A Northern Light Duty

Think about all the duties Mattie lists on the farm. Previously, her father has stated that he can't run the farm alone, and it becomes clear here that running a farm in the early twentieth century Adirondacks requires a ton of hard labor, long days, and self-sacrifice. Mattie is the only one who can help Pa as much as he needs it, and she's torn between her desire to do so and her desire to earn money to go to college.

As Mattie's complaining about the responsibilities that she feels to her family, Weaver pinpoints a hard truth that Mattie's not ready to admit: it's not just the physical labor that prevents Mattie from pursuing her dream. There's a psychological component to the duty that Mattie feels, and it's this mental obstacle that she must overcome if she is ever to leave her family and attend college.

Mattie made two promises to dead people: She promised her mother she would stay, and she promised Grace she would burn her letters. Does this fall in the components of duty and responsibility, and how is Mattie haunted for eventually breaking both of these promises? (Boo.)

Aunt Josie often functions as the mouthpiece for social values in the novel, so what we hear coming out of her mouth is often what other people around her think. But Aunt Josie latches on to Mattie's conflict: abandon her sisters and Pa for her dream, or stay and fulfill the responsibilities dictated to her by her gender and social norms.

Mattie started cleaning her Aunt Josie's house before her mother, Josie's sister, died, and she keeps it up because she knows her mom would want her to. How does Mattie's commitment to Aunt Josie, a woman she doesn't really like or respect, make it harder for her to shirk her duties at the farm and follow her dreams? Also, Mattie thinks of herself as a slave, but clearly her Pa doesn't. Why might this difference of opinion exist?

We don't often see this, but Pa has also sacrificed dreams for responsibility. When his wife realized that he'd had one close-call too many, she demanded that he quit working the river (an incredibly dangerous job) or she and the girls would leave him. So he quit something he loved to save something he loved more. It's a mark of Mattie's maturity that she is able to see beyond her own dreams to the sacrifices that others make for responsibility and duty.

Mattie depends on her uncle to give her the money necessary to go to Barnard College, but, like her mother and brother, he, too, abandons her. Only her father, who she doesn't really get along with, has remained. So the shame that Mattie feels is guilt for wanting to abandon her family like she has been abandoned, but also shame for treating her father and the responsibilities he's been forced to shoulder with scorn.

Mattie overhears a conversation between Miss Wilcox and her husband through an open window; he insists on asserting his husbandly rights, but she refuses. We think it's because she thinks she has a duty to her craft of writing and to women who might want to follow in her steps. It might not seem like it at first, but Miss Wilcox is willing to sacrifice the safety and security of marriage—remember, we're in 1906—in the name of pursuing her dreams and helping change the world, one poem at a time.

Throughout the whole novel, we see Mattie torn between dreams and responsibility, and to be honest, we're really not sure how we'd handle this one. On the one hand, Grace specifically asked Mattie to burn the letters. But on the other, Grace was murdered and her letters contain part of her story. Duty doesn't always make itself clear, Shmoopsters.

Okay, this is the moment where we find out what the promise Mattie made to her mother is: to stay with her family and fulfill the responsibilities expected of the eldest girl on the farm. But we have to put the promise in context: Ellen is sick with cancer, not herself, and wracked with pain and grief. How could Mattie refuse her mother's request? And even more importantly, in what spirit did Mattie's mother make her request? Would she really want Mattie to give up her dream of college to stay on the farm? We kinda think she wouldn't.