54 pages • 1 hour read
The Dutch House
A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 14-15Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 2
Chapter 14 Summary
As time goes by, Danny achieves some financial stability with his real estate holdings, and Maeve is deeply involved in this success because she keeps his books and manages his taxes and paperwork, free of charge. Maeve’s involvement adds fuel to the fire of conflict with Celeste, however, and all is not well in Danny’s marriage.
Celeste believes Maeve is still overinvolved in Danny’s life and blames Maeve for Danny’s decision to break up with her earlier in their relationship. Celeste also resents how frequently Danny goes down to Maeve’s house and sees the time spent away from their children as stolen, especially since Maeve has no children or spouse to prevent her from coming up to the city. Celeste has also failed to move on from her disappointment that Danny never became a practicing doctor; Danny trots his medical skills out for minor accidents during family vacations, but this is not enough for Celeste. Maeve, on the other hand, still resents Celeste’s desire to get married when Danny was in medical school. Maeve still shows up for important events in the children’s lives, and she fills young May’s ears with stories about the Dutch House.
Danny also begins to realize how generous Maeve has been in taking care of his accounts. After she refuses to take pay, he buys her rental house in Jenkintown and gives her the deed to it. She is, despite herself, gratified to finally own something. Danny travels down once per month so Maeve can do his books, with the added benefit (in his mind, in any event) that they don’t have time to be hanging around the outside of the Dutch House. Thinking over this change, Danny realizes that “[they] had changed at whatever point the old homestead had become the car […][Their] memories were stored on VanHoebeek Street, but they weren’t in the Dutch House anymore” (234).
Chapter 15 Summary
By 1990, May is already a very talented dancer and secures a part as one of the mice in a New York production of The Nutcracker. The entire family—Celeste’s parents, Maeve, and some other relatives—turns out to see May perform. During the performance, Danny is startled to see that the opulent, fairy-tale set looks very much like the Dutch House in part because every unreal, fantastical scene looks like the Dutch House to Danny. During the very long performance, Maeve’s blood sugar drops dangerously low. Danny must give her glucose tablets to get it back up, and Celeste ceases hostilities with her sister-in-law to allow Danny to take care of his sister.
Danny takes Maeve home and decides to spend the night. He has a fantasy of taking her to see all his properties so she can see in person what he has accomplished, but she is too worn out for that. He realizes for the first time that his sister is fragile and that he can take care of her. The next morning, Maeve convinces them to go to their spot in front of the Dutch House. To their surprise, Andrea comes down the walk. Andrea doesn’t notice them, but they are both struck by the fact that she is just a regular person, not the larger-than-life character who threw them out of their home in 1963. Afterward, Maeve tells Danny that she is finally done with returning to the house. Danny agrees with her and is “sickened” (255) by his realization that they “had made a fetish of [their] misfortune, fallen in love with it” (255)
Chapters 14-15 Analysis
These two chapters fall at the end of Part 2, and they mark several major pivots in the lives of Danny and Maeve. Danny continues to consolidate his real estate empire and grows increasingly confident that his choice of real estate as a career and following in his father’s footsteps were good decisions. Celeste, unfortunately, is still caught up in her own narrative as Danny as a doctor, so several large passages in these chapters focus on her growing discontent with Danny, his choices, and her choices (including surrendering her own career and intellectual capacity to motherhood).
Patchett also begins to develop the characters of May and Kevin more, with the impact of allowing the reader to see how the stories Maeve and Danny tell about themselves shape yet another generation of Conroys. For May in particular, the Dutch House is on par with fairy tales.
Danny’s recognition that the story of his expulsion from Dutch House has become something other than a realistic tale develops in stages. When he watches The Nutcracker, Danny figures out quickly that his misrecognition of the indoor sets for the ballet occurs because “[a]ny configuration of luxury seen from a distance felt like a window on [his] youth” (243); in this moment, Danny sees that it is well past time to allow the day Andrea threw him out to be something that is firmly in the past.
The next epiphany comes when Danny and Maeve see Andrea and the Dutch House for what they believe will be the last time. Danny puts himself in his father’s place to try to imagine what Cyril saw in the Dutch House, and the imagery Danny used to describe the set from The Nutcracker spills over into Danny’s attempt to imagine this moment. The implication is that Danny’s fantasy about the Dutch House as a home is one that he inherited from Cyril. Andrea’s appearance in front of the house breaks the fantasy completely because Andrea has aged, a development that is completely predictable after more than 20 years. Again, Danny is forced to recognize that although his narrative about what happened at the Dutch House has not changed, everything else has because time and people move on.
Patchett explicitly focuses on the passage of time and aging in these chapters. While Patchett moves back and forth through multiple times within single chapters early in the novel, the timeline becomes more explicit in these later chapters. She includes time markers, such as the age of children and adults, and she also inserts specific years for the events. The introduction of historical time is a move that reflects the waning power of the fairy-tale elements of the narrative of Danny and Maeve’s childhood expulsion from the Dutch House.
Unlock all 54 pages of this Study GuidePlus, gain access to 8,800+ more expert-written Study Guides.
Including features:
Related Titles
By Ann Patchett
