40 pages • 1 hour read
Lily KingEuphoria
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2014A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Summary
Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Character Analysis
Themes
Symbols & Motifs
Important Quotes
Essay Topics
Tools
BetaThemes
Gender, Rivalry, and Cooperation
There is an understanding of a patriarchal order in both the New Guinea tribal world and the anthropologists’ world. While the men are dominant, women find ways of asserting themselves and their own visions for life and society.
In the system of the Grid, Fen, Nell, and Andrew develop the notion that tribes differ in temperament according to an axis that can be likened to compass points. Often, the temperamental orientation is dependent on the balance of power between men and women in the tribes. The Mumbanyo tribe dominates the Northern “aggressive, possessive, forceful, successful, ambitious, egoistic” (186) side of the spectrum. They commit practices such as sacrificing first-borns and killing twins, as they are believed to be the result of sex with two different fathers. The murder of twins ensures the father’s rights over the mother because the legitimacy of issue can be clearly distinguished with single births. The Mumbanyo tribe’s patriarchal intimidation also extends to the fathers’ incestuous copulation with the daughters when they reach the age of 7 or 8, which causes the latter to grow up “distrustful, vindictive and murderous” (47).
Fen, who proudly has the Northern temperament, exhibits a similar competitiveness to the Mumbanyo culture that “enamor[s]” (47) him. He does not only strive for dominance like the Mumbanyo, but in their style has sexually abused his sister and been violent toward Nell’s body. In the novel, Fen’s Northern temperament culminates in his expedition to find the sacred flute that he hopes will make his fortune. When he judges Andrew to be unsuitable for the mission, he steals his canoe and recruits traumatized Tam tribesman Xambun. However, while Fen goes through the motions of persuading the Abapenamo to gift him the flute, he is the only winner in the situation. Xambun is killed in an ambush, and his tribe fears that without being buried with the flute, Xambun’s spirit would be “restless, […] mak[ing] trouble for them all” (225). Still, regardless of the trouble he causes, Fen insists on concluding the expedition in a selfish, patriarchal manner.
In contrast to the Northern temperament, the Southern manner—of being “responsive, nurturing, sensitive, empathetic, war-averse” (186) and possessing values along matriarchal lines—is reflected in both the Tam tribe and the evolving science of anthropology. While the Tam culture celebrates tall, warrior-like males such as Xambun, it also encourages cooperation and a balance between work and leisure. The adult women take a day off for their minyana ceremony of massage and pleasuring, though they are usually “hardworking and unpampered” (217). This cooperation between men and women ensures that the Tam culture is functional and peaceful.
The anthropological community is also more fluid and Southern in temperament. While Fen hopes to hijack glory for himself in his flute-finding expedition, the true triumph, the Grid, is a collaboration fed by the work of Helen Benjamin. Arguably, this still young science has room for women and their different kinds of contribution. As Nell writes in her journal, “there is something about finding the balance to one’s nature—perhaps a culture that flourishes is a culture that has found a similar balance among its people” (144).
Love Triangles, Adultery, and the Formation of New Tribes
The opening quote from Margaret Mead, the anthropologist who Nell’s character is based on, reads: “Quarrels over women are the keynote of the New Guinea primitive world.” Andrew and Nell acknowledge this by observing that many tribal stories “revolve around someone’s brother or best friend stealing his woman,” such as the Kiona creation myth, which is “about a crocodile who falls in love with his brother’s wife and they run off together to create a new tribe” (192). Certainly, the love-triangle and the stealing of one partner from another, already formed relationship, also underpins the romances of the anthropologists in the novel.
Prior to the events that occur in the novel, a relationship exists between Nell and Helen. Helen left a heterosexual relationship with her partner Stanley to be with Nell, ready to take part in a homosexual relationship of shared intellectual and sexual interests. This relationship is severed when Fen charms Nell away from Helen to “live with an us-against-the-world mentality” (53) and set up as a couple studying tribes in New Guinea. However, Fen and Nell’s relationship is destructive. He is violent towards her, and she is unable to defend herself. An Anapa tribe elder warns Nell that she is “not safe” (156) alone with her husband and advises for the need of a brother-like guardian.
Such a guardian arrives in the form of Andrew, who dresses her wounds, diminishes tensions between her and Fen, and eventually falls in love with her. When Fen makes off with Andrew’s canoe, Nell and Andrew commit adultery, beginning a new Southern-oriented tribe of shared ideas and sexual pleasure. When Fen returns and confronts Andrew in a Sydney Hotel room, the latter imagines how one of his Kiona tribesmen would have handled the situation: “In this situation a Kiona man would offer the other fellow a few spears, an axe, and some betel nut, and then the wife was his” (235). However, Fen is not nearly so agreeable and says that Andrew cannot have Nell, who is “not on the Grid” (238) and therefore does not automatically belong to Bankson’s Southern tribe. Indeed, Nell resists easy categorization when she boards the ship with Fen, despite despising him. The last words of her notebook—which refer to an Amy Lowell poem about bread and wine and the Tam bodily seat of affections—use the masculine pronoun “he” ambiguously: “He is wine and bread and deep in my stomach” (247). It is unclear whether the man who is substance and sacredness to her is Fen, whom she is leaving behind, or Andrew, whom she intends to join. In leaving Nell’s tribal affiliation unclear, King takes Margaret Mead’s dictum further and maintains that despite whatever the quarrels over her are, a woman cannot be possessed.
The Illusion of Euphoria in Anthropology
Euphoria, ordinarily understood as a visceral, bodily feeling of elation, has a more academic application in King’s book, which Nell defines:
It’s that moment about two months in, when you think you’ve finally got a handle on the place. Suddenly it feels within your grasp. It’s a delusion—you’ve only been there eight weeks—and it’s followed by complete despair of ever understanding anything. But at that moment the place feels entirely yours. It’s the briefest, purest euphoria (50).
The language of handling and grasping that Nell uses in this passage indicates a kind of possessiveness that can be associated with white, colonial claims to hold power over non-white lands and cultures. However, a sense of “delusion” (50) is present as an exception to the rule that the anthropologist establishes over the land and tribe. Still, Nell admits that the illusion of possession is thrilling. The euphoria felt over believing to cognitively possess and therefore completely understand a tribe is also a metaphor for that felt in relationships, where one feels, albeit momentarily, to completely understand another person. However, this too proves to be delusion. The “two and a half months” Nell spends with Fen on the ship where she feels herself in love with him are a time when “you really think you know someone after that kind of time together” (53). This knowledge proves to be as elusive as an anthropologist’s grasp of a tribe. Fen is not the man she thought he was when falling in love with him.
Andrew, on the other hand, though prone to the influence of his love for Nell, is less fooled by the concept of euphoria in anthropology. He is unconvinced that he “could ever truly understand another culture” (50) and becomes fascinated with anthropologists’ attempts to do so. Indeed, he develops a theory that anthropologists’ subject matter and findings reflect their own personalities, rather than the culture itself. He finds that Fen resembles the Dobu, the tribe he studied and penned a monograph about with “his paranoid streak, his dark humor,” and that there is a chance that the reader learns more “about the anthropologist” (177) by reading his work. Anthropology, for Andrew, is less a study of disparate peoples than self-study. This view fits King’s endeavor to craft an anthropologist-orientated view of life amongst New Guinea tribes.
