The Magnolia Palace

Several of the characters in The Magnolia Palace have strong, influential parents who play a central role in their children’s lives. In fact, the children often are willing to sacrifice their own wants, needs, and passions to please their parents. Through the characters of Joshua and Helen, Davis explores how children can balance the weight of their parents’ expectations with their own plans. Although they struggle with it, in the end, both Helen and Joshua manage to find their own way forward. Both Veronica and Lillian, to some degree, also take certain paths in order to please their parents. Veronica takes the modeling job in New York to bring her sister Polly home and support her mother. Lillian begins her modeling career, in part, because of her mother’s support and ideas. But it is Joshua and Helen who exemplify this theme most evidently.

Joshua’s parents are loving and supportive, but he feels the weight of their expectations. Joshua, named after an iconic Black portrait painter, is struggling to make his own mark in art history, in part to please his parents. His choice of field reveals his parents’ influence: “My mom and dad like to joke that this internship is the perfect mix of their two professions” (114). His love of art, and for the Frick Collection, is genuine, which Veronica notices: “He’d been brought up to cherish art and was personally invested in the care of these beautiful objects” (230). Yet his parents have strong ideas about how he should develop his career.

His father, a history professor, and his mother, an artist, exposed him to the art world from a young age: “My mother’s an artist, and we used to visit the Frick regularly when I was a kid” (113). Yet he struggles with the weight of their expectations. To Veronica, he says, “Sometimes, the pressure from my parents to make them proud makes me want to do what you did at the photo shoot. Stand up to authority and blow it all up” (218). Joshua’s struggle is to create a place for himself in a field that his parents already occupy, satisfying both his parents and himself.

Part of this struggle includes not letting his parents determine his course of study: “I’d like to go to Columbia for my master’s degree, but since my father works at Brooklyn College, that makes better economic sense. Also he’ll be able to keep an eye on me, make sure I’m living up to my potential” (218). Joshua hints at the practical argument for his attendance at Brooklyn College, no doubt the one he heard from his father, but his wry comment at the end shows a sensitive spot. He feels the burden of his father’s oversight and the pressure to bow to his will, yet Joshua, in his own way, manages to balance his own wants and needs with his parents’ expectations. At the end of the novel, he is pursuing his degree at Columbia, where he can form his own reputation. Joshua has found a balance between pleasing his parents and following his own path.

At the beginning of the book, Helen has let pleasing her parents, specifically her father, become her highest priority. She even forsakes her own needs in the process. She idolizes Mr. Frick but is unable to fully gain his approval because she will never measure up to her dead sister. Although Helen ultimately charts her own journey, her compulsive need to please Mr. Frick nearly causes her to follow his dictates.

Until her father dies, Helen’s life is focused on fulfilling his expectations. Just before his death, however, Lillian convinces Helen that she should pursue her dream of creating a library instead of getting married. Helen admits that she is not the “marrying kind” and begins to get excited about the library. After her father dies, she momentarily reverts to the idea of marrying Richard because it is what her father wanted, but she recovers a bit from her grief and recommits herself to her library. Mr. Frick’s death freed Helen from the confines of pleasing him.

In fact, Miss Winnie, who killed Mr. Frick, points out that his death allowed Helen to become her own person: “I freed Miss Helen from the restraints of being her father’s daughter. She was better off without him” (320). While Helen is the most dramatic, high-stakes example of this theme, Davis uses many characters to explore how powerful a need to please a parent can be, but how it is still possible for children to balance their parents’ expectations with their own passions and needs.

Lillian and Helen face social constraints, as women in early 20th-century America were judged largely by what they had to offer men. Even Veronica in the 1960s was likely limited by her options, stumbling into a career as a model and, later, basically falling into her job (and passion) as an archivist. In 1919, a woman’s place was restricted to the home in the roles of wife, mother, and daughter. Helen and Lillian are both intelligent, competent women who want to pursue careers, but they encounter struggles to fulfill their passions in the face of societal mores.

Helen is a disappointment to her family because she is unmarried at the age of 30. Despite her accomplishments during World War I and with the Frick Collection, her contributions to the family go unrecognized—and although it is Helen who actually manages her family’s household, Childs is still seen as the potential heir to the responsibility and fortune.

Additionally, when Helen develops her own interests outside the family, that doesn’t engender approval either. When Mrs. Frick and Lillian discuss Helen’s library, Mrs. Frick’s attitude illustrates the common view of the time: “Mr. Frick and I both say better to leave such an undertaking to the scholars and universities, not our silly Helen. Especially once she’s married. We can’t have that. [...] A woman’s passion should be her husband and children” (137). Richard Danforth, Helen’s suitor, is just as disapproving: “A woman running a library? Would her father allow such a thing? I’m surprised” (150). His incredulous reaction shows that this expectation is not limited to the older generation but is the prevailing societal attitude.

Only when Helen’s father dies does she find the strength to defy society’s expectations and follow her career path—and there is a nod toward modernity on the part of Mr. Frick when he leaves the bulk of his estate not to Childs, but to Helen.

Lillian, on the other hand, has been career-minded since she was a child and decided she wanted to be on stage. She steadfastly pursues a career, and when she is given a choice between Hollywood or Richard, she chooses Hollywood. Lillian’s career aspirations also change as the novel continues. As Helen’s private secretary, Lillian oversees the entire Frick household. This is a daunting job, but considering that she stumbles upon it by accident, she picks it up quickly and without letting on that she has no experience.

Once she has undertaken the job, she discovers that she likes it and is good at it, and when the Frick family leaves town, she is excited about staying home and working:

It would give her time to catch up on the bookkeeping and file invoices, among other duties. To do so without interruption gave her a strange thrill of excitement. Making the monthly books balance or firmly declining an invitation with a sweet note of regret was her forte, it turned out (143).

When Richard asks her to leave with him and become his wife, Lillian experiences doubt, but her priorities become clear to her again later: “She’d almost muddled up everything by falling for Mr. Danforth, but today she was clear in her desires: a career, not a messy love affair” (187). Lillian returns, time and again, to her career, despite the difficulties women face in professional fields and despite the pressures of the time for women to get married and have children.

After Mr. Frick’s death, Lillian and Helen have a frank conversation about what they want in their futures, agreeing that neither of them is the “marrying kind.” As Lillian says, “I want to make my own way in the world” (234). The two women create their own independent lives, but only by defying societal expectations and redefining their idea of a woman’s place.