50 pages • 1 hour read
Kate QuinnThe Huntress
Kate QuinnFiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2019A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Hunter and the Hunted
The Huntress claims that neither cowardice nor bravery exist, “only nature. If you’re the hunter, you stalk and if you’re the prey, you run” (470). She is aware that before the end of the war, she was the hunter, capturing Jews and prisoners of war and killing them in what she considered acts of “mercy” before they could reach worse deaths at concentration camps (470). However, after the war, she became the prey because “the victors decided I was a monster” (470).
Although the Huntress successfully manages to pass herself off as a fragile war widow and lands herself a husband and a comfortable living, she never loses the sensation of being pursued. She confesses that “every day I’m afraid and every night I dream” (470). By day, she is afraid that Jordan and Daniel are suspicious of her; by night, she dreams of the rusalka she encountered on the night she killed Sebastian. She kills Daniel when he asks questions about Kolb and catches him “looking at me, in bed when he thought I was asleep” (473). Here, the position of being scrutinized while she is in the helpless, unconscious guise of sleep, makes the Huntress feel like the hunted. She therefore feels that she has no choice but to turn into the hunter herself, tampering with Daniel’s ammunition so that his turkey hunt ends in self-destruction. During the war, she killed humans for enjoyment. Following the loss of the war, she is only able to enjoy hunting animals for sport and kills humans in self-defense. She considers that even before being brought to justice, the loss of the life of a hunter and the continuing sensation of being hunted is punishment enough for her crimes.
Nina—whose remarkable agility, silent tread, and rusalka-like propensity to emerge from lakes, bloody and with her razor in hand—shares many common traits with the Huntress. She also was trained to hunt from a young age and enjoys the pursuit of people she thinks are her enemies, whether the Germans or the Huntress herself. However, she distinguishes herself from the Huntress, because she hunts hunters who are not “easy targets” or “people on the run […] who can’t fight her” (317). Instead, Nina likes to fight where there is a fair challenge and the chance of coming face to face with a dangerous equal.
Unlike the women in her aviation regiment, who dream of peace and domesticity once the war is over, Nina is compelled to keep finding a target to direct her energy and sense of purpose toward. She therefore comes to realize that she is a natural counterpart of Nazi-hunter Ian’s team. Though title of Quinn’s novel most likely refers to the woman born as Lorelei Vogt, the label could also refer to Nina, as the motif of seeking and landing upon a target applies to both women. Interestingly, the novel shows that one Huntress can only be defeated by the ruses of another, as the Huntress’s Russian counterpart emerges “relaxed and reptilian, streaked with blood from the corners of her mouth” (502) as though she has just bitten into her prey. It is this sight of a creature that appears more terrifying and predatory than herself, that finally makes the original German Huntress stop running and give herself up.
Forgetting the Old War
Forgetting is a crucial theme in Quinn’s novel. In their search for the Huntress, the protagonists grapple with their society’s desire to forget the war against the Nazis and to instead channel their energy and hatred into the threat from Communist Russia. In Austria, where Tony and Ian conduct their preliminary investigations into the Huntress, they have to find ways around the silence of those who were on the losing side of the war and complicit in the Nazi atrocities. In the United States, a country which saw no World War II fighting on its soil, the memory of the Nazi threat fades, replaced with fear and suspicion of the Soviets.
Indeed, as early as 1946, Jordan’s father tells her that it should not matter which side Anneliese’s deceased husband fought on during the war. By 1950, Ian is advised to let lesser criminals like the Huntress “alone” because the “Nazis are beaten and done” (22), and it is time to worry about the Russians instead. In her postscript to the novel, Quinn remarks that this attitude was historically accurate. The so-called Red Menace provided a foil that allowed serious Nazi war criminals to escape to the United States, set themselves up as American citizens, and pass unnoticed until as late as the 1960s.
Ian however, who is still bereaved by the Huntress’s murder of his brother and horrified by her other ruthless killings, believes that there is still “muck” to be cleared up from the war (22). Although he admits that the Huntress’s killings are on the scale of a personal game-hunt compared to the mass killings at the death camps, the entire novel makes a case for remembering the Huntress’s war crimes, bringing her to justice, and telling the stories of her victims, rather than merely accounting for their deaths in a statistical manner.
For example, Ruth, one of the Huntress’s surviving victims, remains traumatized by what happened to her. When Daniel and Jordan meet Ruth, she is a “sweet little thing” who “hardly says a word” (9). Her silence is a symptom of her attempt to come to terms with what happened to her. When Jordan’s inquiries into Ruth’s past end with the little girl dropping her ice cream, Jordan feels guilty and remarks that “you don’t have to remember if you don’t want to” (98). Ruth replies “that’s what she said” (98), implying that the permission to forget has come from the woman who killed her mother. It is in the agreement to forget, however, that the Huntress gets away with what she did to Ruth.
Nevertheless, two sensory stimuli impede Ruth’s ability to forget either her biological mother or the fact that the Huntress killed her. While she recognizes that violin music speaks to the truth of her origins and early life, her automatic recoiling at the sight of blood indicates that she will never forget the spectacle of the Huntress killing her mother. After the Huntress is gone from her life, Tony, Jordan and Ian permit Ruth to remember her biological mother as she continues her violin lessons and learns Yiddish so “she can know something about her mother’s people” (527). This move to re-familiarize Ruth with her origins counters the dominant trend after the war, when people like the Huntress denied and camouflaged their identities.
In an entirely different manner, Jordan and Tony also cannot forget the old war. They are both in their 20s in the postwar years and missed out on the opportunity to play dominant roles in war, whether in action in Tony’s case, or as a photographer in Jordan’s. While Tony joins Ian’s Nazi-hunting team after the war, Jordan idolizes her photographer heroines, Margaret Bourke-White and Gerda Taro, and longs to take front-line action shots. Neither Jordan nor Tony can settle easily into the postwar American dream of peace and prosperity with its fixed gender roles and emphasis on stability, as they long for the excitement of a life of adventure. Thus, the hunt to capture and document the Huntress, who escaped and then continued the atrocities of the last war, provides an outlet for the feeling that they missed out by being born later than Nina and Ian.
Rewriting the Norms of Gender and Family in the Postwar Era
In the Epilogue at the Red Sox baseball game, Quinn presents the reader with a makeshift group of people of different ethnicities who feel a familial sense of responsibility to one another: there are Jordan and Tony, a non-married couple; Nina and Ian, who are simultaneously married, lovers, and on the edge of divorce, and little Ruth, a Jewish orphan who is attached to the adults because of their links to the woman who killed her mother.
While the familial feelings of love, responsibility, and occasional frustration between the different members of the group are genuine, this union does not constitute the idealized postwar American nuclear family, headed by a working father and featuring a housewife mother and biological children. This nuclear ideal counters the fractured family model of wartime that is promoted by Daniel McBride and those of his generation. When as a widowed father he marries Anneliese, whom he presumes to be a widowed mother, he legally adopts Ruth so that they will share the same last name and better resemble a nuclear family. He encourages Jordan to marry her boyfriend Garrett Byrne, who is from a similar family background, at the earliest opportunity. Interestingly, both Jordan and Garrett are described as “all-American” (41), even though by virtue of their last names, they likely have Irish heritage, meaning that their ancestors came from a persecuted immigrant group. Still, by the mid-20th century, Irish settlers were beginning to assimilate into the image of white American respectability.
While many idealized the postwar familiar ideal, the majority of the novel’s characters found excitement and opportunity in the war’s fracturing of traditional family models. The Huntress, herself the mistress and not the wife of a prominent SS guard, finds that prior to the end of the war, she enjoyed an unprecedented degree of freedom in her beautiful Lake Rusalka home in occupied Poland. She describes how even by the end of the war, when “everything [was] falling to pieces, Manfred away for days at a time, yet I slept so soundly there” (470). Tellingly, it was both the illicit love affair that made the Huntress happy and contented enough to sleep soundly, and also the ability to be independent and go about her hunts unnoticed.
The gay, lesbian, and bisexual characters in the novel, who also have to keep their love affairs secret, similarly find hope in the war’s dissolution of traditional family structures. The same-sex nature of regiments makes it easier to find lovers. Meanwhile, factors like poverty, collectivization-induced apartment-sharing, and orphan children allow lesbians like Yelena to dream of living with the women they love and adopting and raising orphan children together, without arousing suspicion. For Nina, the experience of living in a warrior-like sisterhood rather than a family enables her to recognize that she prefers a life of action to one of “peace, babies and all the borscht they can eat” (316).
Even in the prewar years, Jordan and Nina—two women who refuse the domestic model of homemaker—did not experience a nuclear family. Both of their mothers died when they were young, and they looked up to their fathers, however dysfunctional. Both women dismissed the female role models present in their lives, whether marriage-minded school friends in Jordan’s case, or sexually adventurous sisters in Nina’s. Instead, they idolized distant role models like the aviatrix Marina Raskova or female war photographers.
Both by virtue of their temperament and experience, neither Nina nor Jordan would easily fit into the nuclear familial mode, as is evidenced by Nina’s overt shunning of domesticity and Jordan’s inability to imagine herself as Garrett’s wife. Indeed, Jordan’s desire for “the world” (309) rather than wifehood is so profound that when the Huntress encourages her in this direction, Jordan is so grateful that she turns a blind eye to the Huntress’s suspicious activities. Following the death of Daniel, the champion of the nuclear family, the Huntress assumes the guise of a widowed housewife emerging after the death of her husband to go on the hunt again.
In each of these cases, the novel shows the nuclear family to be of secondary importance to the more fragmentary structures that allow the characters to express the fullness of who they are and to collaborate toward a common purpose.
Unlock all 50 pages of this Study GuidePlus, gain access to 8,800+ more expert-written Study Guides.
Including features:
Related Titles
By Kate Quinn
