56 pages • 1-hour read
Last Twilight in Paris
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Symbols & Motifs
Weil Family Home
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussions of illness, emotional abuse, religious persecution, and death.
The home in which Helaine is confined for 13 years of her life, beginning at age five, is a symbol of fear and disempowerment. As a child, she conceives of the townhouse as a “gilded cage”: Beautiful but nonetheless limiting. It isn’t until she begins taking walks and meeting Gabriel that she really begins to understand the way her confinement affects both her and her mother. When Otto yells at Annette for allowing Helaine to leave the home, “Helaine knew then that fear had kept her mother every bit as much of a prisoner as the walls of her childhood home had kept Helaine herself” (68). Annette has long known of Otto’s infidelity, and she’s simply chosen to ignore it for lack of another, better choice. She would be powerless if he left her, so she becomes as much a captive in her marriage as Helaine does in her home. At least there Annette can create the illusion of safety for her and Helaine.
When Helaine meets Gabriel, everything changes. Her fear diminishes when she realizes that she does have another option and need not remain in her parents’ home. At Gabriel’s apartment, she realizes, “There was more joy in sharing Gabriel’s tiny apartment and the freedom of the city than in this enormous, cold house where she felt so caged” (69). Then, when Gabriel arrives at the Weils’ door to ask Otto for permission to marry Helaine, his willingness to marry her with her consent, despite her father’s refusal, indicates the increased freedom she will gain outside the family home. When faced with the possibility of having to stay versus the potential freedom and happiness associated with leaving, Helaine knows that “The last thing [she wanted] was to remain alone and a prisoner in her parents’ house” (73). She’s even willing to be estranged from her mother to obtain the freedom she craves; by leaving, she takes control of her own life.
The City of London
For Louise, London represents the kind of freedom Helaine finds outside her home in Paris. Louise associates the city with independence and a sense of purpose, as it’s where she lived during her youth, before she was saddled with the responsibilities of wife- and motherhood. Thus, the city is both a setting and a motif that highlights The Interplay Between One’s Past and Identity.
In her suburban home with Joe, Louise feels discontented and unfulfilled by her life. She lacks a distinct sense of purpose, sensing that her life lacks meaning compared to the way it used to feel. In London, she says, “As I make my way down Regent Street, my stride grows more confident with each step. Suddenly, I am that Louise, the wartime one who was independent with a life and purpose of her own, and it is as if none of the intervening years ever happened” (75). When she lived in London as a young, unmarried woman, she could dispose of her time how she wanted, and so she volunteered with the Red Cross during the war to do something significant and contribute to the war effort. This work made her feel valuable in a way that mothering her twins and working part-time in a suburban thrift shop do not.
Louise conceives of her postwar life outside London as limiting and restrictive. Meeting Ian again in London confirms her present sense of purposeless. She references the “social contract [that] was rewritten after the war” (81): Ian was free to continue his important work with the Red Cross and, later, the Foreign Office, while she is expected to happily submit to a much smaller and more tightly circumscribed life than the one she knew before. Worse, she feels guilty about her feelings, claiming, “Despite my restlessness at the constraints of my current life, I love my husband and children” (110). She loves her family, but she nonetheless associates her life outside London with “constraints,” against which she chafes uncomfortably. London, on the other hand, remains a place where she felt vital and purposeful—a painful contrast between her past and present that she must ultimately resolve by being more honest with Joe.
The Gold Heart Locket
The two halves of Helaine’s gold heart locket represent love and connection to loved ones, becoming a key symbol that emphasizes The Enduring Effects of Trauma and Loss. Helaine’s grandmother initially gave her one half, keeping the other half for herself, and so Helaine grew to associate the necklaces with the love she and her grandmother shared, “creating a kind of connection between them when they could not see one another” (71). Upon Helaine’s confinement to her family’s home, and later, when her grandmother dies and Helaine takes possession of both halves, she begins to associate the necklace with the trauma of her prolonged confinement and the loss of her childhood and loved one.
Later, when Helaine gifts one half of the necklace to Gabriel, she feels that “it was not just a necklace, but a promise they were making to one another” (136). She associates the locket both with her love for Gabriel and her sense of loss when he must leave Paris and travel into Nazi Germany, similar to the way it represented her love for and loss of her grandmother. Though others accuse Gabriel of being a traitorous collaborator, the fact that he still has the necklace proves to Helaine that “she could trust her husband. He was a good man, and he loved her deeply. He gestured toward the necklace. ‘I’m never without it,’ he said” (251).
Louise also associates the necklace with love and loss. After she finds one half in a box at the thrift shop, she says that its “turning up after so many years is like a sign […]. Like Franny calling to me from beyond the grave, reminding me of the promise I had left unfulfilled” (84). The fact that the necklace resurfaces some 10 years after she initially saw it, parallels and represents the way her trauma and sense of loss concerning Franny and her dismissal from the Red Cross continue to affect her life. Likewise, when she meets Helaine, she realizes that Helaine also still suffers trauma’s effects. When the necklace is, once again, found—this time among Ian’s things—it is returned to Helaine and Gabriel, enabling the heart to once again become complete.
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