Jacob Have I Loved by Katherine Paterson

First published: 1980

Type of work: Historical fiction

Themes: Coming-of-age, family, gender roles, and religion

Time of work: World War II

Recommended Ages: 15-18

Locale: An island in Chesapeake Bay

Principal Characters:

• Louise (Wheeze) Bradshaw, an adventurous teenager with an inferiority complex intensified by her twin sister’s talent, looks, and femininity
• Caroline Bradshaw, the twin, a talented musician destined for the Juilliard School of Music
• Mc Call (Call) Purnell, a fatherless boy of the village, Louise’s best pal and eventually a sailor in the U.S. Navy
• “Captain” Hiram Wallace, a former citizen of the island who returns and becomes the frequent companion of Wheeze and Call
• Susan Bradshaw, Wheeze’s mother, who gave up a career to become the wife of a Chesapeake waterman
• Truitt Bradshaw, Wheeze’s father, a weathered fisherman of little culture and sophistication but surprising gentleness
• Grandma Bradshaw, who lives with the family, confuses reality and imagination, and quotes Scripture to prove almost everyone’s damnation
• “Auntie” Trudy Braxton, an eccentric older woman of the island who becomes Caroline’s benefactor

The Story

In 1941, when the nation goes to war, Louise and Caroline Bradshaw, thirteen-year-old twins, live on Rass, an isolated fishing island. Rass is being eaten away by the encroaching ocean, as the lives of the watermen are eroded by changing times. Louise (Wheeze) and her ungainly buddy Call make friends with Captain Wallace when he retires to the island he had left in disgrace. Removed from the war, the three outcasts share numerous adventures: refurbishing the Captain’s old place, disposing of Auntie Braxton’s stray cats, even surviving a hurricane. The Captain eventually marries Auntie Braxton, earning the jealousy of Wheeze’s own grandmother, who has loved him from girlhood.

The plot revolves around Louise’s identity crisis. She is imaginative (fantasizing, for example, that the Captain is a Nazi spy and that Franklin D. Roosevelt will pin a medal on her when she exposes him). She is also impulsive, insecure, and jealous. She suffers through the awakened sensuality of puberty, and she romantically yearns for escape from isolated Rass. Only Grandma Bradshaw sees through Wheeze’s androgynous facade and knows how deeply she envies Caroline, suffers guilt, and needs to establish her own identity. The grandmother, however, is a senile old troublemaker as well as a wise fool, and she often hurts both Wheeze and Susan with her accusations and condemnations.

Except for the radio, Rass is isolated from the world, but the war suddenly becomes real when the school’s best teacher enlists. Yet times with the Captain and Call still provide a frequent escape for Wheeze until Aunt Trudy dies and the Captain suddenly seems older, weaker, more vulnerable. The kids outgrow their adventurous games of childhood. Call enlists in the navy; the Captain uses Aunt Trudy’s legacy to send Caroline to the Juilliard School of Music.

Now Wheeze is virtually alone. She drops out of school and obtains her diploma by home study, stops attending church, works beside her father, and becomes ever more sullen. When Call returns, muscled and resplendent in his navy uniform, he chooses to marry Caroline, not Louise. Caroline has everything Louise wanted: looks, talent, popularity, escape, success, and even the playfellow of her childhood. Louise is now sure that God has cursed her and blessed her sister.

At the climax is a confrontation between daughter and mother. Louise had always been contemptuous of Susan, her mother, for having given up her profession as teacher to marry an ignorant waterman and become a common housewife and mother and a passive target for Grandma’s cruelty. Anger ignites Louise’s resolve to leave Rass and seek her own future. She aspires to be a doctor but settles for nursing when veterans acquire all the available slots in medical school. She then goes to Appalachia as a nurse/midwife. There she meets and marries widower Joseph Wojtkiewicz and becomes the surrogate mother to his children. Joe is an awkward, simple mountaineer but a gentle and good father, as Truitt Bradshaw had been. Louise, like Susan, finds meaning in service to others. Even the isolation of the “mountain-locked valley” reminds Louise of the loneliness of Rass. By the end of the novel, the Captain, Grandma Bradshaw, and Truitt are all dead, and Susan is moving to the mountains to live out her days with her daughter.

Context

Jacob Have I Loved reflects Katherine Paterson’s interest in historical settings, adolescent strivings, and, especially, religious themes. The author prefers to create fictional characters in the process of growing up—feeling at odds with their families, facing moral decisions, and discovering their own identities. Louise Bradshaw fits this description quite nicely, and the novel, like much good young adult fiction, investigates the generational theme between parent and child. Further, the novel is enjoyable on several levels: in narrative technique, use of humor, and subtlety of allusion.

As historical fiction, the novel suggests the remarkable and frightening change precipitated by World War II. Of the erosion of Rass, Louise remarks, “[A]s the water nibbled away at our land, the war nibbled away at our souls.” At the end of the war, the adolescents have become adults in a world forever changed from that of their childhood: the sincere, ordinary world having faded into the past.

Although the book uses a religious motif, it is not didactic fiction. The author does not prescribe a cure for the “mortal wound” that is youth. Rather, Paterson allows Louise to sort out her own feelings, to decide what values and life’s work will suit her, to overcome her anger and guilt, and especially to work her own way through the malaise in which she feels deserted by God. Finally, she learns that in fulfilling her own destiny, in “build[ing] [her]self as a soul, separate from the long, long shadow of [her] twin,” she can overcome the rage she has felt against the deity, as well as against her sister and her family.

The cyclical nature of familial growth and sibling conflict is foreshadowed symbolically at the end of the novel when Louise as midwife delivers twins—one lusty and healthy like herself, the other frightfully weak and sickly like Caroline. The concluding scene, however, is hopeful; the strong twin will survive and prosper, as the protagonist has done.