The Cider House Rules

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1985

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-3

Chapters 4-7

Chapters 8-11

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

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Discussion Questions

Themes

Sex and Repression

Dr. Larch is a secret abortionist who has seen firsthand how sex workers and other poor vulnerable women are treated. His youthful experience with a sex worker led him indirectly to his work. The sex worker later sought him out when he was a doctor, seeking help after a self-induced abortion; he was unable to save her, or later her daughter, who wanted him to give her a safe abortion.

Many other characters in the novel are similarly motivated by sex and secrecy. Homer and Melony have secret sexual encounters at the orphanage, and Homer is later sexually assaulted by Grace Lynch, a worker at the orchard, who is herself regularly assaulted by her husband. He tells no one about this assault, both because it causes him shame and because he does not have the language to describe it. Later still, he has an affair with Candy Kendall, the girlfriend of his friend Wally. When he tries to confront Mr. Rose about his secret abuse of his daughter, Mr. Rose intimates to Homer that he knows about he and Candy’s affair, so as to keep Homer in line. He does this in an almost wordless way, simply showing Homer the candle nub left over from Homer’s recent encounter with Candy in the cider house and asking, “That ‘gainst the rules, ain’t it?” (551).

The atmosphere of repression around sex means that there is a constant climate of threat and innuendo, much like the fog that always surrounds St. Cloud’s. While little is said openly about sex, underground news travels fast, and there is much hinting around it. When Dr. Larch first begins to perform abortions, word of his work travels among both patients and fellow doctors; the former flock to him, while the latter increasingly shun him. He is also both snubbed and solicited by a rich family who seek out his services for their daughter, while being unable to say the word “abortion” out loud: “What Wilbur Larch could not forgive was the obvious loathing they felt for him” (65).

As a doctor at St. Cloud’s, Dr. Larch is later targeted by the board of directors and particularly by a woman named Mrs. Goodhall. Mrs. Goodhall suspects Dr. Larch of being too old and eccentric for his job, but of being “a nonpracticing homosexual” (458). Dr. Gingrich, Mrs. Goodhall’s psychiatrist colleague, marvels at the ingenuity of this characterization; it is something that instills suspicion but can also never be proved. It shows how rumors can flourish and how shame can be a means of controlling people, when certain things cannot be said out loud.

Rules and Work

There are many detailed descriptions of work in this novel, beginning with Dr. Larch’s work as an abortionist. The relevant tools, their uses, and the different stages of the procedure are all named: “He used the set of dilators with the Douglass points and both a medium-sized and a small curette” (59). This plain but clinical description serves to demystify Dr. Larch’s work, making it seem a job like any other.

This is the first medical procedure that Homer learns as a teenager at the orphanage. While observing Dr. Larch perform abortions and deliver babies, Homer learns this work well enough that he is able to do it himself. However, he refuses to perform abortions. When he leaves the orphanage to go to Ocean’s View orchard, he learns a new set of jobs and rules. He masters the different jobs at the apple orchard, such as picking apples, pressing cider, and driving a tractor; he also learns lobstering and mechanical work from Candy’s father Ray. His early training with Dr. Larch made him a quick and a patient student: “Homer liked Candy’s father, perhaps because surgery is the mechanics of medicine and Homer’s early training had been surgical” (233).

As Ray observes, Homer is “good with his hands” (333). Unlike Dr. Larch, who came to his surgical work through his beliefs and life experience, Homer learns through doing. He grasps the rules first and the reasons for these rules gradually. He also learns that societal rules and codes—unlike surgical training—are rarely as straightforward as they seem. Even Olive’s list of rules for the cider house workers—the “cider house rules” of the novel’s title—is implicitly presumptuous and prejudiced. She admires Mr. Rose, the leader of these workers, for his work ethic and says to Homer of the other workers, “If the rest of them were like him, they could improve themselves” (311). Homer hears in her voice “the ice that encases a long-ago and immovable point of view” (311). Mr. Rose’s discipline and work ethic is also not as benign as it seems; he has his own, parallel set of rules, which he exercises even while seeming to follow Olive’s rules.

Homer’s maturity involves more than learning different jobs, then. It involves deciding on his own list of rules and knowing when to follow societal rules and when to break them. He eventually takes up Dr. Larch’s position and livelihood, including his illegal abortion work. But he must go out in the world first and have his own experience with rules and hypocrisy, to better understand why Dr. Larch’s rule-breaking is necessary.

The Uses of Storytelling

When Homer Wells leaves St. Cloud’s orphanage, Dr. Larch tries to protect him from a distance. He invents a heart condition for Homer, so that he will not be drafted in the war. He tells the Worthington family about this heart condition but does not tell Homer himself. He counsels the family that Homer should not get too frightened or excited because it could be bad for his delicate heart. This leads to confusion and misunderstandings between Homer and his new family, making his transition into his new environment more awkward than it might have been otherwise.

Dr. Larch employs other deceptive tactics as well, such as his invention of an adult Fuzzy Stone. The actual Fuzzy Stone was a sickly boy who died at the orphanage; the fictional Fuzzy Stone is a conservative doctor who disapproves of performing abortions. Dr. Larch intends for Homer to impersonate this fictional Fuzzy Stone and to eventually take over the orphanage, thereby throwing the conservative board of directors off of his track. While this is the overt purpose of the Fuzzy Stone deception, Dr. Larch also has a less conscious purpose: to induce Homer, who is like a son to him, to come home and take up his work. Similarly, while Dr. Larch’s overt intent in inventing Homer’s heart condition is to protect him from harm, he also has a subconscious intent to meddle in and complicate Homer’s new independent life.

While telling stories is a way for characters to deceive themselves and others, it is also a way to imaginatively connect with individuals. The elaborateness of the Fuzzy Stone deception, for example, suggests that the lie is almost a pleasure in itself for Dr. Larch, fulfilling an emotional need for him. It allows him to imagine a parallel life for Fuzzy, in which Fuzzy survived, left the orphanage, and flourished as an adult out in the world. This adult Fuzzy Stone has even been to India in his capacity as a doctor, just as Wally has in real life. Wally’s wartime experiences and memories inform Homer’s fictional accounts of his travels in India, when he is impersonating Fuzzy Stone for the board of directors. Homer’s deception for the board of directors, then, is also a way for him to put himself in the shoes of his friend. The deception also makes practical use of Wally’s disillusionment and seemingly senseless experience. In storytelling, even bad memories are not wasted.

Books are mentioned frequently in the novel, specifically the novels Great Expectations and Jane Eyre. The former is read out loud to the boys’ dormitory in the orphanage, and the latter is read out loud to the girls’ dormitory. Both books, like The Cider House Rules, are coming-of-age novels involving orphans making their way in the world. That the author invokes these novels can be seen as an artistic tribute—a way of acknowledging the tradition in which he is writing. But it also shows the degree to which his characters understand their lives by the stories that are told to them, whether through novels or in life.