The Signature of All Things

“She wanted to understand the world, and she made a habit of chasing down information to its last hiding place.”

Alma’s wish for knowledge, to have questions answered to her satisfaction, is a definitive aspect of her personality. She is an emblem of an era obsessed with advancement and knowledge, while her ruthlessness in hunting down answers foreshadows her trip to Tahiti to find out the truth about Ambrose’s relationship with The Boy in his sketches.

“What Alma wanted to know most of all was how the world was regulated. What was the master clockwork behind everything? She picked flowers apart, and explored their innermost architecture. She did the same with insects, and with any carcass she ever found.”

This description shows Alma’s inquisitiveness, her appreciation for knowledge, her complete lack of squeamishness, and her wish to understand why things work—evidence of her scientific mind. This wish to understand the nature of things and the mechanism that runs them echoes the theme of the book and the title’s allusion to Boehme’s work concerning the signature of all things, and it also foreshadows the theory that Alma develops later about how the world functions.

“Prudence’s arrival changed everything at White Acre. Later in life, when Alma was a woman of science, she would better understand how the introduction of any new element into a controlled environment will alter than environment in manifold and unpredictable ways, but as a child, all she sensed was a hostile invasion and premonition of doom. Alma did not embrace her interloper with a warm heart. Then again, why should she have? Who among us has ever warmheartedly embraced an interloper?”

 Prudence, the same age but beautiful where Alma is clever, is a contrast and foil to Alma both physically and psychologically. This passage emphasizes how Alma sees the world in scientific principles and also highlights the streak of selfishness in her character, which Hanneke will force her to confront in an emotional turning point at the end of Part 3. The omniscient narrator demonstrates the ability to move about in time and to directly address the reader, enlisting their sympathy and support for Alma and closing the narrative distance.

“Alma loved botany, more by the day. It was not so much the beauty of plants that compelled her as their magical orderliness. Alma was a girl possessed by a soaring enthusiasm for systems, sequence, pigeonholing, and indexes.”

 One of Alma’s definitive characteristics is her love for taxonomy. Where contrasting characters like Ambrose are moved by beauty, Alma is motivated by answers. In this, she is a perfect representation of a scientific era, while her drive to understand the nature of things moves her toward the discovery of her version of natural selection—the great ordering principle of the universe.

“It is not sufficient to be merely good, Prudence; you must also become clever. As a woman, of course, you will always have a heightened moral awareness over men, but if you do not sharpen your wits in defense of yourself, your morality will serve you little good.”

In this characteristic speech, Beatrix, who values utility over beauty, references the accepted 19th-century Victorian idea that women by virtue of their sex had a moral understanding that was superior to that of men. But for Beatrix, intelligence is the highest of virtues, the most important to cultivate. Beatrix’s notion of defense speaks to the theme of survival that injects a somber undercurrent to the novel.

“Nobody had ever called Alma a friend. Nobody had ever asked Ama what she thought of a dress. Nobody had ever admired her chin. They sat on the bench for a while in this warm and surprising embrace.”

 This introduction of the character of Retta Snow shows her as a contrast and foil to Alma: someone the opposite of intellect, a creature of vanity and inconsequential chatter. Alma is drawn to her and their friendship for pure pleasure, something she has not been taught to value for its own sake, but giving and receiving affection are also foreign to her. Retta, image-conscious and social, hails from a far different lifestyle than the one Beatrix has provided for the Whittaker girls, but Beatrix’s daughters grow up to lead lives of service to others, while poor Retta grows up to be not much use for anything.

“When the three of them were together, Alma very nearly felt like a normal girl, and she had never felt that way before. […] In Retta’s presence, Alma could be merely a girl, a conventional girl, eating a frosted tart and giggling at a buffoonish song.”

 While she is Alma’s first real friend, Retta’s ability for play and pleasure also introduces a missing element into Alma’s life. However, she also represents the kind of conventional life that Alma feels to be beyond her reach, especially when Retta marries the man Alma loves, George Hawkes. Alma whimsically recalls this childhood trio, all representing different qualities, when Wallace later observes that there were three different scientists (himself, Alma, and Darwin) who arrived independently at a theory of evolution.

“In short, there were too many new inventions these days, and too many new ideas, all so complex and far-flung. One could no longer be an expert in generalities, making a handsome pudding of profit in all sorts of fields. It was enough to make Henry Whittaker feel old.”

The era in which Alma lives is marked by many significant scientific advancements, including the invention of the word scientist, and this historic time frame forms an important background and setting for the book. But the increasing differentiation and specialization of fields, along with advances in technology, leaves less room for polymaths and people who have broader interests, like Henry.

“Did Alma mourn her mother? It is difficult to know. She did not exactly have time for it. She was buried in a swampland of work and frustration, and this sensation was not entirely distinguishable from sorrow itself.”

This passage shows the omniscient narrator at work again in the direct address that invites the reader into Alma’s thoughts and feelings, although Alma is not generally in touch with her feelings—a quality she has inherited from both parents. This passage also demonstrates the frank and unsentimental tone that the narrator maintains throughout the novel, a style that was characteristic of novels written during this time frame and that Gilbert strives consciously to reproduce in her prose.

“Alma’s existence at once felt bigger and much, much smaller—but a pleasant sort of smaller. The world had scaled itself down into endless inches of possibility. Her life could be lived in generous miniature. […] Alma had work stretched ahead of her for the rest of her life. She need not be idle. She need not be unhappy. Perhaps she need not even be lonely.”

 Her enchantment with mosses and her resolve to study them form a turning point in Alma’s character development and in the novel as a whole. The theme that the smallest things have significance pervades the story, and thus Alma’s mosses serve the dual purpose of establishing her reputation and providing evidence for her later theory. Even though her field is small in terms of subject matter and interest, it satisfies her to contribute to the world’s body of knowledge—a happy conclusion for her character arc, in the end.

“To put forth the notion that any entity could alter itself was to question God’s very dominion. The Christian position was that the Lord had created all the world’s species in one day, and that none of His creations had changed since the dawn of time. But it seemed increasingly clear to Alma that things had changed.”

As a scientist herself, Alma keeps current on the publications of the field and so cannot escape the developing debate over evolution, which was taking place long before Darwin published. This debate, posed as an opposition between religion and science or the spiritual and the real, mirrors the contrasting poles, qualities, or realms that Ambrose and Alma love, represent, believe in, and devote their lives to—the material versus the spiritual.

“True, she was something like a book that had opened to the same page every single day for nearly thirty straight years—but it had not been such a bad page, at that. She had been sanguine. Contented. By all measures, it had been a good life. She could never return to that life now.”

 With Ambrose in her life, Alma feels illuminated. After she awakens to love, she cannot be the person she once was, nor return to her previous life. Loving Ambrose is an emotional breakthrough for Alma, a new world like that she will encounter later in Tahiti, a parallel to the intellectual breakthrough she will have when she develops her theory.

“There was no chance anymore for Alma to restrain her love—and no reason to. She allowed herself to plummet directly into it. She felt inflamed by amazement, rampant with inspiration, enthralled. Where she had once seen light in Ambrose’s face, she now saw celestial light. Where his limbs had before looked only pleasing, they now looked like Roman statuary. His voice was an evensong. His slightest glance bruised her heart with fearful joy.”

In the figurative language characteristic of the prose throughout the book, the narrator captures Alma’s rapturous experience of being in love with a series of feverishly hyperbolic descriptions, transforming Ambrose’s appearance from moderately handsome to stunningly beautiful and equating both his physical appearance and his spiritual presence with works of art. The raw, vital intensity of the descriptions makes it clear that a relationship like this is new territory for Alma and the closest she will ever come to a spiritual experience.

“Only a year previous, she had been a contented, useful, and industrious woman, who had never heard of Ambrose Pike, and now her existence had been blighted by him. This person had arrived, he had illuminated her, he had ensorcelled her with notions of miracle and beauty, he had both understood and misunderstood her, he had married her, he had broken her heart, he had looked upon her with those sad and hopeless eyes, he had accepted his banishment, and now he was gone. What a stark and stunning thing was life—that such a cataclysm can enter and depart so quickly, and leave such wreckage behind!”

Alma’s trajectory through love and heartbreak is a dramatic irony and a contrast to the steady, unchanging nature of her life before this experience. The reference to a cataclysm shows the significance this love affair has for her emotional life, the kind of a natural disaster that spurs new adaptations or differentiation in species. Ambrose’s ability to unsettle Alma echoes the disruption caused by Prudence’s entry into the Whittaker household, but her choice to excise him from her life for her own comfort reflects the self-centered view of the world that Alma holds at this time.

“Alma Whittaker was now one of the richest women in the New World. […] It did not feel like a blessing.”

Alma is the heir to Henry’s empire and the benefactor of his many conquests, but she does not feel easy about assuming this responsibility, for White Acre was her father’s kingdom, not hers. Giving up nearly everything to travel abroad is the kind of move that Ambrose would make, and mirroring the essence of his nature is a deliberate choice that fits Alma’s efforts to follow him, find him, and reconnect with him however she may: a very spiritual endeavor for a person unused to embracing such intangible pursuits. The “blessing” also refers to the paternal blessing, the power of the father in a patriarchal society. Alma finally realizes that she has always been her father’s favorite because her drive, her selfishness, and her willingness to exploit others (as evidenced in her experience with Ambrose) mirrors Henry’s approach to life.

“He never ever considered me, Alma realized. Shamefully, this was her first thought, before she even began to take in the scope of her sister’s sacrifice. He never even considered me.”

The omniscient narrator knows Alma’s thoughts when Hanneke first tells her that Prudence sacrificed George Hawkes for Alma. Despite the painful nobility of her adopted sister’s sacrifice, Alma’s first impulse is one of hurt vanity, for she would like to be desired but has never had that opportunity. To her, sexual experience feels like a part of the natural world that she is missing. Learning her sister’s secret makes Alma realize how small her world is and how little she understands her sister. That Prudence’s sacrifice came to nothing is an irony that Alma cannot make sense of. Prudence’s self-sacrifice and her inability to explain it will haunt Alma’s later theory as what she refers to as the Prudence Problem.

“It should have been unbearable to face this sorry inventory, yet for some reason it was not. In strange point of fact, it was a relief. Alma’s breath slowed. Her compass spun itself out. She sat quietly with her hands in her lap. She did not move. She let herself imbibe all this new truth, and she did not flinch from any of it.”

When Alma, ever the scientist, takes stock of herself after her father’s death, it is a sorry reckoning. But like a true daughter of Beatrix Whittaker, she does not indulge in self-pity. Rather, she reorients herself toward knowledge and discovery, this time following Ambrose to Tahiti to find out the truth about him.

“Tahiti felt to her like an uncanny interruption of the Pacific’s vast, endless flatness—an eerie and arbitrary cathedral, thrusting up from the center of the sea for no reason at all.”

 In this instance of figurative language, the island of Tahiti is compared to a religious edifice, foreshadowing the spiritual struggles and inner reckoning that Alma is destined to discover there, for just like a self-reflective visit to church, this pilgrimage to Tahiti forces Alma to confront and dispel all of her remaining illusions, as well as healing both her own inner wounds and the ones she as inadvertently inflicted upon others. Thus, in beholding Tahiti for the first time, Alma encounters not a tropical paradise but an alarming intrusion of the unknown, but like the mosses she studies, Alma adapts and evolves to the stresses of this new environment.

“To be stripped of all that was precious made for a kind of immediate penance. It made her feel somehow closer to Ambrose; Tahiti was where they had both come to lose everything.”

In a moment of dramatic irony, Alma Whittaker, once so rich, now has nothing but the clothes on her back once the Tahitians at Matavai Bay make off with her belongings. She, like Ambrose, has been stripped to her essential being. Without her scientific tools like her microscope and her technical artifacts like ink and paper, her focus now is on survival in its purest form.

“Alma felt she had fully lost the thread of her life’s purpose, whatever flimsy thread it had ever been. She had interrupted her dull but honorable study of mosses to advance this feeble search for a ghost—or, rather, two ghosts: for Ambrose and The Boy, both.”

Alma reaches another turning point in her character arc when she admits that her quest has failed and Tahiti has not yielded the knowledge she sought. It is not in Alma’s nature simply to drift along at the direction of others, as Ambrose does, for just like Reverend Welles, Alma needs a distinct purpose and drive in her life in order to feel useful. In her mind, a failure to discover key knowledge is thus equated with an absence of purpose, for what purpose can remain beyond the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake?

“In all her time in Tahiti, she had never lost her wonder at the power and agility of such canoes. When flotillas such as this came rushing across the bay, she always felt as though she were watching the arrival of Jason and the Argonauts, or Odysseus’s fleet. Most of all, she loved the moment when, drawing close to shore, the rowers heaved their muscles in one last push, and the canoes flew out of the sea as though shot forth by great invisible bows, landing on the beach in a dramatic, exuberant arrival.”

This passage contains a fine example of the novel’s lush figurative language, including the allusion that compares Tomorrow Morning’s arriving fleet to the ancient tales of Mediterranean voyagers like Jason or Odysseus. This comparison makes Tomorrow Morning’s arrival one of epic substance. In contrast to the racist theories held by many white Westerners of her time period, Alma does not perceive the Tahitians as less evolved, sophisticated, intelligent, or worthy. Rather, she is impressed by their mastery of their natural domain, an example of how species adapt to their environment.

“She knew one other thing, and this was the most important realization of all: she knew that the world was plainly divided into those who fought an unrelenting battle to live, and those who surrendered and died. This was a simple fact. This fact was not merely true about the lives of human beings; it was also true of every living entity on the planet, from the largest creation down to the humblest.”

The moment in which she flirts with the possibility of drowning marks yet another turning point in Alma’s life, and the realization of how deeply and fiercely she values her own survival at all costs proves to be a breakthrough in her scientific understanding. Suddenly, Alma has a way to envision how the entire natural world works together, in harmony with one purpose, but although her theory is parallel to Darwin’s groundbreaking achievement, she never desires recognition for it.

“Alma did not wish to live at the beginning of history; she wished to live within humanity’s most recent moment, at the cusp of invention and progress. She did not wish to inhabit a land of spirits and ghosts; she desired a world of telegraphs, trains, improvements, theories, and science, where things changed by the day.”

After meeting with Tomorrow Morning, Alma has fulfilled her quest for Ambrose and, in a sense, laid his ghost to rest. She views her departure from Tahiti as a return to the material, technologically reliant world she knows. Alma is a product of a scientific age, one that imprints human ambition and systems of knowledge on the natural world, unlike the more harmonious means of living with their surroundings that the Tahitians have developed.