A Great Deliverance

The shrines to absent family members in the novel are symbols of grief, but also of emotional manipulation. When Havers first sees the shrine to Tessa in the Teys household, she steps back “as if to ward off a blow” (100). This is not just because of the pain and grief the shrine represents, but the public performance of grief it entails. As Havers later confesses to Lynley, the shrine she built to honor her deceased brother, Tony, has a hidden agenda: to evoke guilt in her parents. Havers blames her parents for ignoring Tony during his final days. The shrine was supposed to force them to confront Tony’s absence; instead, it has caused them to retreat into a false reality. 

Tessa’s shrine was built by William as part of a pattern of his emotional manipulation and abuse. Like the shrine to Tony, it was not built to memorialize the dead but to pressure the living. The shrine helped William emotionally blackmail Roberta and further control her. It also helped William win the sympathy of his community and paint himself as a grieving husband. Whereas Havers wanted a positive, if painful, outcome from her shrine, Williams only builds his shrine to promote harm.