Dragonfly: Things

The novel Dragonfly in Amber opens with Roger Wakefield clearing his deceased foster-father's house of the latter's possessions.  The first time I read the novel, I was trying to overcome the trauma of the transition between book 1 and book 2--and it was traumatic.  It took me a while to work up the will to read it because I didn't--DIDN'T--want to hear that what had (apparently) happened, happened.  So as Roger looks through the later Reverend's possessions, I didn't particularly notice what the possessions were, though I did catch the general significance of the Reverend's Jacobite artifacts, and his interest in the eighteenth century.  Nothing is placed by accident in a novel, so just for the record:

He moved toward one of the tables and picked up a smal china dish.  It was filled with small metal rectangles; lead "gaberlunzies," badges issued to eighteenth-century beggars by parishes as a sort of license.  A collection of stoneware bottles stood by the lamp, a ramshorn snuff mull, banded in silver, next to them.  (4)

The snuff mull calls to my mind Claire's attempt to spring Jamie from Wentworth prison.  Murtagh uses attempted theft as an excuse for knocking out the guard, but when Claire suggests that he take something--a snuffbox--to make it convincing, he scoffs--actual theft is a capital offense, while attempted theft is a much lighter sentence (maiming or flogging).  The snuff mull is further described as having inscriptions, "the names and dates of the Deacons and Treasurers of the Incorporation of Tailors of the Canongate, from Edinburgh, 1726" (4), but this is a detail that I can't fit into place at this point.

The "gaberlunzies" recall Jamie's friend Hugh Munro from Outlander, who gives Claire the dragonfly in amber that provides the novel's title.

I admit to having been a bit perplexed at the title otherwise.  However, there is an explanatory moment when the sense of self that a child possesses from birth, that develops during the toddler years, puts up defenses during the teen years, and then hardens itself against the world through adulthood is described as that dragonfly (69-70). The narrative voice of Claire explains:

I had thought I was well beyond that stage, had lost all trace of softness and was well set on my way to a middle age of stainless steel. But now I thought that Frank's death had cracked him in some way. And the cracks were widening, so that I could no longer patch them with denial. (70)

By this early analogy, the formation of Claire's self in relation to--and through--Jamie, and the whittling away of the amber, are the subjects of the novel.  And yet, in some ways, I would argue that the true subject of the novel is the reconstruction of Jamie--and especially, of Jamie's manhood--in Claire's image.  And it takes, in my opinion, the next few novels for Jamie to recover his own sense of self in relation to his time-traveling wife--and time travel itself is very much to blame.