Great Circle

“On the ship I know what to do.”

Addison Graves seeks control in his life. Unable to make sense of other people, including his wife, he seeks out the smaller, contained world. When at sea, a ship is a self-contained world with its own rules and its own order, where Addison Graves is king with total control. Like with Marian and her planes or Hadley and her films, Addison Graves struggles to control his own life, so he seeks out artificially limited spheres of influence.

“In prison, the persistence of his consciousness had seemed a particularly severe aspect of his punishment, meted out not by the court but by his soul.”

The real punishment for Addison Graves is being trapped with himself for so long. His guilt burns inside him, providing a constant companion during his incarceration. He blames himself for the loss of life on his ship and for his public disgrace, even though neither was necessarily his fault. The loss of freedom in prison is minor compared to the violent thoughts Addison harbors against himself.

“The studio is worried that you’ve punctured the romantic illusion.”

The film franchise that made Hadley famous is a romantic illusion. It is not real, but the fans invest themselves because reality is unsatisfying; they prefer the easy illusion to the difficult truth. There is an additional layer to the studio head’s criticism of Hadley, given that he sexually assaulted her and demanded that she perform a sex act on him to secure the role in the franchise. The romantic illusion of the franchise is built on violence, lust, and abuse.

“Usually Jamie’s presence gave Marian a sense of symmetry and rightness, of having been properly balanced.”

Marian views her twin through the eyes of an engineer. She depends on him to stay afloat, like the wings of a plane or the hull of a ship. By framing her relationship with her brother in technical, engineering terms, Marian can pretend that she has some measure of control over her life. She does not understand emotional or personal difficulties, but she completely understands engineering. Because she understands Jamie, she views him as an extension of her engineering expertise—and, like planes and other engineering marvels, Jamie simply makes sense to Marian in a way that people typically do not.

“Don’t be obtuse, Marian. Because I’m a man.”

Wallace delivers a blunt assessment of the situation to Marian. His bluntness shows how misogyny is simply a fact, and to ignore it would be obtuse. Wallace is not making a moral judgement on the existence of sexism, he is simply pointing out how prevalent and unbending it is. He provides a practical reflection of the world because he is worried about Marian, not because he sees anything inherently wrong with the world. Wallace does not have the capacity to envision a world without sexism, as he views it as immutable and obvious, illustrating the pessimistic extent to which he has internalized the world’s prejudices. To Wallace, sexism is as obviously a part of the world as the trees and streams he paints. As he is with the subjects of his paintings, he is a detached observer of the world who exists only to document, rather than challenge what he sees.

“She couldn’t admit she had.”

Marian has a complicated relationship with sex. She struggles to admit that anything brings her pleasure, as she is afraid that this admission will be framed as a concession. She worries that people will use her pleasure against her, so she does not want to provide them with any ammunition.

“Her vision of herself as a pilot had been so convincing, she’d forgotten she didn’t actually know how to fly, that she would have to learn.”

Marian is so determined that she is almost able to will the world to change and then struggles with the discrepancy between what she imagined and what is real. After so long being sure that she would be a pilot, Marian gets her chance to fly. She feels as though she has succeeded, and she feels as though she has realized her dream, only to be faced with the crushing reality that she still has far to go. Like her plane chasing the horizon, Marian constantly chases after the impossible—but her determination makes the impossible seem almost possible.

“Women don’t fit the meter.”

Hugo’s trite joke about women not fitting into the rhyme scheme of the line is a throwaway comment by a man, but it also reflects women’s place in art. Within a patriarchal value schema, women are disposable and lacking in power, to the extent that they can be sidelined in favor of a syllable scheme. To artists and writers, women are a second thought. Equality is less important than the male-dominated perspective of art. In a patriarchal society, aesthetics command more respect than equality.

“She is beginning to understand how Wallace built his debts.”

To Marian, flying is an addiction. The physical act is less important than what it represents to her. She is not addicted to a substance or a chemical, but to a feeling. Flying provides Marian with a sense of freedom and independence that she cannot find elsewhere in the patriarchal society. Just as Wallace drinks to forget his failures and to feel like another person, Marian flies to abandon her concerns. 

“She resented Barclay horribly; her gratitude to Barclay was bottomless. She wished she could vanish and never return; she couldn’t bear leaving him.”

The push and pull of Marian’s relationship with Macqueen illustrates her problem. She feels trapped with an abusive partner because of her pride. As a girl raised by Wallace (who struggled to pay his debts) and Addison (who abandoned his children), she feels a revulsion at the idea of leaving a debt unpaid. After Macqueen invests so much in her, she feels that she would be abandoning a debt if she were to leave him. Even though she knows that their relationship is bad, her reason for staying is baked into the very essence of her character. 

“She imagined her father would be proud to see how unaffected she was.”

Marian wonders whether her father would be proud of her imperviousness at a challenging time. The unaffected approach refers to her sea legs and her quick acclimatization to the ship but also to her endurance of the trauma of marriage to Macqueen. Marian’s vision of her father is complicated and imagined, so she wonders whether he would be proud to see her stoicism. Marian is searching for ways to sympathize with a father she never knew, as well as ways that he might be able to sympathize with her.

“He gave it grudgingly, suspiciously, knew each trip she made over the line was a pantomime of escape.”

Marian flies bootlegged alcohol over the border for her abusive criminal husband. The irony of these journeys is that they enrich Macqueen while also illustrating the fleeting nature of his happiness. While Marian’s aviation makes Macqueen a great deal of money, each trip shows how quickly and easily she could escape him. Marian takes pleasure in knowing that Macqueen’s fortune has an emotionally fragile foundation, preventing him from taking pleasure in his growing empire.

“If she could just go farther, live nowhere, possess only an airplane, and if that airplane never needed to land, then, maybe she would be free.”

Marian’s around-the-world trip is the ultimate expression of her desire to endlessly pursue an unreachable goal. By the end of the story, she goes farther than anyone else and lives in a country where no one knows her name. This anonymity is the closest thing she finds to freedom, and the relentless pursuit of freedom constantly foreshadows and justifies her decisions.

“Two hawks in a box.”

Marian and Caleb are lovers throughout their lives, but both know that they are not suited to marriage. Marian frames the idea as two hawks in a box. This image suggests that she views love as a caging thing, a prison designed to force together two creatures that are wild and flighty by nature. To Marian, marriage is an artificial constraint that will never feel natural.

“Were we doing a bad thing, compressing her?”

Hadley attempts to reduce Marian’s life into a single, consumable film. However, the novel’s other narrative illustrates why such an attempt obliterates the nuances and complexities of a subject’s life. Hadley struggles with this realization; the more she comes to know Marian, the more she realizes that the film will never capture the essential character of Marian Graves. Though she has pretensions of making worthwhile art and winning awards, Hadley is slowly coming to terms with the futility of her project.

“He longed to communicate something not about trees but about space, which could not be defined or contained.”

Jamie’s attempts to paint the world echo Hadley’s attempts to make a film about Marian. Jamie can paint a tree, but he will never be able to communicate the complexity, meaning, and reality of the tree itself, just as Hadley can only portray a caricature of Marian Graves. There is no way for either of them to capture the essence of their subjects; their art will inevitably be only a shadow of reality.

“He was almost as bewildered as if he were still an infant on the Josephina, plunged into an incomprehensible world of fire and water.”

In the context of the novel, life has a circular nature. Jamie’s death exemplifies this circularity as he plunges into the sea and drowns after surviving a similar accident when he was a young baby. Jamie may have escaped death as a baby, but the “incomprehensible world of fire and water” (373) swallows him eventually. He returns to an earlier moment in his life as his existence comes full circle.

“Almost no one has more than a few scattered data points, but they connect the dots however they please.”

Adelaide Scott understands Hadley’s struggles. She knows that art can never truly represent a person’s infinite complexities. Instead, art functions like people’s impressions of others, scrambled together from “a few scattered data points” (390). Using these data points, people try to turn the chaos into meaning and connect the dots however they please. The characters are aware of this irreconcilable issue within art, yet they continue to produce art. Adelaide makes her sculptures, and Hadley makes her films. The attempts to piece together meaning take on a meaning of their own. While this meaning may not be an authentic portrayal of the original subject, it is meaningful in its own right. 

“They might even make a film about you.”

The idea that a film might be made about Marian’s life is a throwaway joke at the time when Marian was planning her flight. In the future, Hadley will make a film, but the film will have little resemblance to Marian’s actual life. The number and scale of the mistakes in Hadley’s film suggests that the film is not actually about Marian Graves. Instead, it is about the public persona that Marian allowed the world to momentarily glimpse. The idea of a film about Marian’s life remains a joke, but not for the reason Marian originally thought.

“He’d sold the blue coupe to some slick California lawyer who’s now unwittingly zipping around Long Beach in a totem of lost love.”

The fate of Eddie’s car illustrates the impossibility of storytelling. To Eddie, the car is a significant reminder of societal intolerance. The vehicle is imbued with a specific and tragic meaning, one that justifies his decision to stay behind in the Antarctic research base. To the lawyer, however, the car is just a car. The fate of the “totem of lost love” (413) presents the question of how many other totems exist in the world. Innocuous, inanimate objects hold meaning for some and not for others, with no way for these stories to be told.

“I’m not imagining things?”

Hadley continues unravelling the truth about Marian’s life, but in doing so, she shows that the truth is unattainable. She seeks validation from Joey, asking him to confirm that she is not imagining the similarity between the two samples of Marian’s handwriting. The fundamental issue is that while she may be correct, she is imagining nonetheless. Hadley does not have (and cannot have) all the information about Marian’s life, so her imagination fills in the blank spaces. For Hadley and other artists, replicating others’ lives is inherently an act of imagination.

“In a movie, this would be the moment when I would rush outside and plunge cathartically into the sea.”

Hadley shows her awareness of the differences between art and reality. She has worked in the film industry for so long that she has internalized the structures and expectations of the artform. A satisfying ending, to Hadley, is one that adheres to the forms and expectations of a film. She imagines a moment of catharsis that never arrives, because movies have taught her to expect such a moment. Instead, Hadley’s catharsis comes from the realization that understanding someone through art is an impossible venture but—like Marian’s flight around the world—the attempt is worthwhile. 

“And then I must have slipped back into being Marian Graves because, for a moment, I felt free.”

As Hadley acts out the final scene of the movie, she begins to slip in and out of her impression of Maria Graves. To Hadley, Marian Graves is not a person but a state of mind. The letters and revelations she has discovered throughout the course of her journey mean that she now views Marian as representing the constant yearning and struggle to be free. Now that she understands that Marian found a satisfying end to that struggle, she can associate her own feelings of freedom with being like Marian. The moments when the lines blur between Marian and Hadley show their journeys’ similarity, even if Hadley can never understand Marian in all her complexities.