53 pages • 1 hour read
Patrick DewittFrench Exit
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2018A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
Fire and Frances’s Lighter
Frances’s lighter appears in the opening paragraphs of the novel; it is symbolic of her power, and what she sees as her power’s source: her money, social class, and beauty. The lighter is gold, giving it clear financial value, but beyond that, Frances “liked this lighter best due to its satisfying weight, and the distinguished click! it made at the moment of ignition” (3). Its obvious value, sophistication, and beauty echo Frances herself.
Fire, more broadly is a founding element for Frances. Her father smelled of smoke, and the same smell on Franklin attracted her to him. As a child, Frances purposefully burned her room to attract her mother’s attention. This establishes fire as Frances’s way to assert, or reassert, her power, and the lighter becomes the portable, pocket-sized tool for this. She wields her lighter in the same way that she wields her money, class, and beauty. Just after she uses it with a hostess whose party she is leaving, she uses it again with a police officer: “She held up the lighter and lit it: click! The flame, stubby and blue-bottomed, was positioned between them, as though defining a border” (7). Frances uses the lighter to express emotion while separating herself from the other person.
Frances also uses the lighter, a physical manifestation of her power, to express herself without having to show any real passion or vulnerability. When their waiter in Paris ignores them, Frances puts up with it to a point, and then takes action: “she removed her lighter form her coat pocket: click! She held the flame to the bouquet and it went up in a ball” (92). Without saying a word, Frances has communicated the depth of her anger using the lighter.
In her last conversation with Susan, Frances begins with her customary disdain, punctuating it by lighting cigarettes ostentatiously. However, soon “Frances’s face softened, and she spoke in a tone Susan had never heard, no longer arch, but candid, and without spite” (217). Although she lights another cigarette during the course of the conversation, she doesn’t wield it in the same way, with the “click!” that Patrick deWitt always inserts when she’s wielding it.
It is notable also that Frances chooses to die by suicide in the bath. The water extinguishes the symbolic flame that is Frances.
Paris
Paris is the setting for French Exit, but it is also a motif that runs throughout Frances’s life and connects to the theme of The Circular Nature of Life’s Stages. Frances first went to Paris when she was young, and the relative freedom and anonymity she felt there became, for her, intrinsic to the city. When she returns later during her marriage with Franklin, Paris is changed for her—it is no longer a place of freedom but a place in which she is expected to act the part of Franklin Pierce’s wife. She understands that Paris is merely reflecting the strictures she feels in her marriage, and yet she still “stopped [going there], blaming the city” (218). The symbolism shifts from Paris representing freedom to a young Frances, to representing her new, restrictive position in her marriage and social class. After Franklin’s death, she rediscovers her love of Paris through Malcolm’s own interest in it; however, when she returns to Paris for the last time, staying in Joan’s apartment, it is an opportunity for Frances to reclaim Paris for herself. With her final return, Paris represents freedom to her once again, as it is the place where she rids herself of the remainder of her money and takes control of her life once again.
Fruit
For Frances, fruit symbolizes life, passion, and emotion, which, throughout her life, she has shut herself off from. Before they leave for Paris, when she and Malcolm check into the Four Seasons, that night “she had parched visions all through the night: a juicy plum eluded her, passed from hand to hand” (12). She is denied the pleasure of the “juicy” fruit. The first thing she does, upon waking, is to call room service and order a plum. Although is delivered on a “heavy, filigreed tray, […] it erred on the dry side, possessed no magic, and did nothing to lessen much less solve her deeper difficulties” (12). Although the plum is ordered from expensive room service, and presented magnificently, it is flavorless and disappointing: “She sat in the center of her overlarge, sunlit bed and ate it, hopeful for a valid experience” (12), but is dissatisfied.
This plum contrasts with the orange that Frances shares with a man in the park near the end of the novel. She admires the man, “who had been so courageous in the riot,” so much so that she “turned away in shyness” (165), a reaction both to her own emotional response to the man, and his open display of his own emotions. Although “His face was welted and decorated with multicolored bruises, […] he didn’t appear unhappy” (165). The man is open to the simple pleasure of eating his orange. Francis shows the development of her character, and her increased comfort with Finding Connection to Others, when she shares an orange with him and enjoys the simplicity of the act. Frances has gone from expecting the plum to “solve her deeper difficulties” (12), and not being able to enjoy or extract any flavor from it, to enjoying the simple experience of sharing the orange with the man. By the end of the novel, Frances has connected more directly with life, and deWitt emphasizes this shift by showing a change in the very way fruit tastes, and the pleasure taken in the simple act of eating it.
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