The Tents of Wickedness: Analysis of Major Characters
"The Tents of Wickedness: Analysis of Major Characters" explores a complex web of relationships and psychological struggles among a group of intertwined characters. Central to the narrative is Charles "Chick" Swallow, a columnist navigating the challenges of midlife, whose connections with his past—especially his high school sweetheart, Elizabeth "Sweetie" Appleyard—profoundly impact his current life. Sweetie, portrayed as a figure of arrested development, grapples with her own identity and the expectations imposed by her father, leading to a series of misguided pursuits that reflect her tumultuous search for meaning.
Chick's wife, Crystal, embodies the discontent of a woman feeling confined by traditional roles, illustrating the pre-women's liberation struggles of her time. The narrative also delves into the lives of secondary characters, such as Nickie Sherman, Chick's friend, whose inability to adapt to the mundane aspects of life causes strain in his marriage, and Lila Sherman, who represents a stabilizing force, advocating for responsibility and acceptance of life's routine.
Together, these characters present a poignant examination of personal aspirations, thwarted desires, and the societal expectations that shape their lives. This analysis provides valuable insights into their motivations and the broader commentary on the nature of relationships and self-identity in a changing world.
The Tents of Wickedness: Analysis of Major Characters
Author: Peter De Vries
First published: 1959
Genre: Novel
Locale: Decency, Connecticut
Plot: Fiction of manners
Time: The late 1950's
Charles (Chick) Swallow, a fortyish columnist for the Decency, Connecticut, Picayune Blade. His sympathetic pen and ear win him more friends than he wants. His reinvolvement with a girlfriend from adolescence, Sweetie Appleyard, prompts him to apologize for his excessive conventionality, as opposed to her strained and theatrical feeling that she is special and needs special allowances made for her. He is just silly enough and she just barely reasonable enough that here is some plausibility to each case.
Crystal Swallow, Chick's wife and the mother of his three children. Crystal has a sense that she is trapped in a “chintz prison.” She is a pre-women's liberation example of an educated woman who believes that her abilities are not being used well in her role as wife and mother, however urbane the setting.
Elizabeth “Sweetie” Appleyard, a childhood sweetheart of Chick described by her father as an Emily Dickinson without talent. Hers is a case of arrested development—sexual and other—caused, her father thinks, by the traumatic interruption of Chick's early attempted seduction of her. After she has reentered Chick's life as a baby-sitter, her father asks Chick to complete the seduction. Chick fails, and she goes off to the Village to try to live like, if not be, a poet. Damning the bourgeois life, she asks Chick to father a child for her to rear and temporarily fools him into thinking her pregnancy was caused by him. After being found out, she heads for the West Coast, marries a divorced man with two children, and moves to a Los Angeles suburb.
Charles Appleyard, Sweetie's father, a widower who marries during the course of the novel. A failure at almost everything he has attempted, he nevertheless had the good sense to invest inherited money through his French connection—his wife's relatives—and thus is able to present himself as a sort of effete Adlai Stevenson. He probably is the cause of his daughter's holier-than-thou attitude, and he certainly is the cause of her enrichment, because he dies a moment or so before Sweetie's grandmother (both in the same plane crash), thus enabling the fortune to proceed directly to his daughter and not to his newly acquired wife.
Nickie Sherman, Chick's boyhood friend and brother-in-law. Like Chick, Nickie is a failed boulevardier; unlike Chick, however, he has not gone on to find any meaningful work. He cannot come to terms with the ordinariness of life, and his marriage, partly as a result of this failure, is breaking up. After a schizophrenic episode triggered by Chick's well-meaning but ill-conceived intervention, Nickie is shocked back to normality and into responsibility.
Lila Sherman, Chick's intelligent, down-to-earth sister, Nickie's wife. As the mother of two children, she has lost patience with her husband's intellectual philandering and his unwillingness to let his life be “disrupted by routine.” When he finally becomes reconciled to reality, however, she accepts him; their lives are normalized, and their marriage is saved.