BUtterfield 8

Summary

BUtterfield 8, named for a fashionable Manhattan telephone exchange, is set in New York in 1931, in the last years of Prohibition and the early Depression, among speakeasies, apartment hotels and the blurred borderland between respectable society and its demimonde. Its central figure is Gloria Wandrous, a beautiful, intelligent young woman who drinks heavily, sleeps with men who interest her and lives partly on their generosity, while refusing to see herself as a kept woman or a prostitute. The novel opens as she wakes alone in the apartment of Weston Liggett, a wealthy, married, Yale-educated businessman with whom she has spent the night. Finding that he has torn her dress and left money, she takes his wife's mink coat instead and walks out. The coat sets the plot in motion. Liggett, both infatuated and anxious for his reputation, pursues her through the city. Gloria takes refuge with her friend Eddie Brunner, a struggling artist who cares for her without sleeping with her and who offers her a kind of honest friendship she rarely finds. Through flashback the novel reveals that Gloria was sexually abused as a girl by an older man and drawn early into a world of adult men, experiences that the narrative presents as shaping her restlessness and self-contempt. The novel moves among a wide cast of New Yorkers, including Liggett's wife Emily and their daughters, a newspaperman named James Malloy, speakeasy owners and society figures, using them to anatomise the city's class distinctions and double standards. Liggett's pursuit grows desperate and his marriage frays; Gloria half considers a different life. In the end, trying to get away from Liggett aboard a night steamboat, she falls overboard and is killed by the paddle wheel. The newspapers sensationalise her death, and the respectable world absorbs the scandal and moves on. O'Hara based the novel loosely on the 1931 death of Starr Faithfull, a young woman whose body was found on a Long Island beach and whose case became a tabloid sensation.

Plot or Argument

• The morning after

  Gloria wakes in Liggett's apartment, takes his wife's mink coat and leaves; the novel introduces the speakeasy society of 1931 New York.

• The city and its people

  Interlinked chapters follow Liggett, his family, Eddie Brunner, Malloy and others, mapping class and money in Depression Manhattan.

• Gloria's past

  Flashbacks reveal Gloria's childhood abuse and early introduction to adult sexuality, which colour her relations with men.

• Pursuit and death

  Liggett pursues Gloria; fleeing him on a steamboat, she falls overboard and dies. The press and society respond.

Characters

• Gloria Wandrous, protagonist

  Beautiful, hard-drinking young woman on the margins of New York society whose death ends the novel.

• Weston Liggett, Gloria's lover

  Wealthy married businessman whose infatuation becomes obsession.

• Emily Liggett, Liggett's wife

  Respectable wife whose mink coat Gloria takes.

• Eddie Brunner, Gloria's friend

  Poor artist whose friendship is one of the few honest relationships in her life.

• James Malloy, newspaperman

  Recurring O'Hara figure who observes the social world of the novel.

Lessons

• Respectability depends on whom it excludes

  The novel shows the same men moving between family life and a demimonde that society pretends not to see. It exposes how reputations are protected at the expense of women like Gloria.

  • Who is judged for the affair, and by whom?
  • How does the novel treat the newspapers' version of Gloria?

• Early harm shapes later lives

  Gloria's history of abuse is presented as a hidden key to her behaviour. O'Hara asks readers to see past the scandal to a damaged person, without turning her into a case history.

  • Does the novel explain Gloria too much or too little?
  • Is Gloria a victim, an agent, or both?
  • How would her story be told differently today?

• Fiction drawn from headlines

  O'Hara took a tabloid case and imagined the social world around it. The novel raises questions about how fiction uses real tragedies.

  • What does the novel gain from its basis in the Starr Faithfull case?
  • What responsibilities does a novelist have to a real person's memory?

Context

Set in 1931, the novel captures Prohibition New York, where drinking in speakeasies crossed class lines, and the early Depression, when fortunes were shaken. The case of Starr Faithfull, found dead on a Long Island beach in June 1931, filled the tabloids with stories of her diaries, her relationships with older men and the unresolved question of accident, suicide or murder.

Composition

O'Hara wrote the novel after the success of Appointment in Samarra (1934), drawing on his own experience as a New York journalist and nightlife habitué. It was published in 1935 by Harcourt, Brace.

Reception

The book's frankness about sex made it a bestseller and a source of controversy. It was adapted as a 1960 film starring Elizabeth Taylor, who won the Academy Award for Best Actress, although the film changed much of the story and setting. O'Hara's reputation declined after his death but has had periodic revivals.

Comparisons

• on-the-road

  Both portray drinking, restlessness and sexual freedom in American cities, but O'Hara's world is one of fixed social hierarchies while Kerouac's characters flee them.

• the-portable-dorothy-parker

  Parker's stories of the same New York speakeasy era share O'Hara's sharp eye for drink, loneliness and the predicaments of women.

• passing

  Both late-1920s/early-1930s New York novels end with a young woman's fatal fall whose cause remains disputed, and both explore social masks.

• daisy-miller

  Both follow a young American woman whose freedom with men scandalises her society and ends in her death.

Quotes

For Students

A reading companion for classical Christian high school students. See the student guide.

Reading Guide

Watch for

• The opening morning in Weston Liggett's apartment, when Gloria finds her dress torn and money left for her, and takes Emily Liggett's mink coat instead. Ask what she is refusing by refusing the money.
• The way the novel moves from Gloria to a wide cast of New Yorkers, the Liggett family, Eddie Brunner, James Malloy, speakeasy owners, and society figures, so that the city itself becomes a subject.
• Gloria's friendship with Eddie Brunner, the one man in the novel who cares for her without wanting anything from her.
• The flashbacks to Gloria's girlhood, which show how early she was drawn into a world of adult men and how that history shapes the way she sees herself.
• The ending on the night steamboat and the newspapers' treatment of Gloria's death. Notice how quickly the respectable world absorbs the scandal and moves on.

Key terms and names

BUtterfield 8

A fashionable Manhattan telephone exchange, written with the first two letters capitalized as exchanges then were. The title places Gloria in a particular, well-off part of the city and suggests a world held together by telephone calls and arrangements.

Speakeasy

An illegal bar of the Prohibition years. In 1931 New York the speakeasies of the novel are where society people, journalists, and figures like Gloria mix across class lines that hold firm everywhere else.

Prohibition

The national ban on the sale of alcohol, in its last years when the novel is set. Its widespread evasion forms the background of constant drinking in which nearly every character lives.

The mink coat

Emily Liggett's coat, which Gloria takes in the first chapter in place of the money left for her. It sets the plot in motion and draws together the novel's concerns with money, respectability, and what a person is worth.

Starr Faithfull

The young woman found dead on a Long Island beach in June 1931, whose case filled the tabloids. O'Hara based Gloria's story loosely on hers.

James Malloy

A newspaperman who appears in several of O'Hara's books. In this novel he is one of the observers through whom the reader sees the social world of Depression Manhattan.

Seminar Questions

1. Comprehension What does Gloria find when she wakes in Weston Liggett's apartment at the start of the novel, and what does she take when she leaves?
2. Comprehension Who is Eddie Brunner, and how is his friendship with Gloria different from her relations with other men in the novel?
3. Comprehension How does Gloria die at the end of the novel, and how do the newspapers and the respectable world respond?
4. Interpretation Why does Gloria take the mink coat rather than the money? What does that choice say about how she sees herself and how she wants to be seen?
5. Interpretation Weston Liggett pursues Gloria while worrying about his reputation. How does O'Hara use Liggett, his wife, and his daughters to show the cost of his double life?
6. Interpretation The flashbacks reveal Gloria's abuse as a girl. How do they change the way a reader judges her choices in the present-day chapters?
7. Big Question When a person's life is shaped by wrongs done to her and by a society that uses and then forgets her, how far is she still responsible for her own choices? What does the novel suggest, and what do you think?

Faith Connections

• John 8:1-11 (Scripture)

  The men who bring the woman taken in adultery to Jesus go away one by one when told that the one without sin should cast the first stone. O'Hara's New Yorkers, quick to sensationalise Gloria's death while their own lives go unexamined, are a modern crowd standing around the same woman.

• Luke 7:36-50 (Scripture)

  Simon the Pharisee sees only that the woman at Jesus's feet is a sinner, while Jesus sees her love and forgives her. The novel's respectable characters see Gloria the way Simon sees the woman, and Eddie Brunner alone comes near to seeing her otherwise.

• Augustine, Confessions I.1 and VIII.5 (Church Fathers)

  Augustine says the human heart is restless until it rests in God, and later describes how habit, indulged, became a chain that held his will. Gloria's restless movement between men, drink, and the city fits both descriptions, though the novel offers her no such rest.

Logic and Rhetoric

Central argument: In 1931 New York, money, class, and reputation decide how a person is treated more than character does. Gloria, wounded in girlhood and living on the edge of respectable society, is used by men like Liggett and judged by the world they belong to. That world protects its own standing and treats her as a scandal rather than a person. Therefore her death is shown not only as the end of a reckless life but as a verdict on a society that consumed her and moved on.

Rhetorical device: symbol. Emily Liggett's mink coat, taken by Gloria in the opening chapter, travels through the plot as an object of pursuit. It stands for the money and respectability Gloria lacks, and for the way the Liggetts' world values its possessions more carefully than it values her.

Debate: Resolved: Weston Liggett bears greater responsibility for Gloria Wandrous's death than Gloria herself.

Writing Prompts

Essay: O'Hara surrounds Gloria with men who want different things from her: Weston Liggett, the men of her past, and Eddie Brunner. Using the opening scene with the mink coat, the flashbacks, and her friendship with Eddie, argue what the novel suggests Gloria actually needed and why she never found it.

Comparison with Daisy Miller: Daisy Miller and Gloria Wandrous are both young American women whose freedom with men scandalises their societies, and both die young. Compare how James and O'Hara present each woman's innocence or experience and the judgment of those around her, and argue which society the author holds more responsible for her end.

Medical Lens

Alcohol is ubiquitous: the novel is a close portrait of Prohibition-era drinking culture, in which illicit liquor was a fashionable social lubricant and a source of chronic heavy use. Gloria's childhood sexual abuse is a hidden trauma that the narrative links to her later life; modern readers may see in this an early literary treatment of the long effects of abuse, though O'Hara's framing belongs to its time. The real Starr Faithfull case, which inspired the novel, involved disputed questions of accident or suicide; the novel itself presents Gloria's death as an accident. The period treated sexually active unmarried women in quasi-medical terms (e.g. 'nymphomania'), a framing the novel partly reproduces and partly criticises.

• Throughout

  Speakeasy drinking, hangovers and the role of alcohol in every social encounter.

  Alcohol
• Middle section (flashback)

  Account of Gloria's sexual abuse as a girl and its aftermath.

  Trauma Shell ShockSexuality Medicalized
• Final chapters

  Gloria's fall from the steamboat and the public reaction to her death.

  Death Dying

Creative Prompts

• Essay

  Compare Gloria Wandrous with Daisy Miller as young women whose freedom is punished by their stories. Is O'Hara's view more sympathetic than James's?

• Fiction

  Write Gloria's diary entry for the day the novel begins.

Further Reading

• Appointment in Samarra, John O'Hara

• Pal Joey, John O'Hara

• The O'Hara Concern, Matthew J. Bruccoli