some cheap public display.”

This passage speaks to the ongoing tension Madeleine feels about public interest in her relationship with Jack. Throughout the novel, she believes that sharing her feelings cheapens them, turning her sincere emotion into a gaudy performance. This price of marrying Jack was not one she fully anticipated.

“I wanted actual love, not a looking-glass reflection of it. Not stolen kisses, or sotted promises. I wanted the truth of love, the pure molten core of it, because anything short of that was just a cheat.”

When Katherine tells Madeleine why she didn’t run away with the rich Scottish boy who offered to marry her, she is probing Madeleine’s true feelings for Jack. The theme of romantic love is the central preoccupation of the novel. Madeleine’s insistence on the sincerity of her and Jack’s love drives her effort throughout the story to reframe and respond to the way their relationship was interpreted and judged by the outside world.

“With that stability [of solid ground] came a cost—their treasured privacy. Their cherished honeymoon bubble, annihilated the moment they set foot ashore.”

This passage again expresses Madeleine’s belief that interest from the press and public invade and ruin the tenderness of her relationship with Jack. She craves the life she imagined with Jack, one that could exist outside the ephemeral world of a ship. However, she knows that going ashore would ruin the illusion of their perfect insulation.

“Ava, her long neck and flawless skin and sloping shoulders, and dark doe eyes that held Madeleine’s own with the confidence of the very rich, the very lovely, the very talented and unique.”

Madeleine feels overshadowed by Jack’s first wife, Ava, when she regards her portrait. In peering into Vincent’s room, Madeleine is in fact peeking into the private world of Jack’s first family, which she wants to know more about. Ava is a contrast and foil for Madeleine, held out as a standard to which Madeleine will never measure up.

“It can be rough sliding into someone else’s territory at first, even if they’re long gone. Ghosts in the walls, I guess. The artwork, the furniture, even the pattern of the china […] Someone else’s ideas about living, sleeping, entertaining, manifested all around you. But you’re tough, Madeleine. Bright and tough. You wouldn’t be where you are right now if you weren’t. You’ll make this place your own.”

Margaret Brown proves a mentor and friend to Madeleine in many ways, especially here, where she visits Madeleine at the Fifth Avenue mansion. Margaret senses that Madeleine feels swallowed by the house, overshadowed by her new role and her predecessors, so counsels her to make the chateau the home she desires. The irony is that later, when Madeleine sits beneath the portrait of her husband, Jack will be the ghost in the wall.

“Egypt. And then that word, full of spice, transformed itself into a new word, an even better one, resonating down through her bones: Escape.”

The wish for adventure and action is inscribed into Madeleine’s character from the beginning. Egypt, which Madeleine perceives as an exotic locale, an ancient and Eastern contrast to the world of Western culture in which she is entrenched, seems like a refuge. The dramatic irony at work is that their honeymoon in Egypt will bring Jack and Madeleine to the Titanic and disaster.

“She wanted her heart to be as lifted as his, to keep them in harmony, because she adored their harmony and always had. But so far, all she could bring herself to feel about her pregnancy was a thin, distant amazement. Like all the tumbling, strange changes in her life now were happening to someone else, and she was only watching them from afar, observing all their fascinating little facets.”

An example of the figurative language throughout the book, Madeleine’s focus on her body and her pregnancy here amplifies her private and interior way of life. She hopes her pregnancy will serve as a way to bring her and Jack closer together. In the end, she will cling to Jakey as all that she has left of his father.

“She felt at once that anything was possible. That she could leap over the balcony railing and clamber down the side of the hotel like a monkey, run across the grounds, across the clipped green grass and in and out of the palms until it all melted into sand. She could run up the pyramids themselves, all the way to the top, giddy with the power of herself. With the power of being free.”

This passage captures the freedom that Madeleine feels in being away from New York society and the traces and echoes of it that followed her to France. Outside of that society and its restrictions and judgments, she is finally free to explore and follow her own inclinations. This moment is one of many examples in the novel where Abé uses setting to showcase Madeleine’s feelings.

“It’s plain as day Jack adores you. I think he adores you to the point that the thought of being without you terrifies him to the core. And for a man like Jack Astor, that is significant.”

Margaret reaffirms for Madeleine that what she and Jack feel is true love. Where Madeleine once thought of him as larger than life, she realizes that loving her makes Jack vulnerable. Ironically, it is Madeleine who will lose Jack, not the other way around.

“Everywhere she stepped, her feet stirred up the dust of history, hundreds of years old or thousands. She wanted to memorize all of it, so she could carry these days and nights with her back to America. She wanted never to forget the perfect heat, the sand, the stars spread above her in a shifting, infinite river of platinum, stretching from end to end above the earth. The meteors that fell in silence all night, every night, sketching slow blazing lines into the heavy blue.”

As well as displaying the figurative language that makes the prose of the novel so rich and textured, this passage captures the amazement Madeleine feels during her adventure in Egypt. The long history, the open vistas, and the jeweled beauty are all a contrast to and, for Madeleine, improvement on the over-decorated houses she inhabited in New England.

“It came at them as a fortress, as a castle, as a painted feverscape towering above the ocean. It was the tallest, scariest thing Madeleine had ever seen, bearing down on them in a crest of freshly slaughtered saltwater. Titanic arrived eating up the flat horizon. Titanic arrived swallowing the waves.”

An example of foreshadowing as well as figurative language, this passage in which Madeleine first sees the ship imagines the Titanic as both majestic and terrifying, a figure of magnificence and a devouring beast.

“Madeleine felt, bizarrely, as if she had stepped back in time. She was back in some mansion in Newport or Manhattan, the same stony people, the same stony expressions. She had plunged right back into the world she had worked so hard to escape.”

After the freedom of Egypt, upper-class society feels to Madeleine like something she has outgrown. Despite being in a new setting here, one that should feel fresh and exhilarating, Madeleine experiences a sense of falling back into a kind of imprisonment. This moment foreshadows the way that, after losing Jack, Madeleine will mature beyond that circle.

“It was a Poiret, one of her best; for the rest of her life, she would associate the finest fashion house in Paris with ice and cold and death.”

The designer gown Madeleine wears to dinner at the Ritz restaurant aboard the Titanic exemplifies the glamor of her persona as Jack’s wife and the wealth that surrounds her. However, this passage also evidences the way her wealth cannot insulate her from the tragedy to come.

“When Madeleine could look up again, the aft section of the ship remained practically upright, as if it had been designed to float exactly like that. A shooting star lit a long, fiery path behind it, and as the star sank, so then did the ship: almost gently, almost quietly, except for the splashing and screams.”

The contrast of the gentle motion increases the horror of the reality of the lives lost with the Titanic’s sinking. Abé’s novel remains true to the historical record, but Madeleine’s point of view makes the disaster feel real and immediate for the reader. The image of the shooting star contrasts with the beauty of the meteors she watched crossing the Egyptian sky, one a place of heat and sun and the other a landscape of ice, cold, and death.

“She was pulled into another embrace. Madeleine closed her eyes, yielding momentarily to the solace of it, relaxing against her [mother] as she used to do as a child. But then behind her eyelids the fog came, and the white faces against the water, and she eased away.”

Madeleine is haunted by the memory of the dead she saw floating in the water when she made the lifeboat return to search for Jack. Although she is safe and returned to land, not even her mother can provide comfort. Madeleine has lost more than just Jack; she has lost her innocence, the sense of security that her wealth long afforded her, and she is now keenly and perpetually aware of her helplessness in the face of tragedy.

“I became the face of feminine heroism, doughty yet demure. That newspapers published story after story about me, usually quoting other survivors who claimed they saw me that night, or they saw Jack, or they saw us both, so terribly, romantically star-crossed.”

In an irony that does not amuse her, Madeleine notes that the public has indeed embraced her as Mrs. Astor, but only now that she is a tragic, pregnant widow. She is loved only as an object of pity. The stories that spring up around her last moments with Jack hint at the lore that began weaving around the subject of the Titanic almost from the moment of its sinking.