Themes in A Northern Light and the Story's Unique Format

 A Northern Light is a story set in 1906, about 16-year-old Mattie, who lives with her father and three younger sisters on their family farm. After her mother died and her brother left their home, Mattie’s dreams of graduating high school and attending college are dampened. Not only can she not afford to leave the town, her family relies on her for cooking, cleaning, and helping out around the farm. She later meets Royal Loomis, who she begins to fall for. After he proposes to her, Mattie has to make the difficult choice of going to college or marrying Royal.

           The book is told in both the present and the past. The book starts out in the past, telling the story of Mattie’s life on the farm. Every few chapters, it returns to the present, where Mattie is working at a hotel. The present is centered around a murder that actually happened—that of Grace Brown, who was drowned by Chester Gillette, her boyfriend. In A Northern Light, Grace gives Mattie a bunch of love letters between her and Chester the day before her murder, telling her to burn them. Instead, Mattie reads them and uncovers the truth behind her death.

           I think major themes of the story include education and gender roles. Mattie is expected stay at home and keep the house instead of going to school, and she often has to sacrifice a day or two of school whenever her father needs help of the farm. He thinks her love for learning is silly and useless, and that her time would be much better spend helping out around their farm. When she reveals her dream of studying literature and writing in college, she is met with discouragement. Her aunt tells her that she ought to stay at home and help out around the house, and Royal thinks that her dream is ridiculous. This shows that at the time, education was not valued, and was usually sacrificed for work.

           Another theme of the story is gender roles, which is usually referred to alongside marriage. Women are expected to please their husbands and put them before themselves. After Royal and Mattie start to date, she reads an article in a magazine which says “if you with to attract a man, you need to be ‘attentive and receptive to his every word, put his own interests before yours, and use the eloquent, unspoken language of the female body to let him know that he is the very center of your universe, the primary reason for your existence.’” It is common belief that women should aim to do nothing but please men and should but them above any of their own needs or wants. This injustice does not slip by Mattie completely unnoticed, as shown when she is listening to Royal talk about things that do not interest her: “As I nodded and smiled and umm-hmm’d and oh, my’d my way down the drive, I wondered if boys had any sort of magazine that told them how to attract women, and if so, did it ever tell them to put the girls’ interests first?”

           Grace Brown’s story being included in A Northern Light makes it much more meaningful, as it hints towards element of Mattie’s life that readers may not have seen if it wasn’t included. For example, the book later reveals that Chester had murdered Grace because he had made her pregnant, but he did not actually love her. He had only been with her to take advantage of her. Soon after that, it is shown that Royal is only marrying Mattie so that he can take her father’s land. The book draws a parallel between the situations of the two girls, which implies that nothing good will come out of Mattie’s marriage. The reader realizes that Mattie is being used before she does. This adds a huge element of suspense, as it places more importance on Mattie’s decision to either marry or leave Royal. It makes the story much more captivating, as readers are able to draw connections from Grace’s story to Mattie’s.