50 pages • 1 hour read
Lauren GroffFates and Furies
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2015A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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BetaPart 2, Chapters 4-6Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 2: “The Furies”
Part 2, Chapter 4 Summary
A flashback to Mathilde’s college days shows her first meeting with Lotto was far more calculated than it first appeared through Lotto’s “coup de foudre” (227) retelling in Part 1. Having overheard about both Lotto’s fortune and his sexual prowess in a girl’s bathroom, the intrigued and svelte Mathilde checks out her target while he stars in Hamlet. She decides to pursue further and facilitate a meeting with Lotto, but first she must take out Bridget, his pseudo-girlfriend, as Bridget is an obstacle.
Mathilde sees Bridget with her friends while they’re on their way to the cast party and proceeds to give Bridget alcohol poisoning with intent. With Bridget puking and out of the way, Mathilde makes her move. Lotto is smitten, but Mathilde remembers saying no to a request of his, which is different from his recounting of their first moments.
Once married, Mathilde is overjoyed with the prospect of having a mother and family along with a husband. However, a call from Antoinette ends her dreams. In retaliation for being asked by Antoinette to walk away from the relationship, Mathilde vows to come between them. Mathilde further taunts Antoinette for years with pictures in the mail of what she’s missing out on with her son.
Part 2, Chapter 5 Summary
Aunt Sallie throws in the towel in trying to get through to the numbed Mathilde, following a number of weeks of trying to help her. Rachel, however, does not give up, and continues to pester Mathilde, until Mathilde somewhat returns from the catatonic state she’s been in. Everyone else “gives her space, gives her time” (233), and gives her gifts, but scoffs behind her back at her continued callousness. The only gift Mathilde appreciates is a black cashmere mourning frock given to by her old boss, Ariel. She wraps herself in it for days.
After Antoinette had died, Lotto had come into his vast inheritance. Mathilde was treated to a car upgrade and got a new Mercedes. Late one night, after Lotto’s death, Mathilde gets in a car crash and almost bites her tongue off.
As she bleeds on the grass, Mathilde realizes her life is half over and that someday, when she is old and grey, she will know that “the sum of her life […] was far greater than its sum of love (236).”
Part 2, Chapter 6 Summary
Aurelie (that is, Mathilde as a child) is sent to live with her Parisian grandmother. Because of the nature of her grandmother’s job as a prostitute, along with her harsh personality, Aurelie is confined to living and sleeping in the apartment closet.
For six years, Aurelie resides here. Life is stark. Without even a refrigerator, her grandmother keeps “perishables on the windowsill, where sometimes pigeons and rats got to them” (240).
After she turns 11, Aurelie arrives home after school to find her grandmother dead and in rigor mortis. From the bruises around her neck, it appears her grandmother was strangled to death.
Aurelie walks to the local grocer and waits for him to have a free moment. She whispers the news and next thing she knows she’s on a flight to America.
Thus, the reader learns how Mathilde became fluent in French and impressed her French instructors throughout the rest of her schooling. Also, it explains why her English was riddled with malapropisms.
Part 2, Chapter 4-6 Analysis
People giving up on Mathilde’s catatonic state of grief, after her failed attempt to fill up her hollowness with the false connection of physical intimacy, as she had enjoyed in her marriage, mirrors her family disowning her after the death of her little brother, when Mathilde was a child. Lotto’s friends and family only care so much for Mathilde when she is in her most vulnerable state just as her family’s love turned out to be conditional when she was in her most formative and vulnerable state of development.
Just as Lotto had been the one person to get past Mathilde’s self-imposed boundaries when he was still alive, in the newest chapter of her life as a widow, Rachel is the one person to not give up on Mathilde no matter how much Mathilde pushes Rachel away. It is in this relentlessness that Mathilde realizes just how similar Lotto’s little sister is to him, despite thinking for so long that they were nothing alike. With the same “endless nervous energy” (268) that Lotto had showed in pursuing Mathilde (and in any endeavor he set his heart to), Rachel’s persistence helps Mathilde to start the healing process.
The reasons for Mathilde being the way she is start to become evident the more her past is filled in. Mathilde’s grandmother’s neglect stunts Mathilde’s emotional growth. She comes to expect the minimum in fulfilling her base needs, rather than seeking friendships and relationships to fill her social and emotional well-being. The fear of being unlovable, instilled in her by her parents, coupled with the neglect from her grandmother and uncle, resurface in her inability to be vulnerable with others, as further rejection would confirm what Mathilde has been ingrained to believe: that she is indeed bad.
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