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Bea C. Altar

Lit 8 Fiction and Fiction Writing

13 February 2020

Analysis on “The Other Margaret” by Lionel Trilling

Summary

Friends Mark Jennings, a shop owner, and Stephen Elwin, Margaret’s father, stood

looking at a reproduced picture of a king by the French expressionist Georges Rouault. Stephen

had bought the picture some weeks before and was complimenting the frame chosen by

Jennings. Soon after their conversation about the picture ended, Jennings introduced to Stephen

a young soldier, his wife’s cousin, who came out into the shop. Jennings, seeing his wife’s

cousin looking at the picture, told the young soldier that the picture was bought by Stephen. The

young lieutenant, although insincerely, complimented the picture in fears of undermining

Stepehen’s confidence. However, Jennings knew that Stephen was fully aware of the young

soldier’s insincerity. After the young lieutenant left, Jennings, explained to Stephen that the

young lieutenant is a good kid. Stephen was then caught in his thoughts about a sentence from

one of Hazlitt’s essay: “No young man believes he shall ever die” and flashbacks about his

teacher Mr. Baxter.

With the picture neatly wrapped in brown paper, Stephen Elwin decided to take a bus to

go home. Upon seeing the bus, Stephen remembered the days when he and his friends would talk

about fine and powerful motors from Europe that were being used for the buses. Stephen then
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witnessed an incident between the boy who with his friend, wanted to ride the bus, and the

conductor who ignored the boy’s queries about the bus fare. Watching this scene of the boy and

the conductor, Stephen was once again deep in his thoughts trying to rationalize the situation of

both the conductor and the boy but ended up feeling angry to both of them with which puzzled

him and made him unhappy as he alighted the bus.

Stephen, now seated comfortably in his living room, watched his daughter Margaret

mixed the drink he usually had before dinner. After receiving his drink and give Margaret his

appreciation, Stephen told Margaret that he bought a picture. Margaret looked at the picture and

told his father she doesn’t like it. Lucy, Stephen’s wife, then entered the room slumped on a chair

with legs stretched out after declaring that their dinner will be very good and that it’ll be ready in

about 10 minutes. Margaret stiffened as her mother mentioned the other Margaret, the maid,

when Stephen asked Lucy if she was tired for she was slouching in the chair with eyes closed.

Margaret also prepared a drink for her mother and gave it to her. Lucy, unaware of the tension

she created, proceeded to narrate her story of a conductor making fun of a woman on the bus for

being Jewish. Margaret was angry because she thought that Lucy was making fun of the Jews

with her story. Stephen intervened and made Margaret realize her mistakes. Lucy remembered

the kitchen and then hurried, and came back out to tell Margaret to “come and hurl the salad,”

which was a famous joke in the family.

Margaret asked her father to find and inspect the two gifts, a wallet and a green lamb, she

has prepared for Lucy’s birthday. While Stephen was in her daughter’s room, Margaret suddenly

burst in, and soon after, Lucy came in too. Lucy and Margaret had an argument regarding the

other Margaret that aggravated with the mention of Margaret’s teacher Miss Hoxie. Lucy and

Margaret only reconciled when Lucy saw the green clay lamb Stephen was holding and learned
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that it was Margaret’s gift for her. Lucy very much liked the lamb that she brought it with her in

the dining room and put it at the table. During their dinner, Stephen and Margaret argued

regarding the other Margaret inasmuch she was compared to their former maid Millie. Although,

Margaret still insisted that the other Margaret was not responsible for her misfortunes and rather

blamed it to society. After their dinner, the family sat in the living room wherein Lucy

announced that the other Margaret was being dismissed for good. They heard a crash and found

out that the maid Margaret deliberately broke the green lamb. Having witnessed this, Margaret

cried and her parents tried to comfort her to no avail.

Analysis

The story is about an urbane, wealthy New York family and their African American

maid, Margaret who proves to be a destructive, troubled young woman that challenged the

family's liberal ideas. The daughter of the family, also named Margaret, tries to excuse the maid's

mean-spirited behavior while Stephen, the patriarch of the family, realizes that despite her

troubles, the maid is not excused from individual responsibility and societal obligations. Stephen

Elwin as the central intelligence of the story, narrates the events through his point of view and

even his thoughts on the scenes that had transpired before him. In using the central intelligence

point of view, the author successfully incorporated seemingly irrelevant details in the story such

as in the first few pages where the picture of the king by Rouault and the bus incident in his way

home. The narration of these events, almost spontaneous as in reality, created a ploy to which the

reader may ask who is the Margaret in the title and when will she be introduced in the story. This

approach used by Trilling is called the peripheral-tangential approach wherein the core meaning

of the text is reached through reverberations and including seemingly irrelevant details in the
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story. This kind of approach may create a rather dull or tedious story that will bore and/or

confuse the readers (or at the most, the non-critical readers). Interestingly, in the case of the story

“The Other Margaret,” Trilling was able to use this approach to his advantage in two ways: (1)

by using a central intelligence point of view that perfectly works with this approach, and (2)

incorporating the name Margaret in the title. In craftily using the name Margaret in the title and

purposely delaying the mention of Margaret in the story, the author is able to keep the reader’s

attention. All the while, by using a central intelligence point of view, the author was able to delay

the mention of Margaret to include seemingly irrelevant information and events in the story.

The reproduced picture of a king by Rouault, a seemingly irrelevant detail in the

beginning of the story, proved to be a symbolic representation of Stephen Elwin. The picture was

described as “full of rude blacks that might seem barbarically untidy”, “a person looking at

it…might find it repellent, even brutal or cruel” and the king was described as “blackbearded and

crowned.” These descriptions was contrasted with the added description of the picture “in his

right hand he held a spray of flowers,” which created an image of ironic qualities of fierceness

and authority, and tenderness of a character. The relevance of this picture was only revealed at

the latter part of the story. The encounter of Stephen Elwin with the young lieutenant and the

incident he witnessed on the bus on his way back home also played a crucial part in the story in

that these events provided a points of comparison between the boy, the conductor, the young

lieutenant, and Stephen’s daughter Margaret.

The title is significant and crucial to the story on three grounds. Firstly, it introduces the

character Margaret and created a sense of expectation of knowing who Margaret is. As was

discussed earlier, the mention of the name Margaret in the title presumes that there is such a

character in the story. Secondly, reading the title alone suggests that there are two characters in
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the name of Margaret, and this further implies a sense of binary comparison between the two —

the Margaret and the other Margaret. Surprisingly, however, the tension was not between these

two Margarets. The tension lies between Elwin and his daughter with the other Margaret as the

subject. Elwin’s ideas of age and death which he has learned primarily from Mr. Baxter’s lecture

on Hazlitt’s essay and experiences in life collide with that of Margaret’s social views that she has

learned from her teacher Miss Hoxie. The other Margaret was even compared to the previous

helper Millie but not with Margaret Elwin. Even though, the maid Margaret played a key role in

creating the conflict and/or tension in the story, she may have been not the other Margaret that is

indicated in the title after all. It could have been that the other Margaret pertains to Margaret

Elwin’s transformed self when she learned the truth about the maid. The green lamb, as

Margaret’s self-portrait – an obvious symbolism, was shattered by the maid and described

thereafter as “more white clay showing than green glaze” which may mean that by seeing the

truth, Margaret was devastated as suggested in last paragraphs of the story. And lastly, on a

postcolonial standpoint, the mention of the “other” in the title is suggestive of racism or racial

discrimination and marginalization. The limited description and events that included the other

Margaret, seemingly further reiterate reiterate the othering of the maid Margaret which was

described. Moreover, the maid Margaret did not have even one dialogue in the story is a way of

silencing of colored people just as in the instance of the subaltern who was with the boy in the

bus incident.

The story, in all its subtle incorporation of significant details, tackles the idea of the

double truth that both the society and the individual herself/himself is responsible for her/his own

actions. The author did not undermine that the maid Margaret, as a Negro, was a victim of

discrimination in the society they live in. However, Trilling wanted to say that it was not entirely
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the fault of the society that maid Margaret acted that way in the story. Stephen Elwin also wanted

to teach his daughter that it is a totally a different thing to learn as what is taught by our teachers

and another thing to learn through personal experience and see things with our own eyes.

Ultimately, what the story is trying to promote to its readers is to be responsible for one’s actions

and thoughts.