Cope Makes an Evasion explained

What happens

Themes in this chapter

• Youth vs. Middle Age

  Foster's bitterness toward Cope's youthful vigor and the attention it garners contrasts with his own physical limitations.

• Performance and Artifice

  The women's dramatic reaction to Cope's fainting is compared to a religious festival, highlighting the performative nature of social interactions.

• Class and Provincialism

  Randolph's investigation of Cope's family through the Freeford directory reflects class-based curiosity and provincial social structures.

Characters to notice

• Basil Randolph

  Visits Foster, discusses Cope's fainting, and announces his plan to move to a new apartment.

• Joe Foster

  Knitting in his room, expresses bitterness about Cope's fainting and compares the women's reaction to a religious festival.

• Bertram Cope

  Referenced as the subject of Foster's bitterness; his fainting episode is discussed.

• Medora Phillips

  Mentioned as having told Foster about the fainting episode and as being out strolling.

• Hortense Dunton

  Mentioned as having fainted the morning after the dinner, according to Foster.

• Rosalys Cope

  Listed in the Freeford directory as a schoolteacher at the same address as David L. Cope.

Key passages

• “I remember how, when I was in Florence, we went out to a religious festival one evening at some small hill-town near by. This was twenty years ago, when I could travel. There was a kind of grotto in the church, under the high altar; and in the grotto was a full-sized figure of a dead man, carved and painted—and covered with wounds; and round that figure half the women and girls of the town were collected, stroking, kissing— Adonis all over again!”

  Foster compares the women's fussing over Cope to a religious festival in Italy where women venerated a statue of a wounded man.

  Foster's bitterness and envy of Cope's physical vitality are expressed through this analogy.

• “I suppose you know that your young friend got up a great to-do for us the other evening?”

  Foster sarcastically refers to Cope's fainting episode as a dramatic performance.

  Highlights Foster's resentment and the theatrical nature of the incident.

• “If I had only picked up another bone or two, I might really have put together the domestic organism. Yet why should I trouble? It would all be plain, humdrum prose, no doubt. Glamour doesn't spread indefinitely.”

  Randolph muses that learning more about Cope's family would likely reveal an ordinary, unglamorous background.

  Reflects Randolph's ambivalent curiosity about Cope's origins.