The Dutch House

The novel includes an explicit focus on fairy tales because of its references to Hansel and Gretel and other old fables. Patchett uses allusions to these stories to tap into cultural myths associated with childhood, the meaning of success, and love. The novel itself can be read as a realistic fairy tale that follows what would happen after the end of the fairy tale in a modern setting.

In Chapter 14, Celeste accuses Danny and Maeve of being Hansel and Gretel because they “just keep walking through the dark woods holding hands no matter how old [they] get” (237). In a sense, she is right. The Conroy children are abandoned by their mother and disinherited by their stepmother due to the haplessness of their father. Patchett undercuts these archetypes when she has Danny and Maeve see an older, diminished Andrea at the end of Part 2 and again when she reveals that Andrea has dementia.

Unlike the figures in the Hansel and Gretel story, the Conroy children are never restored to their place in their home. Instead, they build lives like ordinary people. Success in this case is not measured by restoration of their inheritance but instead by their ability to move on without it. One element that appears in both the original tale and the story of what happens to Danny and Maeve is that they ultimately survive because of their ability to love and cling to each other.

In the end, Patchett chooses to create a realistic story. Danny recognizes in 1990 as he sees The Nutcracker stage props that life in the Dutch House has contaminated his ability to see life outside of it for what it is. Andrea’s aged appearance helps him recognize how dangerous this perspective is, and both he and Maeve give up visiting the Dutch House. Despite the fairy-tale ending—May buying the house after becoming a famous actor—Patchett’s overall use of fairy-tale elements is to underscore that life is not a fairy tale.

The novel features three major paintings—that of the VanHoebeeks and that of Maeve, completed when she was a girl because Elna refused to be painted. Portraits represent wealth and connections to the past.

As a practical matter, full-size, professional paintings are expensive, handmade items. Therefore, to have the time and means to be painted is a symbol of great wealth. Cyril’s decision to keep the paintings of the VanHoebeeks after purchasing the home shows his desire to acquire the trappings of inherited wealth. He attempts to commission paintings of himself and Elna to show his new wealth, but Elna’s class sensibilities prevent Cyril from signaling his success.

Maeve’s portrait is slightly different in its meaning. It represents her sense of entitlement to the comfortable childhood she had in the Dutch House. When Andrea ejects Maeve ad Danny from the house, they can’t take the painting with them, symbolizing the rupture with their past in the house. Maeve’s decision to reclaim the portrait when she visits the house decades later at Elna’s behest shows that she has at last freed herself from the grip of her past in the Dutch House.

Danny buys a brownstone in New York for Celeste as a gift as their family grows. Like Cyril, however, Danny fails to ask his wife if she wants such a house (she does not), making the house a symbol of the way Danny makes the same mistakes as his father.

Maeve is diagnosed with diabetes in the immediate aftermath of Elna’s departure, and Danny and the other characters theorize that the disease is the result of the trauma Maeve suffers from being abandoned by her mother. Her illness is thus a symbol for the trauma of abandonment but also of the frequency with which the Conroys engage in magical thinking about mundane events.