The Whalebone Theatre

“Chilcombe is a many-gabled, many-chimneyed, ivy-covered manor house with an elephantine air of weary grandeur. In outline, it is a series of sagging triangles and tall chimney stacks, and it has huddled on a wooded Cliff overhanging the ocean for four hundred years, its leaded windows narrowed against sea winds and historical progress, its general appearance one of gradual subsidence.”

This early description establishes the country house of Chilcombe as both a setting and a motif. A sense of deterioration and decay is conveyed, while the house’s precarious position on a cliff suggests that it could topple into the ocean at any moment. Through these details, Quinn hints at the decline of the Seagrave family and the English aristocracy.

“It is not a day that would make a good story. Cristabel likes stories that feature blunderbusses and dogs, not brides and waiting.”

The author conveys three-year-old Cristabel’s bold and outgoing character traits while she waits to meet her stepmother. The passage makes it clear that stories have shaped Cristabel’s imagination, and her preference is for adventure rather than the traditionally feminine genre of romance.

“A wife’s role, thinks Rosalind. To submit. Elegant. Not bored. She spins these words in her mind through the silences of dinner in the dark red dining room and the waiting in the bedroom afterwards and the time after that, when she looks up at the canopy to find the lopsided face watching her in her wife’s role, and there is something in that which allows her a little distance while it goes on.”

The theme of Playacting as a Societal Microcosm is emphasized as Rosalind reminds herself of the parameters of her role as Jasper’s wife. Quinn highlights the psychological toll of playing gender-prescribed roles as Rosalind repeats her mantra to distract from the unpleasant experience of sleeping with Jasper. Her focus on the “lopsided face” in the bed’s canopy is reminiscent of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s iconic short story, “The Yellow Wallpaper.” In Gilman’s story, the protagonist’s obsession with a pattern in the wallpaper reflects her deteriorating mental health as she remains trapped in a stultifying domestic situation that is not to her liking.