That Summer

Daisy Shoemaker, born Diana Rosen, is the novel’s other protagonist, who serves as a foil to Diana. As a child, Daisy had a close relationship with her father, a generous but ultimately ill-fated businessman who suffered an untimely death and left his family in relative poverty. With her brothers having left home, Daisy is alone with her mother, who cannot escape her grief, and as Daisy believes, comes to resent the responsibilities of motherhood. Daisy learns to cook for herself and discovers a genuine passion which she passes on to her college roommates and later to her clients with her small cooking school business. She later uses cooking as a way to bond with Diana.

She meets Hal while she is still in college and is overwhelmed by his maturity, decisiveness, and wealth. She drops out of college to marry him and gets pregnant, giving birth to Beatrice soon after. It is Hal who renames her Daisy in a symbolic erasure of her identity, due to his unacknowledged guilt at having raped another woman named Diana. Although at the time she has no qualms about these decisions, the fact of her renaming becomes a central symbol of her growing sense of her own inferiority when she compares herself to other mothers who have professional qualifications and careers. Hal offers her no help with these struggles; instead, he constantly belittles his wife’s achievements and emphasizes her need to rely on him and his wealth to survive. Daisy feels unable to act as a proper role model for her daughter, and her own lack of education is often a sticking point in Hal’s insistence that Beatrice herself get a college education. Diana and Beatrice have a difficult, inharmonious relationship at best, and as the novel progresses the two characters represent a generational gulf in ideas about gender relationships and attitudes toward sexual harassment.

Daisy is viewed as asexual, especially by her daughter, and she also has issues with body image. When she first meets Diana, she compares herself disparagingly to the other woman, who is beautiful, stylish and, as she believes at the time, a successful consultant. However, Daisy’s growing friendship with Diana helps her to see her own life in a different light and begin to understand the ways in which she is controlled and devalued by Hal. Her only other friend, Hannah, has died, and as she becomes closer to Diana, she also becomes increasingly independent, determined, and self-aware. The two Dianas act as counterparts to each other, for although Daisy’s life is similar to that which Diana imagined for herself before her assault, Daisy remains unhappy. Similarly, while Diana’s life appears perfect to Daisy, Diana hides a devastating secret that has tarnished many years of her life with trauma. Through the pair’s unlikely yet increasingly deep attachment to each other, Jennifer Weiner fully explores the theme of The Bonds of Female Friendship.

When Daisy discovers Hal’s true nature, she alternates between a refusal to accept the revelation and an acknowledgement that it is consistent with what she already knows of him. Her new knowledge of Danny and Hal’s past actions devastate her seemingly well-ordered life, and she symbolically renounces Hal’s inherited house and travels to the Cape. Struggling between wishing for Hal to be punished and accepting the past for what it is, she eventually rejects the name “Daisy” outright and decides to divorce Hal and begin a new life in the company of Diana and Beatrice. The novel does not reveal what she does next, but its conclusion sounds a hopeful note of a happier future for a woman who might once again choose to call herself Diana.

Henry “Hal” Shoemaker is a successful and wealthy lawyer who is the husband of Daisy and the father of Beatrice. Coming from a privileged and affluent background, Hal has always enjoyed an easy life and a sense of entitlement that are key motivators of many of his hurtful actions. As an 18-year-old, Hal is known as “Poe” by his friends, a crude nickname bequeathed on him after he performs oral sex on a menstruating girl, and a boy makes a joke about Edgar Allen Poe’s short story, “Masque of the Red Death.” As a teenager, he attends the Emlen Academy school and spends summers in Cape Cod. In his final summer there at age 18, he meets, grooms, and eventually rapes 15-year-old Diana Scalzi, an action for which he feels no remorse.

His youthful exuberance for sexual conquest eventually descends into a dependence on alcohol which only ceases when an older Emlen alumnus advises him to find a wife and settle down. This advice fits well with Hal’s traditional, patriarchal worldview in which men are the breadwinners and women the homemakers. He sees no issue with the disparaging, controlling ways he treats his wife Daisy, and in fact, he believes that he is protecting her from a world in which she would otherwise suffer. He sees her as being fundamentally less valuable than he is, and this attitude becomes clear when he denigrates her education and accomplishments, and belittling her contributions to their shared role as parents. Similarly, he has little time for his daughter’s creative pursuits and instead believes that she ought to follow a conventional path, taking advantage as he did of the opportunities that wealth and privilege provide.

Hal’s reaction to the reappearance of Diana in his life after so many years is not depicted in great detail in the novel; however, he shows little reaction to her open accusations and remains sure that his wealth, education, and respectable position in life will protect him from the word of someone he sees as being less valuable and less important than himself. Unlike Danny, he has not attempted to make amends for his past crimes at any point in his life. Nevertheless, Hal’s true impotence is revealed once Daisy finds the courage and determination to leave him, and he is finally denied the home, wife, and family that he wanted. The two Dianas he has victimized become a force united against him, and the novel’s conclusion leaves no doubt that, although he has not faced any violent consequences or criminal charges for his past actions, Hal is nonetheless suffering the consequences of what he did.

Beatrice is Daisy and Hal’s daughter, and she is first introduced as being about the same age that Diana was during the summer when she was sexually assaulted in 1987. Unlike Diana, however, Beatrice has grown up in a world in which women and girls are educated on issues such as sexual assault and rape culture. Thus, from the outset, Beatrice is depicted as a strong advocate for women’s rights as well as a bold and confident individual. Expelled from Emlen Academy for spray painting the word “rapist” on a boy’s dorm room door, Beatrice is resolute in her belief that boys and young men should receive punishment for such actions, however misguided they might be. She is smart and perceptive, and she quickly realizes that Emlen Academy will always prioritize its own reputation and protect its male students from the consequences of their wrongdoing, rather than supporting students like her friend, who was sexually assaulted.

Finding herself at a less prestigious private school after her militant outspokenness against sexual assault at Emlen, Beatrice still stands out for her creative sartorial choices and her strong opinions. She is repeatedly forced to defend her actions at Emlen and her belief that women should be believed when they make accusations against men who hold positions of power. She is nevertheless easily infatuated with Cade Langley, a rich and popular jock who resembles her father and who, as she later discovers, has only spent time with her in order to win a bet. The narrative thus demonstrates how easily the events that led to Diana’s assault might replicate themselves in Beatrice’s own life.

Beatrice and her parents argue often, especially about Beatrice’s unusual hobbies, such as taxidermy. Not only does Beatrice reject the misogynistic values and convictions of mainstream patriarchy, but she also rejects the conventional education that her father desires for her and instead pursues her own creative interests.

Despite Beatrice’s perceptiveness and intelligence, Daisy protects her from the full scope of the novel’s events, and she gleans only bits and pieces of the whole from overheard conversations and arguments between her parents. The new environment to which Daisy introduces Beatrice in Cape Cod does, however, prove to be one in which she will thrive, and the final image of the novel, which depicts Beatrice paddling into the sunset, is a positive one. Beatrice therefore represents a new generation of educated and empowered women who, in the wake of the #MeToo Movement, are able to hold the men who take advantage of them accountable, as Beatrice does with Cade.

Danny Rosen is Daisy’s older brother and Hal’s school friend. Danny attended Emlen Academy at a time before his father’s death, when the family was still wealthy. He has difficult memories of his time at school, where he was unable to be openly gay and where his infatuation with Hal led him to participate, if only as an observer, in Diana’s assault. Unlike Hal, Danny is dogged by guilt at his role in the assault and he eventually realizes that what at the time seemed like simply drunken fun was, in fact, rape. Danny has secretly dedicated his life to doing good works in order to alleviate the guilt he feels for his actions. He and his husband Jesse look after foster children. One of the novel’s key questions is why Danny is able to allow his younger sister Daisy to marry Hal, a man he knows to be a perpetrator of abuse. Although it is revealed that in his own way Danny did try and prevent the marriage, Danny and Hal’s continued relationship is evidence of the complex ways in which different individuals deal with the aftermath of assault.

Michael Carmody is a caretaker of houses on Cape Cod. Working every year for the wealthy and privileged holidaymakers, Michael is a foil for Hal and his contemporaries at Emlen. Whereas they are entitled and sexually aggressive, Michael is quiet, patient, and caring. He dedicates himself not only to the care of the houses but to the care of Diana as well, and as he slowly repairs and mends the cottage in which she lives, he simultaneously heals the wounds she has been left with after she was assaulted. Michael encourages her to pursue justice but is hesitant when she becomes obsessive and single-mindedly hunts the men who hurt her. Nevertheless, he remains her staunchest supporter, assuaging her guilt after Brad’s suicide and existing as a steadfast constant for her to return to.

Hal’s father Vernon is the archetype of the traditional, patriarchal, misogynistic male character. When Daisy gives him a cooking lesson, he protests that men should not have to cook for themselves and insists that a woman’s place is essentially to be a domestic servant for her husband. He resents the changes brought on by the #MeToo Movement and firmly believes that boys should be allowed to make mistakes and that men should not be held accountable for things they did in the past, no matter who was hurt as a consequence. His first wife, Margie, was his “office gal,” and so he doesn’t acknowledge the issues caused by workplace harassment, characterizing such interactions as innocent flirting. Vernon and his granddaughter Beatrice represent a generational divide in the ways in which attitudes toward rape culture continue to evolve.

Brad Burlingham is the third Emlen boy who participated in Diana’s assault, holding her down while Hal raped her. Brad has not enjoyed the easy and successful life of most of his peers since that event; he has four children from two failed marriages and lives in a small apartment, working at a Starbucks as part of a rehab program. Despite this arrangement, he is still a heavy drinker of beer even if he does avoid hard liquor. When Diana confronts him, Brad defends himself by attempting to differentiate himself from Hal and the others, claiming that he was mostly disliked at school, where he was academically, socially. and athletically inadequate when compared to his peers and his older brothers. Like Danny and unlike Hal, Brad has a number of justifications for his behavior that night, and although Diana pities his current despondent state, his rationalizations are weak at best and eventually fall flat. Finally, Brad asks whether she intends to kill him, and when she leaves him to his own devices, he dies by suicide less than a week later. Thus, Brad’s eventual self-destruction represents one form of punishment for past mistakes.

Cade Langley is a classmate of Beatrice’s at Melville School. He is part of a different social group, and unlike Beatrice, who is a self-identified misfit, Cade is popular, conventionally dressed, and comfortable with his wealth and privilege. He is much like her father was at that age. Cade invites Beatrice to sit with him at lunch as a dare and then persuades her to skip school with him in order to win a secret bet with his other friends. The two teenagers find that they have some things in common and begin to build a friendship. He feels guilty enough about the bet with this friends that he eventually tells her the truth, to her disgust and fury. Cade represents a young man who, although more aware than the previous generation of the acceptable ways to treat women, still falls into similar traps of exploitation and ridicule, if to a much lesser degree than Hal and his school friends. When Beatrice rejects him, he forcibly pulls her into a kiss, and although she enjoys the sensation and tells him so afterward, his action is far from the definition of a consensual interaction. The novel suggests that his encounter with the confident and politically principled Beatrice might change his trajectory and save him from becoming an abuser like Hal.