Character Clues
Character Analysis
Clothing
Clothes make the man (or woman), right? And that's no different for the characters in our book. Louise and Caroline are contrasted by the outfits they wear. Louise looks like she walked off a crabbing boat, which, hey, she actually did, and she regularly ruins her good dresses and clothes:
My grandmother caught me before I got to the door. "Louise Bradshaw! Don't you go coming in the house dirty like that. Oh, my blessed, what a mess! Susan," she called back in to my mother, "she's full ruined every scrap of clothes she owns." (1.79)
Caroline, on the other hand, delights in looking feminine and always appears pristine and ready to go. In fact, when she gets off the ferry from music lessons in Crisfield, Louise thinks she looks an awful lot like a carefree girl in a cigarette ad. Lovely.
Call's clothes also change throughout the novel. Though he dresses like a fisherman when he and Louise are little, he spruces himself up with a naval uniform when it's time to stop in New York City and charm Caroline into marrying him. No more working class, Call—now he's fancy and metropolitan. And no, Louise does not like this one bit.
Location
Most of the action in our story takes place on Rass Island, so it's fitting that Caroline gets to leave the island and explore what the outside world has to offer while Louise rarely does. Caroline has her lessons in Crisfield and eventually goes to boarding school in Baltimore and then on to college in New York City. It's all very fancy.
But Louise, who feels stuck, almost never leaves the island, even when she's little. By the time Louise's mother is ready to suggest that Louise leave and go to school in Crisfield, Louise is enraged. How dare her mother take her home from her? How dare she want to send her away? Despite her resentment, Louise has started to identify with the island and feels she can never escape.
It's only when Louise is finally able to leave Rass Island that she's able to be herself and set aside all her past hurts and bitterness. Caroline also thrives off the island, but Call says that she's "alone in that world" (16.97), and he believes she needs a connection to home. Hey, don't we all?
Names
You don't have to look much further than their names to see that Caroline and Louise are different. Caroline is always called by her full name. It's never Carol or Carrie for her—nope, only prim and proper Caroline.
Sara Louise Bradshaw, on the other hand, is rarely called by her given name, which she hates. She even dreams of humbling her sister and forcing her to recognize her true name:
"Oh, Wheeze," [Caroline] began to apologize. "Call me no longer Wheeze, but Sara Louise," I said grandly, smiling in the darkness, casting off the nickname she had diminished me with since we were two. (3.60)
That's why Louise thinks it's so condensing when the Captain refers to her and Call as "Wheeze and Cough" (5.115). It's not until he starts calling her by her full name that she warms up to him. And, when the Captain finally says Auntie Braxton's real first name—Trudy—Call and Louise know he's who he claims to be.
Names play a part in Louise's life later, too. She chooses a town to work in because it shares a name with her father, and she baptizes a baby girl with her mother's name because she figures, "Susan was the name of a saint, wasn't it?" (20.22). For now, let's just say it's definitely not a coincidence that Sara Louise shares a name with her sharp-tongued grandmother, Louise. To dig into this, though, you're going to have to visit the "Characters" section.