60 pages • 2 hours read
Catherine MarshallChristy
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 1967A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 30-38Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 30 Summary
Tom’s death brings a sense of gloom to the Cove, and the mission staff—David in particular—are disheartened. Miss Alice adjusts her schedule to remain in Cutter Gap and console David, encouraging him to continue in the real work of the mission: touching hearts with the love of God. They agree on the necessity of confronting evil, but Miss Alice encourages David not to focus solely on changing external behaviors but to preach so clearly about spiritual truths that people’s hearts are transformed.
David is still uncertain about his calling to ministry in the long term, and he confides some of his feelings in Christy. He also surprises her with a proposal of marriage but insists that she think about it and not answer right away. Christy is flattered and feels warmly toward David, but there is always a hint of uncertainty in his convictions, both about faith and romantic love, that unsettles her.
Chapter 31 Summary
Fairlight continues her reading lessons, and her friendship with Christy deepens and blossoms. Together, they cherish moments in the woods and mountains, and Fairlight opens her eyes in a new way to the beauty of nature and the rhythms of mountain life. Meanwhile, Christy contemplates David's proposal and his growing affection for her, all while still wrestling with the crisis of faith that Doctor MacNeill’s perspective has provoked in her. During one of Christy and Fairlight’s outings, they encounter Bird’s-Eye, who asks Christy to deliver a message to Opal McHone. Christy complies, passing along a letter in which Bird’s-Eye reveals that he is not the one responsible for Tom McHone’s death.
Chapter 32 Summary
The school year ends with a series of festivities at the mission, and the families crowd in to hear the presentations from the students, which include songs, recitations, and other academic performances. As with ordinary schooldays, the closing festivities have their share of drama, like when one of the student’s pet raccoons make an appearance, causing hound dogs to burst into the schoolhouse.
Christy is pleased with the progress her students have been making and looks forward to continuing her plans for expanding the reach of the mission school. With the school year over, she now plans to return home for a holiday. This will delay her response to David’s proposal, but he makes no protest to the idea—a lack of response that surprises her.
Chapter 33 Summary
Before Christy departs for Asheville, she pays a visit to Miss Alice for one more conversation. Miss Alice knows that Christy holds her in exceedingly high regard, and rather than let Christy cling to a misplaced perception, she decides to reveal her broken backstory.
As a girl, Miss Alice’s family would often play host to a visiting gentleman—a Quaker from England, admired as a spiritual leader and an influential preacher. Over the years, he becomes a familiar presence in Alice’s life, and she and her family trust him implicitly. Little by little, though, his intimacy and confidence in Alice takes a darker turn. When she turned 16, the preacher used his spiritual influence to convince her to disrobe for an especially spiritual experience, which turned out to be sexual assault. Her trusting nature was taken advantage of, and she became pregnant. Remarkably, the Quaker community supported Alice’s decision to keep the child. Rather than send her away, as was common in those days, they pledged to surround her and her child with love. This act of grace shapes much of the way Miss Alice sees the world. Her child, a daughter, grows up to marry Doctor MacNeill, bearing a striking resemblance to Christy.
Chapter 34 Summary
Back home, Christy realizes that while she has been transformed by her experience at Cutter Gap, her surroundings—friends, family, and home—have remained unchanged. She continues to reflect on Miss Alice’s story, now seeing her as a woman who has endured pain and tragedy yet emerged stronger and more compassionate. Christy learns that accepting others as they are aligns with God’s acceptance, transcending any gradations of goodness or effort. And if that is the case, then it applies not only to moral exemplars like Miss Alice but to ruffians and villains like the Taylor men.
As Christy’s visit at home draws to a close, her parents urge her to stay and resume her college studies, but Christy cannot envision leaving Cutter Gap without finishing what she started. On her return journey, Christy makes a detour to Knoxville to meet with Hazen Smith and several of the town’s influential ladies. One of them introduces Christy to the methodology of the Danish Folk Schools, which aim to empower older individuals by teaching them literacy, writing, and vocational skills. Christy is invigorated by these ideas and immediately begins dreaming of applying them to the Cutter Gap. David meets her to accompany her back to the Cove, and along the way, he asks about where his proposal stands. Although she intends to say yes to him at that moment, she is surprised to find another answer coming out instead: “I care a lot for you, David. But I need a little time to be sure about marriage” (388).
Chapter 35 Summary
After Christy’s return to Cutter Gap, one of the biggest events in Cutter Gap kicks off: Ruby Mae’s wedding. David regards the wedding as a mark of the mission’s failure toward the girl, but Christy sees it as the fruit of her labors of reconciliation on behalf of Ruby Mae and her family. Initially, David hesitates to officiate the ceremony, hoping to encourage the couple to wait and bemoaning the traditional place of alcohol at the festivities. However, he ultimately relents, believing that God’s blessing accompanies their commitment.
After David’s ceremony, the true mountain celebration commences with food, dancing, and the symbolic belling of the bride (using a barrage of raucous noise to coax the bride from the house). Christy is struck by the honest and forthright way that the mountain people deal with the place of sex in marriage, holding a prominent place as an open secret in the middle of the festivities rather than shrouded in the prudish silence of her home society. Doctor MacNeill takes an interest in Christy at the occasion, and they dance together to the mountain music.
Chapter 36 Summary
Fall comes to the Cove with rich color and beauty, but while Christy has grown to appreciate such wonder around her, she still feels unsettled in her soul. Her potential engagement to David is particularly troubling since David seems reticent to explicitly express his love for her. Despite this, Christy remains focused on expanding educational opportunities for the adults in the Cove. She delves into a book on the Danish Folk Schools, which provides insights on addressing the educational challenges she observes, particularly among adults. Miss Alice and Doctor MacNeill express interest, but David remains skeptical, viewing the mountain folk as inherently lazy. Christy feels annoyed and confused at his lack of support for her ideas, thus compounding the mixed feelings she was already experiencing toward him.
Chapter 37 Summary
Christy grapples with the intense superstitions prevalent among the highlanders, many of which touch the families closest to her. Young Zady Spencer confides her fear of the dark, dreading encounters with ghosts. In response, Christy imparts a comforting song, emphasizing God’s protective care. This is something of a new idea for the girl, as most of the mountain people are taught to consider God as an object of fear rather than of comfort and solace.
It’s not just the children who are touched by superstition, either—Fairlight fears the shadow cast by the mountain across her cabin. Christy attributes this unease to the cabin’s location: opposite a towering pinnacle that, when the sun sets, plunges the dwelling into premature darkness. For Fairlight, however, the shadow signifies something deeper: the encroaching presence of death. Christy does not know how to respond and Fairlight seems to expect no response, since death’s coming is viewed as being something as certain as the sun going down: “And even as I watched, the sun dipped behind the peak and the heinous gloom slanted across her upturned face” (417).
Chapter 38 Summary
In early October, Zady appears at the mission to summon Christy to her mother’s side. Christy rushes to the Spencer cabin, where the children are waiting for her, but her friend Fairlight is nowhere to be seen. The eerie silence inside the cabin alarms Christy. Fairlight is in bed, suffering from an illness and a high, hallucinatory fever. As the children rush to fetch the doctor and complete the other tasks their teacher gives them, Christy assesses Fairlight and is confused and frightened by the symptoms she sees. Fairlight slips in and out of delirium, sometimes playful and sometimes agonizing. Fairlight speaks of death, but Christy brushes off the idea, assuring her the doctor is on his way. The terror of the illness grips her most strongly when the shadow of the mountain begins to creep across the cabin, and Christy is horrified as she watches Fairlight succumb just when the shadow reaches her. Death has taken her friend, and Doctor MacNeill arrives at the scene to give a grim assessment: typhoid has taken its first victim of the season.
Chapters 30-38 Analysis
These chapters offer a lull in the rising action which was precipitated by the first crisis (the moonshine affair and the death of Tom McHone) before leading into the second crisis, which will bring the story to its climax. In these chapters, the characters must deal with the lingering effects of the first crisis, as those effects have changed the nature of life in Cutter Gap. A sense of gloom surrounds the mission as having failed to forestall violence in the area and the McHone and Taylor families that have been directly and permanently disrupted by its fallout.
With the tension between the locals falling off into this unhappy lull, the story shifts its main attention back to Christy’s inner development and the emerging romantic storyline of the novel. Catherine Marshall uses the story of Christy’s retreat to her home in Asheville to show the growth in her character. Whereas she had initially set out from Asheville full of questions as to where she belonged and whether she was fit for the kind of service this mission posting would require, now those questions have given way to a sense of certainty. She knows she belongs in Cutter Gap, and that her former life in Asheville—so culturally and materially different than the Cove—can no longer satisfy her.
While she has come to a sense of certainty about her purpose, she is still dealing with serious questions regarding her faith. The theme of Faith Amid Suffering and Loss thus holds a central place in these chapters, preparing the way for the crisis of the climax. While Miss Alice’s earlier advice about faith and doubt helped and encouraged her, Christy still feels unsettled at times, and the death of her best friend, Fairlight Spencer, sets her up for an even more agonized road of doubt ahead. For Fairlight, who loved the beauty of the mountains, to die taken by an illness and with the fear of an old superstition about the mountain’s shadow threatens to challenge Christy’s faith at an even deeper level.
The theme of Toughness and Resilience in the Face of Adversity emerges once again in these chapters, but by this point in the novel, Christy is no longer the primary object of the theme. While she is tough and resilient, as she has proven repeatedly throughout the novel, the later chapters of the book consistently relate how she is struck by the toughness and resilience of others around her, from locals like Opal McHone to mission staff like Miss Alice. In this section of the novel, Miss Alice’s strength and resilience are cast in a new light by the revelation of her traumatic backstory.
This also engages the motif of secrets, as the story she tells about her youth discloses a life-altering sequence of events, of which Christy had been entirely unaware. As with Doctor MacNeill’s secrets, Miss Alice’s secrets, once revealed, show the depth and virtues of her character in new ways. The narrative of the traumatic sexual abuse and rape she experienced as a girl gives added insight into the growth of her character from that point on. Although Miss Alice intends for the story to temper Christy’s admiration for her, it has the opposite effect: it shows just how admirably resilient Miss Alice is, and Christy admires her even more.
The emerging romantic storyline of the novel also develops significantly in these chapters. For the first time, Doctor MacNeill is revealed to be a significant romantic interest in the plot, one who has developed an affection for Christy. David, however, remains the main love interest for the present, largely because he advanced his romantic overtures to the point of proposing marriage. The sequence of events and reflections surrounding David’s proposal are useful for analyzing his role as a character in the novel. Christy is left with uncertainties about David, not because she isn’t fond of him but because she senses a lukewarm hesitancy in his manner and a lack of commitment. He seems to withhold something of himself and can never fully come to the place of avowing his need for Christy and declaring his love for her in unconditioned terms.
This aspect of David’s character is not limited to his romantic interactions, though. It is also the same character flaw that comes up in the novel’s assessment of his religious faith and his commitment to his vocational calling in ministry. Whenever pressed for a theological answer, he comes across as strangely halfhearted, and the challenges of working in the Cove seem to have him questioning his calling to the pastorate. Catherine Marshall uses the romantic storyline, then, to bring out and accentuate the traits of both the doctor and David and their differing influence on and understanding of the local community. These differences gradually become better understood in Christy’s perception.
