I Capture the Castle

The home of the Mortmain family during their years of poverty, Godsend Castle is a motif used to discuss the novel’s theme of The Historic Past and Modernist Thinking. The family’s living quarters combine the historic castle and a modern house attached to the castle so that family lives in a metaphorically transitional area representing the shift toward modernity occurring within English society in the late 1940s when I Capture the Castle was published. Cassandra’s first encounter with the castle in Chapter 3 of the novel reveals first how necessary the castle is to her family’s life and second the inevitable continued presence of England’s historical past in Cassandra’s present moment (28-29).

Rose and Cassandra do not have access to perfume or other beauty products during the family’s period of poverty, so their trip to the department store in London is significant. The perfume Cassandra sees becomes a motif of the different values Cassandra and Rose have regarding wealth and material good. Rose sends Cassandra a bottle of perfume as a present, and while Cassandra is initially excited to receive it, she decides against wearing it during her Midsummer Eve rites as the scent disrupts the natural smell of the wildflowers she has gathered (207).