45 pages • 1 hour read
Rachel JoyceMiss Benson's Beetle
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2020A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Part 1, Chapters 9-17Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 1: “Adventure!”
Part 1, Chapters 9-13 Summary
This summary section includes the chapters entitled: “Stowaway”; “So Much Vomit”; “Something Fishy”; “The Truth About Enid Petty”; and “Father Spotting and the Natural History Museum.”
Mundic follows Margery on board her ship, stowing away in the boiler room. Margery has difficulty adjusting to life at sea. After her first dinner, she becomes violently seasick and spends weeks in her cabin, throwing up. During this time, Enid cheerily tends to her and babbles on about how much she loves babies. Eventually, Margery finds her sea legs and regains her appetite.
Mundic spends his days spying on Margery and her assistant. He becomes suspicious of Enid after he follows her ashore at various ports. He finds Enid perusing newspapers from overseas as if she’s afraid of finding bad news. She also buys a radio to listen to broadcasts from England on board. When Mundic returns to his lower deck hideout, he is discovered by two crewmembers. One of them realizes that Mundic must have been a prisoner of war during WWII from his gaunt condition and fragile mental state. When one crewman suggests turning Mundic in, the other says that he’s endured enough. The kindly crewman finds an empty cabin for Mundic and sneaks him food, so Mundic is content with the arrangement. He spends the rest of the voyage watching Margery.
By the time the ship nears Brisbane, Australia, Margery has fully recovered. At the same time, Enid’s health takes a turn for the worse. She appears at the cabin door with her skirt covered in blood. The gory sight makes Margery squeamish, so she runs away and falls down a flight of stairs. Someone then takes her to the ship’s infirmary. When Margery returns to the cabin, she learns that Enid has just had a miscarriage. Enid confesses that she has lost multiple babies and is devastated each time, fearing that she will never become a mother.
After spending days in the cabin crying, Enid abruptly decides that she’s going to start a new life in Brisbane and try to have a baby. She’s begun a relationship with a fellow passenger named Taylor and won’t be accompanying Margery on the rest of the trip. Margery struggles to reconcile “the woman who had stayed in bed, grieving for her lost baby, with this whizzy updated version, who was going to start a happy new life in Brisbane” (79). The two women bid each other a tense farewell when they reach port.
Margery flashes back to her childhood again, remembering the time she lived with her aunts. One day, she is in a park when she thinks she sees her father across a pond, accompanied by a woman and a small boy. Margery almost confronts him for deserting her when she realizes that the man isn’t her father. It is only at this point that she fully acknowledges that her father and brothers are dead and never coming back to her. During this same period of her childhood, Margery begins to cultivate her keen interest in beetles. Her first visit to the Natural History Museum enthralls her. Margery wonders, “Why did people lift their eyes to the sky in search of the holy? True evidence of the divine was […] pinned in glass cases and drawers, in the Insect Gallery of the Natural History Museum” (85).
Part 1, Chapters 14-17 Summary
This summary section includes the chapters entitled: “No Place for a Lady Like You”; “Closer”; “London, November 1950”; and “Two Pairs of Wings.”
Margery is still angry with Enid when she arrives in Brisbane and heads for her hotel. Hard as it is to admit, Margery realizes that she needs Enid if she hopes to find her beetle and that their unlikely partnership seems to work. She spends the following day in port trying to track down Enid, whom she finds at an American detention camp for people without passports along with her new boyfriend, Taylor.
Margery tries to persuade Enid to rejoin the expedition. She compares their partnership to the two sets of wings on a beetle. Both are necessary. Enid refuses and says that Taylor has a gun and wouldn’t like it if she left. Margery questions Enid’s choice of boyfriend but gives her some money and directions to the flying boat to New Caledonia the following day.
On the bus ride back from Enid’s camp, Mundic takes a seat behind Margery. He is close enough to tap her on her pith helmet, but Margery does not see him. Mundic is happy that Enid has refused to continue. He now thinks that he is in charge of leading Margery’s expedition.
The scene switches to London in November 1950. Neighbors notice that the house across the street belonging to a couple named Collett has gotten very quiet. The neighbors tell the police that the wife—later revealed to be Enid—is young and has a heart of gold. Her husband is older and lost a leg during basic training in the war. When the police and neighbors enter the home, they discover that the wife is gone, and the husband’s corpse is covered in blood. The police place a notice in the newspaper reading: “Wanted: Information relating to the whereabouts of Nancy Collett, last seen on 19 October, carrying a red valise” (100).
Back in Brisbane, Margery nervously prepares to board the flying boat. There is a 221-pound combined weight limit for each passenger and their luggage, and she fears that she gained weight during the ocean voyage. Sure enough, Margery exceeds the limit, and she is about to be denied passage when Enid rushes up and claims Margery’s spare suitcase as her own so that both women are admitted aboard. On the plane, the two women experience the wonderful sight of New Caledonia in the distance. The prospect restores Margery’s faith that anything is possible—even the discovery of an elusive golden beetle.
Part 1, Chapters 9-17 Analysis
The novel’s second segment expands on the theme of being haunted by the past. Joyce has already explored the effect the war has had on Mundic from Margery’s point of view during their interview, but these chapters feature more moments from Mundic’s perspective, allowing the reader to more fully understand how often memories of the war torment him. Ghosts of the past also afflict Margery and Enid, and we learn that the latter is fleeing from a murder charge. She seems desperate to receive news from England but also dreads getting any updates on the Collett case. In later chapters, Joyce will reveal the contents of her red valise, but at this point in the novel it represents a constant connection to her haunted past; Enid literally carries the physical manifestation of her guilt around with her. Margery is also fleeing the past in a different way: Memories of her father’s death by suicide have left her with a fear of the sight of blood. As a result, the blood on Enid’s skirt sends Margery running down a staircase in terror and almost breaking her neck. Through Enid, Margery, and Mundic, Joyce explores how unprocessed trauma from the past can create further dangerous or stressful situations in the present.
Aside from the focus on the past, these chapters follow the transformation of Margery and Enid from unlikely partners to true traveling companions. When Margery is seasick, Enid tends her, and Margery begins to realize what an asset the resourceful, quick-thinking Enid is. When Margery searches out Enid in Brisbane after the two briefly part ways, she is taking care of Enid in her own way by rescuing the latter from a terrible relationship with the odious Taylor. Here, Enid’s past disappointments and fear of arrest nearly prevent her from accepting the opportunity to forge her own future alongside Margery. However, when Margery’s baggage is overweight, Enid comes to the rescue again and gets them both on the flying boat to the island. However, Joyce’s reveal of Enid’s real identity as Nancy Collett maintains a sense of dramatic tension between the two women, as this secret complicates their newfound appreciation for one another.
