54 pages • 1-hour read
Major Pettigrew's Last Stand
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Symbols & Motifs
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of racism, gender discrimination, death, and suicidal ideation.
The Major’s Guns
The set of Churchill shotguns comes to symbolize the legacy of the Pettigrew family and, more largely, the value of preserving tradition. The guns also represent the values of sportsmanship to which the Major adheres, which includes fair play, decent behavior, dignity, and respect for women and children. From yet another perspective, the guns symbolize the Major and his brother, reflecting the separate lives they led and their lack of reconciliation at the end of Bertie’s life. Finally, as a superior and highly respected British creation, the guns stand for the attitudes of British superiority that spurred the expansion of the British Empire and its colonial control over lands like India.
E.J. Churchill is a British-based company that has been manufacturing shotguns since 1891. Churchill shotguns are highly regarded for their performance, reliability, and quality craftsmanship. The guns, separately, are well-crafted works that were made in an era when British gunsmiths were considered the best in the world. Paired together, the set is valued at £100,000 sterling. The weapons are luxury items that exhibit excellent craftsmanship. Given these associations, they signal the Major’s loyalty to family tradition even as his wish to possess these family heirlooms also hints at his stubborn, vain sense of pride, for he enjoys being admired for his fine guns. The desire on the part of different characters to possess these guns—or the money that could be gained from selling them—also serves as a device that reveals the priorities of the Major, Roger, Marjorie, and Frank Ferguson. In the end, however, as a symbol of broken tradition and of two brothers parted by death, the Churchills remind the Major not to place too much pride in appearances.
The Shop
In a seemingly casual remark to the Major during one of their discussions, Mrs. Ali describes her shop as a small world unto itself. The shop symbolizes Mrs. Ali’s place in the village, but it also stands for the family obligations by which she feels bound. Because she ran the business with her husband, Ahmed, the shop represents Mrs. Ali’s own past and family traditions. However, like the Pettigrew guns, the shop becomes a point of contention among the Ali family members when people disagree on who deserves ownership.
The patriarchal traditions of her husband’s Pakistani family, which attributes greater authority to men and elders, dictate that Mrs. Ali should transfer the shop to her nephew, Abdul Wahid, so that he may use it to support himself and a wife and children. However, Mrs. Ali is reluctant to give up the freedom she has found in having her own space, free from the judgments of others. The shop therefore becomes the setting for The Tension Between Family Obligations and Personal Fulfillment.
Because the shop caters to the preferences of its consumers, it also reflects the larger battle playing out between Pakistani and British cultures, where elements like Mrs. Ali’s handmade samosas appear as “exotic” supplements to the traditionally British items on display. At the conclusion of the novel, Mrs. Ali decides to transfer the shop ownership to Abdul Wahid so that she might marry the Major, and this development shows that she, like the Major, has chosen passion rather than family obligation or tradition.
The Cliff
In its first appearance, the tall cliff along the park where the Major and Jasmina take George for their outdoor excursion simply seems to represent the hazards of the coast and the dangers that lurk in conventional English childhood for a boy like George, who doesn’t look like his white peers. Mrs. Ali’s involuntary warning to George reflects the instinctive maternal impulse to protect him from harm: an impulse that is confirmed when she later soothes George’s feelings after the white English mother tells her child not to play with the boy. The Major’s disregard of the steep cliff reflects his greater comfort with danger and the prevalence of his white privilege, which allows him to be readily accepted in a community where Mrs. Ali, Amina, and George are all marginalized because of their physical appearance.
Near the end, however, the cliff represents the chasm of hopelessness that Abdul Wahid believes he confronts: a crisis that stems from his inability to reconcile his love for Amina with his sense of obligation toward his faith and his family. The cliff, serving as a symbol of death, represents Abdul Wahid’s belief that death is the only way to be free of the suffering and shame that his choices have brought upon others. For the Major, the cliff represents an outcome that he cannot bear to witness; he knows that if Abdul Wahid were to die, Mrs. Ali could never be truly happy because she would never escape the belief that she was somehow to blame. The titular “last stand” occurs with the Major’s act of heroism in rewriting his father’s act of violence with one that insists on the preservation of life. While the cliff might still represent the dangers of the world, the Major proves that his only fear is to fail to live up to his own principles.
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