The Life Cycle of the Common Octopus

“Alice had grown early into a tall and striking young woman with the coloring and survival instinct of a lioness, while Pen, a late bloomer, had usually been the smallest and quickest in their class, with the glow-in-the-dark eyes and skittish flinch of a black house cat.”

Throughout the novel, Pen and Alice act as foils to one another. In this passage, they are both compared to felines, but while Alice is a bold “lioness,” Pen is a “black housecat” who is prone to hiding and self-effacement. As the novel progresses, Pen’s coming-of-age journey will require her to take on some of the boldness of the lioness in order to meet a new range of social and emotional challenges.

“‘Arcadia. I’m Thomasina.’ ‘Et in Arcadia ego,’ Julian said. He held the door open for her. ‘Even in Arcadia, here am I,’ he added more quietly, as she passed under his arm.”

This quotation is an allusion to Tom Stoppard’s play, “Arcadia,” as well as to the classical Latin phrase “Et in Arcadia ego.” Arcadia is a term for a paradise or utopia, but it was common for paintings depicting this fabled setting to include a skull emblazoned with the abovementioned phrase in order to remind viewers that death was still present there. In this scene, Julian’s statement simultaneously shows off his classical knowledge and also foreshadows his role as an antagonist in the text, for in a figurative sense, he is the “death” that awaits Alice in Arcadia.

“It was almost as if Pen was hoping to find proof that divorce was a rare thing that required a special cause beyond human attraction stretching out of shape and fading into contempt, like a nice pair of underwear turned saggy and dishwater gray.”

With this whimsically unromantic simile that compares a miserable marriage to a dingey pair of underwear past its prime, Alice passes silent judgment on her friend’s obsession with understanding the reasons behind her parents’ marriage and divorce. Alice cannot understand Pen’s preoccupation with the issue, since, to her, divorce has always seemed to be a very logical conclusion to a marriage. This moment reveals Alice’s own biases, indicating that due to her own family’s troubles, she has been raised to see marriage as an essentially unhappy and unstable state of affairs.

“Nor was she familiar with the torpor that could threaten to submerge a person—from which Christina sprang each morning with a cold shower and brisk walk to the village, rituals that never failed to snap her back into the present tense—when a life that had looked so broad and open-ended at one time narrowed to a single corridor cluttered with promises.”

While the college-aged Pen holds an outsider’s perspective on the Lennox family, the adult Pen realizes that undercurrents existed in the family’s dynamics, even though her younger self remained unaware of them. For example, Christina’s happiness and self-sacrifice is also overshadowed by her conviction that her life has “narrowed,” denying her the “broad” vistas of opportunity that characterized her youth. By describing her life as “a single corridor cluttered with promises,” Christina expresses a sense of regret at her current lack of choices despite her overall contentment with the path that she has taken.

“Asking ten-year-old Pen if she knew her best friend was beautiful, however, would have been like asking her if she knew the walls of her parents’ kitchen were pale yellow. Of course she knew, but it wasn’t the point.”

Throughout the novel, Alice is continually harassed and underestimated because of her beauty. Pen knows that Alice is beautiful but sees this as an ordinary fact that is no more remarkable than the color of her parents’ kitchen. For her, “the point” is who Alice is as a person, and her loving regard for Alice is one of the foundational truths of their friendship.

“And yet, no matter how many precautions she took, whenever a teacher lectured a room full of students about an incident of academic theft, Pen felt about as clear of conscience as Lady Macbeth.”

This literary allusion to the dark, guilt-ridden figure of Shakespeare’s Lady Macbeth stands as an incongruous image next to the essentially innocent Pen, and the reference also highlights her academic perspective on life. Additionally, the simile suggests that Pen is so scrupulous a perfectionist that a teacher’s lecture on academic honesty makes her feel guilty even when she is not to blame. The exaggerated nature of the allusion also contributes to the passage’s humorous tone; in the play, Lady Macbeth has committed murders and hallucinates bloodstains on her hands, while Pen is guilty of nothing so melodramatic.

“She could see how easy it would be to relive her parents’ lives without quite choosing to, the way a toboggan finds its way into the pre-compressed path of whoever went before. She wanted to better understand the route they had taken, so she didn’t fall into it by mistake.”

Pen worries that she is doomed to repeat her parents’ mistakes and imagines their path as a metaphorical sled route. Fearing that her parents’ choices have blazoned a path that she is now doomed to follow, she describes their choices as “pre-compressed” tracks that compel her unwilling feet in an ill-advised direction. Her attempts to solve the mystery of their divorce are therefore revealed to be attempts to free herself from this dubious legacy.

“‘Your mother has a weak immune system,’ they said. ‘She just needs rest.’ It wasn’t until afterward that she realized the phrase ‘your mother’ was a bad sign.”

When Pen’s mother, Anna, has a mental health crisis, the divisions fracturing Pen's family widen. On one side is her mother, while on the other side are her father and her judgmental paternal grandmother. The use of the pronoun “your” serves to emphasize this divide, separating the collective entity of the Winter family from Anna and Pen alike.

“She felt a pang of guilt for having chosen artificial stimulants while others worked up honest endorphins on elliptical machines.”

When Pen lights a cigarette outside the student gym, she is sensitive to the glares that she receives from other students, and her self-consciousness once again emphasizes her skittish “house cat” nature. Rather than ignoring her peers’ disapproval, she feels guilty for using “artificial stimulants” instead of “honest endorphins.” Her diction indicates that she feels morally culpable for smoking, and it is also clear that she is still overly concerned with the opinions of others.

“At first, she had found this funny. It had been one of their games. The idea of a power struggle, mutually conceived, had excited them both. Now she tensed her muscles to shake him off and he twisted his ankles to hold her feet in place. But her resistance, she knew, was what kept him on top of her.”

As Alice describes Julian’s habit of lying on top of her and deliberately holding her beneath him after they have sex, this passage clearly outlines his fixation upon maintaining a more powerful position in the relationship, both physically and emotionally. The power struggle inherent in this moment shows that Alice is literally and metaphorically suffocated by the relationship, and the threat of violence in Julian’s actions foreshadows his willingness to assault her outright when she finally decides to break up with him.

“Studying hard forced her out of the claustrophobic recesses of her mind. She had sunk with relief into worlds in which she did not exist and emerged feeling peaceful and strong.”

When Pen feels depressed over romantic issues, she becomes energized by studying for exams, seeing this activity as a form of escape from her worries. She perceives her own mind as “claustrophobic” and finds freedom in knowledge, where she can focus on something besides herself. This reminds her that there is a world beyond her youthful romance, and that she can still be “peaceful and strong” without Sasha.

“His kiss reflected this. There was something starched and formal in it. Like a neatly wrapped bar of guest soap. But Pen’s mind was in the library scene from Atonement, and she wasn’t in the mood for guest soap.”

Pen humorously imagines Fergus’s kiss as “guest soap” in a formal bathroom when what she really wants is the passion of the affair depicted in Ian McEwan’s novel, Atonement. The mismatch in expectations and the overall lack of passion in Pen and Fergus’s interaction indicates that the two do not have the chemistry to be a fitting couple.

“Pen felt as if she had been born prematurely and had somehow managed to return to the safety of the womb, where she wouldn’t have to breathe for herself any longer.”

When Pen compares her the return to Anna’s house as a return to the “womb,” Knight obliquely invokes The Sacrifices of Motherhood, for Pen still imagines that her mother can protect her from the worries and threats of the world. As Pen wistfully hopes that she will no longer have to carry her burdens alone, she temporarily sheds her newfound layers of maturity and returns to a child’s view of motherhood as a well of love and compassion.

“They reminded her of a version of herself that she had lost for a while and then, slowly, beginning when Pen was small, built back up into existence.”

As Anna reflects on her affection for the students roaming her neighborhood, she sees a younger version of herself in their antics. However, her ruminations take a more serious turn when she is also reminded of the moment when she came out of a deep depression and began to rebuild her life alongside Pen. This characterization reveals that Anna’s her approach to motherhood is very different than Margot’s, demanding neither total selfishness nor total sacrifice.

“By dragging her own name, quite deliberately, through the mud, Pen intended to free herself from the useless burden of other people’s expectations.”

In a reversal of roles, Pen becomes the bold one in her friendship with Alice, who grows more timid after Julian assaults her. In this scene, Pen steps out of the shadows to protect her friend, believing that if she allows people to associate her with Julian’s downfall, she will be able to protect Alice from unwelcome questions and memories. This moment shows the growth of both characters as they rise to meet unexpected life challenges.

“She floated in the hot bath for an unreasonably long time, letting her hair fan around her face, imagining herself in a river surrounded by flowers, like that painting of Ophelia that hung in the Tate, which she found at once eerily beautiful and intensely depressing.”

This passage once again emphasizes Pen’s academic inclinations, as well as her penchant for referring to her own life in dramatic Shakespearean terms. In the bath, Pen imagines herself as the doomed Ophelia in Waterhouse’s famous painting. This idea reflects her fears of losing her virginity and her apprehensions about the budding romance with Sasha. The passage strikes a deliberate tone of ambiguity, suggesting her uncertainty over whether she is a beautiful object of desire or a girl doomed by her first encounter with love.

“She and Pen had been friends since well before they had discovered the need to construct an outer shell, like that of an invertebrate animal, to protect the soft inner substance of the self.”

Continuing the novel’s thematic preoccupation with marine life, Alice imagines her childhood self as a soft creature without a protective shell. Her longstanding friendship with Pen means that she can still be her vulnerable self in her friend’s presence, rather than having to pretend to be someone tougher or more capable. Alice also reminds herself that vulnerability is one of the joys of friendship.

“Her mother’s writing had hardly changed. It made Pen think of her own name printed in bleeding Sharpie ink on the tag of every baseball cap, beach towel, and pillowcase that had once gone in her trunk to sleepover camp.”

Paging through her mother’s journal, Pen is struck with nostalgia by the sight of Anna’s unchanged handwriting. Seeing the pages as echoes of her mother’s past self, she realizes that the young person who wrote the journal is also the same woman who prepared Pen for summer camp and nurtured her progress from childhood to adulthood. She realizes that her mother was a different person before motherhood, and she begins to understand some of the sacrifices that motherhood might demand.

“There is little room for a mother’s self-interest in the narrative. There is only the selfish monster and the octopus.”

With this blunt, uncompromising statement, Margot sets up a dichotomy between “good” mothers and “bad” mothers, using the symbol of the octopus. She believes that mothers either give up their selfhood or are shamed for being selfish, and she can conceive of no compromise between these two conceptions. However, Pen thinks of Christina and her own mother and eventually comes to reject Margot’s idea that these overexaggerated caricatures are the only options for mothers to choose.

“He’d given Alice only one note, absently, while fingering his plum-colored ascot: ‘Remember: you have no sense of yourself as an object of desire. You’re a child. You’re conscious only of the power of your mind.’ The thought had made her want to cry.”

When Alice hears this advice from her director on how best to embody the role of Thomasina, she is struck by how different her experience of this character is from her experience of her own body. Throughout her life, she has become accustomed to being constantly objectified, even by her teachers, and she now finds an unexpected sense of both freedom and grief in the idea that she might instead occupy a space in which she is “conscious only of the power of [her] mind.”

“Nicola was generous with her love. She chose to be. She did not punish others for their weakness. Maybe, Alice thought, that was a position of strength, in its way.”

Alice has always despised her mother’s generosity as weakness, but in this moment, she realizes that her mother’s ideas about love might indicate her strength. This scene shows Alice’s own growth as she shifts away from the idea of relationships as games of power and grows to appreciate their moments of shared generosity or vulnerability. Her thoughts on this topic also foreshadow her potential to embark upon a healthier relationship with Charlie.

“It’s my daughter, he would say by way of apology. This would make him look good. A family man, doing his duty. No one ever spoke of a family woman, Pen thought. The phrase sounded ridiculous.”

In her fury at her father’s lies, Pen reflects on the fact that patriarchal culture often eases the way for fathers, allowing men a sense of agency that is categorically denied to women. Pen’s father can be praised as a “family man” for doing the bare minimum, but Pen’s reflection on the seeming absurdity of the phrase “family woman” indicates the inherent bias in a society that views such phrasing as redundant, given that women are expected to remain focused on the domestic sphere rather than pursuing external ambitions. This scene also marks the moment in which she begins to perceive her father as a flawed person.

“It was bright with daylight. She stood in front of the small, unsigned painting between the doorway and the old-fashioned bellpull. In it, a furious sea, rocked by waves, unbound by horizon, confronted the sky.”

While viewing Sasha’s grandmother’s painting, Pen reflects on the constraints that women commonly experienced in the past. The painting is unsigned and was treated as a byproduct of a useless hobby. In this context, the painting’s “furious sea,” which remains “unbound by horizons” and “confront[s] the sky,” takes on a new significance, standing as a symbol of unrestrained strength and passion even though the person who wielded the brush remained bound by the expectations of a society that failed to value her talent.