42 pages • 1 hour read
Fair Weather
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Symbols & Motifs
The Fair
The fair symbolizes progress and education. As Chicago’s mayor says in a closing ceremony, the fair was “the greatest educator of the nineteenth century” (136). When the fair is first introduced to the reader, in Aunt Euterpe letter, she presents it as a chance to see the world. Its grand pavilions showcase technological advances in areas such as machinery, agriculture, and mining and present art exhibits and educational lectures. In the course of the novel, the family manages to work its way through most or all of these presentations, “picking the fair clean” (122).
It is both a catalyst and a symbolic parallel for Rosie’s increasing maturity and future adult life. She comes to it as a green country girl and leaves it as someone with purpose and knowledge of the world, the word she frequently uses to describe the fair. When she is overwhelmed by her first glimpse of the pavilions at night, she says, “It was too much world for me” (63). Resisting the urge to question Lottie about the invitation to the Danforth Evanses, she thinks, “Now I’d been to the fair […] I was not yet a woman of the world, but I had a toe in the door” (125). In the end, the fair, not just Lottie and Euterpe, convinces Rosie that she “had a world more to learn” (134).
Chicago
Chicago symbolizes American optimism and aspiration and also the complexity of adult life. Before the Becketts travel to the city, even unsophisticated Rosie knows that it had burned down (in the Great Chicago Fire of 1871) and has been built back up again. Since being rebuilt, the city has added architectural marvels that Euterpe points out to her family, such as the new art institute (built in 1879).
Prairie Avenue now houses many of the city’s most important residents, all of whom Euterpe can name. Lake Shore Drive facing Lake Michigan, called Chicago’s “Gold Coast,” was home to the city’s millionaires. These include Potter Palmer and his wife, Bertha—head of the fair’s Board of Lady Managers and the unofficial hostess for the city—who entertained presidents and royalty at their Lake Shore Drive mansion.
Chicago’s wealth was built on pig trading and butchery: As Granddad says, it is a “meat-packin’ town” (68). Aunt Euterpe’s last name, Fleischacker, means “meat chopper” in German, showing that she has married into Chicago heritage and culture. However, Euterpe hopes the fair will elevate Chicago’s reputation from a center of trade to one of cultural importance.
In this, Euterpe echoes the opinions of the social elite. The fair brings Chicago the respectability that its wealthy residents crave. As Euterpe writes to her rural family, it is “high time” that the world took note of the city, and with the advent of the fair, the Easterners now have to “sit up and take notice” of its accomplishments (13). The novel’s characters are so aware of Chicago’s glittering new status that the highest compliments they can pay to Chicago’s social “royalty” and celebrities are framed in terms of the city. To Mrs. Potter-Palmer, Rosie praises the “grand city you have here” (92), while Euterpe tells Lillian Russell that the actress “do[es] our city an honor” (120) with her presence. The novel shows that the fair is a place that welcomes all strata of society and where people can mix more freely.
Country Sayings
Country sayings are a motif that add humor throughout the novel and emphasize the thematic contrast between Country Ways and City Ways. They often take the form of simile, as when Lottie remarks, “Mama’s getting crankier than the handle on a churn” (23).
Richard Peck uses the Becketts’ countrified manner of speech to puncture several displays of overly refined manners. Served terrible soup by Euterpe’s private cook, Grandpa says it looks like “somethin’ drained out of the umbrella stand” (60). Mama allows him only two oaths, hecka-tee and helaca-toot, and he uses them liberally. When Rosie tries to introduce Euterpe to Chicago’s social queen, Mrs. Potter-Palmer, he has the last word: “Helaca-toot, Terpie, I’ve lost Buster!” (92). Buster, in turn, ruins the great encounter with Lillian Russell by asking if she was named for Granddad’s horse.
Food
Food as a motif also supports the contrast between Country Ways and City Ways. Every meal shown in the book, whether it is good or bad, is described in great detail. The early chapters indicate how well the family eats at home in the country: dinner is squirrels bagged by Buster along with beans, buttermilk, biscuits, and blackberry cobbler, and breakfast is breaded pork cutlets, eggs, and sour cream apple pie. Lunch on the train is fried chicken and, “to fill in” (52), ham sandwiches and an applesauce spice cake.
In contrast, refined city food can be poor quality. Aunt Euterpe’s rude and lazy cook, Mrs. O’Shay, serves up weak soup, boiled mutton, tough cabbage, a “gray” potato, and stewed prunes. Rosie and Lottie’s conquest of the kitchen (and of the cook, who leaves in high dudgeon) results in a hearty breakfast gobbled up by Euterpe.
The food at the fair is not quite up to the Becketts’ standards; when Rosie smells sausage frying with onions, she can tell that the lard isn’t fresh, and the tea at the Turkish pavilion is merely meant to look pretty. It is a novelty, however, as when they take their first meal in the “Old Vienna” section.
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