Caleb's Crossing

“Listening, not speaking, has been my way. I have become most proficient in it. My mother taught me the use of silence.”

Bethia transforms women’s expected role as quiet, submissive, passive figures into one of action and power through her subversion of the act of listening. For her, listening is a way of learning about the world, absorbing academic knowledge, and unfolding her intellectual gifts.

“I love the fogs that wreathe us all in milky veils, and the winds that moan and keen in the chimney piece at night. Even when the wrack line is crusted with salty ice, and the ways through the woods crunch under my clogs, I drink the cold air in the low, blue gleam that sparkles on the snow. Every inlet and outcrop of this place, I love.” 

Through the novel, the island will be a place of refuge and home for Bethia. It is the first place she thinks of later when trying to shelter Anne, and the place she comes to when Caleb is dying. Here, every detail reinforces Bethia’s powers of observation and her innate connection to her place of birth.

“I thought, but did not say, that grandfather could hardly have expected the fine points of English property law to count for much to some three thousand people whose reputation […] had been ferocious.” 

Bethia is deeply aware even as a girl of the unfair treatment of Native Americans at the hands of settlers. Even on the island, where the Wampanoag and settler communities get along better than other places, the original compact is a one-sided one.