Fates and Furies

“She’d be a teenager until they killed her off and then she’d play mothers and wives. Woman in narratives were always defined by their relations.”

Susannah’s early career as an actress describes the broader scale of women in western literature, especially when written by male authors, and examples of this can be seen in Groff’s novel. For instance, Mathilde is obsessed with finding a home through family and loses herself as a wife, as does Antoinette, who had professional dreams before becoming a wife and mother. Further, from Lotto’s point of view, both his mom and his Aunt Sallie do not seem to have any outside interests besides caring for his well-being because he is the center of his own universe.

“‘There’s a wife,’ Lancelot said. ‘Mathilde. She’s a saint. One of the purest people I’ve ever met. Just morally upright, never lies, can’t bear a fool’ […] ‘The grand love story then,’ Leo said lightly. ‘But it’s exhausting to live with a saint.’”

Mathilde and Lotto both harbor the false idea that their partner is viewed as perfect by others. The statement is ironic because Mathilde is the opposite of a saint while Lotto leaves in a dream world and lets those close to him take care of him.

“Boys belong to their mothers. Cord cut decades ago, but they’ll always share the warm, dark swim.”

The passage explains why Antoinette can’t make room for Mathilde. Having carried and birthed Lotto, and raised him to be the eloquent writer and good person he became, Antionette feels a sense of ownership to his success that she feels Mathilde isn’t owed, despite Mathilde’s contributions. Antoinette’s bond with Lotto is unbreakable no matter how long they are semi-estranged.

“If he said a woman’s creative genius went into her babies, what did it mean about Mathilde, a woman who had none? That she was lesser? Lesser than other women who did? Lesser than he was, who created? But he didn’t think so, not at all!”

When Lotto puts his foot in his mouth during a university panel, he doesn’t care how the audience reacts to him or how his career will fare in the aftermath; rather, his priority is fixing things with Mathilde after she walks out upset over his remarks. By devaluing his childless wife, Lotto worries that she will leave him, while Mathilde worries that Lotto’s desire for children will end their marriage.

“Marriage is made of lies. Kind ones, mostly. Omissions. If you give voice to the things you think every day about your spouse, you’d crush them to paste. She never lied. Just never said.”

In Lotto’s final moments, he has a vision of imaginary advice from his dead mother to put his mind at peace on the subject of his flawed marriage. In finding out Mathilde had been Ariel’s sugar baby before she and Lotto met, Lotto’s belief that he was her savior is eviscerated and deeply changes his perception of her.

“He’d only ever cared about money when it came to his own comfort; otherwise, he left it for others to worry about.”

Lotto, in believing the world is his oyster, never thinks about the consequences of following his dreams and chasing adoration. In loving Mathilde, he doesn’t care about his mother’s feelings or his inheritance. And yet, on the flipside, in pursuing acting, Lotto doesn’t notice the financial strain he puts on Mathilde to support them by having to return to Ariel, budget, and find odd jobs.

“She had a self she didn’t devote to him. For one thing, she wrote, and not just invisibly, which he must have thought magically tidied themselves up in the night. She wrote her own things that she kept to herself […] During the same time she began to write, she left him. He was wrapped up in his work. She came back and he never knew she was gone.”

In Lotto’s mind, Mathilde made minor contributions to his writing: a title here and there, feedback and encouragement. However, the extent she played a hand in his success reveals not only that she was crucial in regard to motivation and management, but essential in the actual creative process. That Lotto doesn’t pay any mind to what Mathilde does when she’s not around illustrates how egocentric he can be.

“It was out of the question that Leo Sen’s body could steal her husband; it was not out of the question that with his genius Leo could take her place in Lotto’s affections. This was worse.”

As evidenced by her business arrangement with Ariel, Mathilde does not view sex as intimate, nor is sex what she appreciates the most in her marriage. What Mathilde fears in Lotto’s relationship with his mother and with Leo is emotional cheating, and that either person might take away her monopoly on Lotto’s devotion. Mathilde craves love because she was denied it as a child, and she doesn’t grasp that love can be shared.

“Here was the Mathilde she’d grown so accustomed to, the one who had never not fought. Hers was a quiet, subtle warfare, but she had always been a warrior. That poetess was imaginary, she had to tell herself; the skinny musician named Leo had nothing on her because he was a boy, and he was powerless. Of course, she would prevail. How dare she walk away.”

Here, we see Mathilde rediscover belief in her ability to make Lotto all hers. Because Mathilde is so consumed by self-loathing and the belief that she’s bad, she lives in a sort of constant fear that Lotto will discover who she perceives herself to be and find someone else to be with. Therefore, Mathilde sees people who could be allies and friends—Antionette and Leo, for example—as competition, first and foremost.

“She looked at him looking at her. A new understanding came into his face and then vanished; he was frightened by this glimpse of what he was in her and wouldn’t watch it unfurl.”

Lotto rarely views Mathilde as anything less than pure, but he sees a different side of her in the moment after she’s planted a newspaper to show Lotto that Leo Sen has drowned. In wanting to appreciate his reaction, Mathilde shows her dark side, but Lotto still refuses to accept the reality of Mathilde’s coldness, even when right in front of it.

“In the height of her happiness many years later, she would think of that solitary little girl, face downturned like a demure fucking bellflower, while inside there was the maelstrom. She’d want to smack that kid hard. Or pick her up in her arms and cover her eyes and run with her somewhere safe.”

By the time Mathilde has become an adult, she’s shut herself off from her softer emotions. Had Mathilde kept herself open to love, despite being denied it, or had she not experienced such a harsh upbringing, than her relationships could have been more fulfilling in her adult life. For someone who becomes such an advocate for her own survival, Mathilde nonetheless remains passive in her emotional needs. As with most childhood development problems, if they are caught early enough they can be fixed. In this case, Aurelie could have been saved, and would not have wound up as Mathilde.

“And poor Lotto had always longed for a kid of his own. With you out of the way, he could have had the kid he wanted. And we all wanted to give him what he wanted. Didn’t we.”

Here, Chollie justifies his decision to have Ariel spill Mathilde’s sordid past and sabotage her marriage by overvaluing Lotto and Mathilde’s connection to each other through sex. Chollie seeks revenge on Mathilde for denying Lotto what he wanted out of life. Chollie and Mathilde share a possessive love for Lotto because they do not possess this trait and he makes them be better people. As the only person both of them truly love, their happiness is centered around Lotto’s happiness.

“Great swaths of her life were white space to her husband. What she did not tell him balanced nearly with what she did. Still there were untruths made of silences, and Mathilde had only ever lied to Lotto in what she never said.”

It’s interesting to note that Mathilde believes that some of the best moments in her marriage to Lotto—the most virtuous moments—are based on quiet if not silent moments together. Here, we see another side of silence: lies through omission. Lotto retains an idealized version of Mathilde, and Mathilde, in turn, seems to believe she needs to withhold large swaths of her past from Lotto.

“He saw clear through and understood. […]‘We’re lonely down here,’ he said. ‘It’s true. But we’re not alone.’”

Lotto knows Mathilde in ways she does not know herself. He sees the good in her where she cannot. While a lot of what he thinks about in regard to her isn’t true, Mathilde aspires to be his ideal of her, rather than her actual self, because Lotto has filled dispelled her loneliness.

“The long arms of both galaxies will reach longingly out and grasp hands at the last moment, and they will come spinning back in the opposite direction, their legs entwined but never hitting until the second swirl becomes a clutch, a dip, a kiss. And then, at the very center of things, when they are at their closest, there will open a supermassive black hole.”

Groff’s analogy of two celestial bodies resonates with the idea that in the joining of two people, catastrophic things can occur, including the loss of individuality. In getting to know another person deeply, there is a pattern of getting too close and getting lost in them.

“What was this mania for universal admiration? Mathilde knew herself unworthy of the love of a single soul, and he wanted the love of everyone.”

Mathilde, in thinking herself unworthy of love, doesn’t allow others to get to know her, while Lotto craves attention because he feels entitled to it. Both adapt themselves to be loveable to those they cherish but Mathilde finds it more meaningful to be favored by those who mean something to her, while Lotto is indiscriminate and seeks universal praise. Lotto is in love with being loved while Mathilde is loved for being in love.

“‘He is. Great American Artistitis.’ Phoebe said. ‘Even bigger. Even louder. Jostling for the highest perch in the hegemony. You don’t think that’s some sort of sickness that befalls men when they try to do art in this country? Tell me, why did Lotto write a war play? Because works about war always trump works about emotions, even if the smaller more domestic plays are better written, smarter, more interesting. The war stories are the ones that get prizes. But your husband’s voice is strongest when he speaks most quietly and clearly.’”

A high point in Lotto’s career is getting a good review from his one harsh critic, Phoebe Delmar. However, it doesn’t change his style. When Mathilde befriends Phoebe at a private event, she keeps coy and carefully crafts Lotto’s next work to be conducive to Phoebe’s insight. Mathilde respects Phoebe’s determination to make Lotto a better writer, and one who respects the art of the craft.

“Mathilde knew how her life would go if she let it. Already, she knew that she and Lotto would be married if she seeded the thought in his brain. The question was if she could let him off the hook. Practically anyone would be better for him than she would be.”

Here, we see how analytical and conniving Mathilde can be. In some ways, she understands that she’ll be bad for Lotto, and weighs this against her owns wants and needs—a mode of behavior that can be viewed as pathological. For Mathilde, everything is planned and plotted.

“She shouldn’t have. She knew it. But her love for him was new, and her love for herself was old, and she was all she’d had for so very, very long. She was weary of facing the world alone.”

Knowing Lotto would lose his inheritance and thus and that she’d be the cause of his relationship with his mother suffering, Mathilde still marries Lotto. What she offers him at the beginning of their married life together is replaceable due to his indiscriminate need to be loved, while her singular need to be loved can only be fulfilled by Lotto.

“There was also the worse reason, a darker one that he turned from quickly every time he brushed against it, a tarry fury that he ignored so long that, by now, it had become too enormous to contemplate.”

After years of postponing a visit his family home Florida, Lotto starts to become weary of Mathilde’s excuses. However, due to her years of supporting him and because Lotto thinks Mathilde is a saint, he is more trusting of her than ever and always pushes his doubts way. Yet it is little discrepancies like this that subconsciously add up and why Lotto immediately believes Ariel’s bombshell about Mathilde’s past, due to her previous lies of omission.

“She said, ‘Please. Let me see my son. Let Lancelot fly down to me.’ Capitulation. Mathilde waited, savoring. Antoinette sighed, and in the sigh, there was superiority, and Mathilde hung up without speaking.”

Mathilde seemingly wins the war for Lotto’s affection in her hanging up on Antionette. Shortly after, Mathilde has a change of heart, but before Mathilde can facilitate a Florida trip for Lotto, Antoinette dies. Mathilde has to live with the guilt that she will never be accepted by Antoinette and that she kept Lotto away from his mother.

“She’d shown him only her body, nothing real. Chollie could bring Gwennie to him, a mother. Mathilde could leave Land with something living. She could give Land and his uncle time.”

As Chollie is the only one who can offer Land access to many memories of Gwennie, who is Land’s birthmother, Mathilde sacrifices her own pride in thinking of how to get them together. While her selfish nature wins out once again and she never actually puts them in contact, and burns the documents that Rachel and Sallie gave her as proof that Gwennie and Lotto are Land’s parents, this shows that Mathilde does know how to do the correct, kind thing—she just chooses not to.

“How ugly a handsome man can sometimes be. Perhaps Land was a far better actor than she’d ever believe him to be; better, for sure, than Lotto had been. Well, she knew what that was like.”

When it’s revealed that Land has stolen Lotto’s manuscript, it becomes clear Land knew about his connection with Lotto before sleeping with his father’s wife. Mathilde, unaware of the connection until after, doesn’t realize the truth until it’s presented in the form of pictures and a birth certificate. The knowing look he gives her when she goes to see him in a play some years later shows he was skilled at playing a role to get what he wanted, much in the way Mathilde herself did in her marriage to Lotto.