Mercy Among the Children

Snow represents purity and the innocence that characterizes Lyle’s falsely accused parents. Richards’s novel shows that innocence, like knowledge in the biblical sense, is ambivalent. Sydney and Elly are innocent of the crimes of which they have been accused, yet they refuse vindication. That Autumn is albino marks her out physically as the bearer of her parents’ ethical position, their simultaneous blamelessness and culpability for their fate. Her physical whiteness also emphasizes the allegorical level of the novel, aligning her with other pale, virtuous women of literature, such as the central character in the poems of the Pearl Manuscript.

The constant theme of adversity in the novel is concretized through pathetic fallacy, with seemingly eternal snowfall adding to the sense of hopelessness. It is unclear whether Sydney is a hero or an antihero in that his tragic flaws engulf him, just as the snow, the symbol of his innocence, ultimately does. Sydney’s death in the snow is reminiscent of the death of Victor Frankenstein in the snows of the North Pole. Mary Shelley’s alternate title for the 1818 novel Frankenstein, The Modern Prometheus, could equally apply to the misadventures of Sydney, himself a misunderstood outcast and fan of literature like Shelley’s “monster.