52 pages • 1 hour read
Katherine PatersonJacob Have I Loved
Fiction | Novel | Middle Grade | Published in 1980A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Sibling Rivalry and Its Emotional Impact
Louise’s rivalry with her twin sister is one of the central conflicts and themes of the novel. Louise, who identifies herself with the biblical Esau, another older twin who lives in his sibling’s shadow, believes that her fate is to be neglected and abandoned in favor of her sister, even as she also fights this situation. Much of this struggle is internal, meaning that the emotions it stirs up in Louise are largely repressed and come out only in violent confrontations. Moreover, Caroline seems blithely unaware of the depths of Louise’s resentment and is often surprised by her actions. Even their parents do not register Louise’s sense of rivalry.
Still, the painful consequences of this sibling rivalry are apparent when Louise explains that Caroline is the only one with the power “to slice [her] flesh clear through to the bone” (73) with a single glance or word. This highlights the reality of conflict between siblings. Though they are not close, Caroline is still the closest person in Louise’s life; whether they like it or not, their lives unfold in uncomfortably close proximity,
Louise compares herself to Caroline and finds herself lacking. Where Caroline is pretty and blonde, Louise is plain and dark. Even their hands mark them as different. Louise concludes that Caroline’s hands signify that she is artistic and successful. Meanwhile, Louise’s hands mark her as doomed to isolation and being trapped forever on Rass Island. Implicitly, Louise maintains the assumption that, while she can see through Caroline’s charming exterior, Caroline has no insight into her. These binary oppositions structure Louise’s sense of her own life, limiting her ability to imagine these relationships otherwise. Anything that someone does on Caroline’s behalf—especially the Captain’s funding of her education—can only appear in Louise’s mind as a rejection of her.
The Search for Identity and Independence
Louise’s search for identity and independence, another major theme of the novel, is deeply entangled with her sibling rivalry. One of several aspects that contribute to Louise’s search for identity is the feeling that she has been overshadowed by her sister and cannot form an identity separate from her sister. While this sensation contributes to her sibling rivalry, it also complicates her sense of identity and independence: Just as there is no Esau without Jacob, there is no Louise without Caroline.
Louise also struggles with her identity as a woman on Rass Island. Louise’s attraction to the water marks her out as unusual: “The women of my island were not supposed to love the water. Water was the wild, untamed kingdom of our men” (43). Water symbolizes the masculine world and Louise’s own masculine traits, yet the Captain tells Louise explicitly: “You were never meant to be a woman on this island. A man, perhaps. Never a woman” (216). Louise has been denied entry into this realm of men, and the identity and independence it represents. She must therefore leave the island to build a new identity for herself. This, as much as escaping her sister’s shadow, is why she finally leaves to attend college and eventually live in the Appalachian Mountains. Even here, however, her gender limits her choices. Her undergraduate adviser dissuades her from applying to the pre-med program, and Louise eventually becomes a nurse-midwife when she had once dreamed of being a doctor.
Part of her impetus for going to the mountains is also her need to divorce her identity from any resemblance to her grandmother, with whom she shares her name. She is determined to be nothing like her grandmother, who is fearful, hard, and mean after decades trapped on Rass Island, and decides that she would like to see mountains, something Grandma will never do. Moving to the mountains, as far from the island and water as she can manage, will prove once and for all that she has escaped her family’s expectations and the identity handed to her in her childhood. She will at last be her own independent person, with work she cares about and a family of her own. Ironically, even when she makes her own life as a nurse-midwife in the Appalachian Mountains, her love of water remains. She is attracted to the mountain village partially because it reminds her of Rass Island. She says that “a mountain-locked valley is more like an island than anything else” (232), with the Appalachian Mountains forming its own wild sea. Even more ironically, she realizes that the life she builds for herself there is more like her mother’s than she could have imagined, and she even marries a man who reminds her of her father. Thus, the identity she built to escape her childhood retains pieces of her old life in powerful ways.
Struggling With God in a Religious Society
Christianity in general—and Methodism in particular—pervades life on Rass Island and has done so since the 19th century. Those who do not attend the church, like the Captain and Auntie Braxton, are viewed as eccentric and possibly suspect, and the rhythms of the church structure everyday life. Religion is almost part of the landscape itself, from the spire of the Methodist church visible from the ferry to the messages of religious consolation etched on the tombstones that line the main street in the village. When Truitt Bradshaw sings to the oysters on his boat, the songs he chooses are hymns.
This is the setting in which the third major theme and conflict of the novel, struggling with God in a religious society, unfolds. Like the other villagers on Rass Island, Louise looks to the Bible to understand her place in the world; unlike those around her, she does so with an intensity that turns into self-hatred. The story of Jacob and Esau—and, to a lesser extent, Cain and Abel—sets the terms of her sibling rivalry and intensifies its emotional impact. Louise makes the connection clear in Chapter 6: “I hated my sister. I, who belonged to a religion which taught that simply to be angry with another made one liable to the judgment of God and that to hate was equivalent to murder” (74). Since Louise never discusses these feelings with anyone else, such as her mother, she has no one to help her contextualize them as being anything other than signs of her predetermined damnation. Indeed, the irony of Louise’s rage against God and “his monstrous almighty injustice” (76) and her desire to escape Rass to escape God is that the intensity of her feelings reflects a deep personal investment in the Bible that does not seem shared by the more conventionally religious people around her.
In a moment of humor, the Captain succeeds in making Louise laugh with a joke about the Bible. This too demonstrates Louise’s internal struggle with her faith and God. She is delighted by the suggestion that the Bible has nothing to say about how one speaks to cats, finding hope in the thought that there is at least one thing in the entire world that has not been dictated by God, the Bible, or the Methodist church. It is the sense of freedom she gleans from this thought that makes her laugh. However, she does not actually achieve freedom from God or her own guilt at this moment. In fact, her guilt and fear of damnation only heightens as she befriends the Captain and then develops romantic feelings for him. She fears that “anything that made a person feel the way [she] felt in that moment had to be a deadly sin” (132). Her fears of damnation, already fueled by her resentment for her sister, are further ignited by guilt over her romantic and sexual attraction to the Captain, which she knows to be inappropriate.
When the Captain reveals that he is giving Caroline money to go to boarding school in Baltimore, this marks not only the final blow in Louise’s sibling rivalry conflict but also triggers her final blow from God. At this, her lowest moment, Grandma cannot resist tormenting her with the words of Romans 9:13: “As it is written, Jacob have I loved, but Esau have I hated” (178). Louise, upon looking up this verse, concludes that she has been cast away by God, her heart as hardened as her hands. She announces to herself that, “there was, then, no use struggling or even trying” (181). However, this is not the end of Louise’s struggles with God because Christianity is inescapable on Rass Island—as it is in the Appalachian Mountains where she lives as an adult. Here, it takes the form of Catholicism, which to Louise seems strange and even suspect, but it imbues the life of Joseph and others much as Methodism saturated the entirety of Rass Island. Louise remains non-religious, but by the end of the novel, she is more at peace with her position and more willing to accept its cultural influence.
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