The Only One Left

The younger staff members at Hope’s End have something important relating to The Uses of Secrets in common. Carter, Kit, and Jessie want their experiences at the house to explain or inform their identities. Kit hopes that by returning to the role of caregiver, which she sees as her calling, she can regain the sense of purpose she felt before her mother’s death. Moreover, proving Lenora innocent would bolster Kit’s fight to clear her own name. Finally, Kit also feels a duty to Mary, with whom she feels professional kinship; picking up Mary’s investigation would result in justice for her death. Carter, a former bartender, believes that Miss Hope is his grandmother, having found evidence of her pregnancy; he hopes solving this family mystery will allow him to find himself. Kit is suspicious that his motives are greed and the desire to control the estate, but Carter’s preference for the caretaker’s cottage suggests that his curiosity is more sentimental than material. Jessie too has an ulterior motive for working at Hope’s End. Kit initially believes that Jessie enjoys the thrill of living in an infamous true-crime house, but Sager eventually reveals that Jessie’s decision to seek employment there is also related to family secrets. 

The stereotyping of women as emotionally fragile and delicate appears in both the 1929 and 1983 narratives, touching on the theme of How Chauvinism and Paternalism Dictates Women’s Fates. To quiet Evangeline Hope’s depressive response to her husband’s emotional and financial abuse, her physician prescribes laudanum. Laudanum, a liquid opiate, gained popularity for the treatment of “nervous” disorders in middle- and upper-class women in the 19th century. Unlike the opium smoked in dens, which was made illegal in 1887, opium consumed as laudanum—despite being just as addictive—was seen as socially acceptable and genteel. Male physicians often used this sedative to facilitate patriarchal household control; discomfited women found that laudanum made their lives more bearable. By 1929, however, laudanum use was rare, as the Harrison Narcotics Tax Act of 1914 placed significant restrictions on the sale and prescription of the drug. That Evangeline was still dependent on this medication indicates the degree of her addiction and the criminal complacency of her doctor. That Dr. Walden is eager to prescribe laudanum to Evangeline’s daughter is indicative of his blinkered willingness to accept that the girl has inherited her mother’s weak constitution—a chauvinistic baseless assumption. Like Detective Vick, Dr. Walden is another of the novel’s casually sexist male authority figures.