The Signature of All Things

White Acre is Henry’s small kingdom, established for his pleasure and named after him. It represents the epitome of Henry’s evolution as well as his conquest of the “New World”; he has carved out this part of it that belongs to him. White Acre then becomes Alma’s domain and her laboratory long before it passes to her by inheritance. The home to her moss-covered boulders, White Acre is for many decades of Alma’s life the territory she knows best, held there as she is by loyalty to her father. It is a strategic center of Henry’s business interests and the locale for Alma’s most inhabited places—the binding closet and the carriage house.

As in the chapter where the astronomer sets up the model of the universe on the lawn, White Acre is truly a model of the cosmos, a world unto itself. It is the center of Alma’s world and the place that holds her family and draws new people into her life, first Retta and then Ambrose. After she matures, first in losing her mother and then again in losing her father, White Acre becomes the “Old World” that Alma wants to leave, the known that she will abandon in favor of the new. But she gives the place new life in handing it over to a cause near to Prudence’s heart. Alma is the one who makes Prudence truly a Whittaker by giving her the family’s home and the running of the little kingdom—a new community, nearly a utopia, that Prudence can design along the principles of equality in which she believes. Thus, while White Acre serves several functions in the novel, it most compellingly represents the Whittakers themselves, first in Henry’s conquest and next in Alma’s theories about survival, adaptation, and change.

The binding closet is “a tiny dark room with a hidden door just off the library, where Beatrix stored all the paper, fabrics, leather, wax, and glues needed to maintain and restore the fragile old editions” (89). It is the secret place where Alma accesses her sexual self and gives free rein to her sexual desires, and so it represents the part of herself that she keeps hidden from others. Sexual release for Alma is about pleasure as well as utility; she finds that achieving an orgasm settles and clears her mind for thought, so a room built for a specific function is the ideal setting for this act.

In bringing Ambrose into the binding closet, Alma gives him access to the most secret, intimate, and raw parts of herself. Because she associates the binding closet with desire, being there with him is an erotic experience for her, and thus she reads an erotic charge in the question she perceives as emanating from him during their silent exchange. After she leaves White Acre for Tahiti and has a sexual encounter with another person, Alma is finally freed from the binding closet. She still pursues self-satisfaction, acknowledging these urges as part of her nature, and it is still a private act, but she no longer feels as if she needs to hide in shame. Rather than binding her, as the name of the room would suggest, or being the shameful and prohibitive act as conventional thought regarded masturbation, the binding closet represents liberation for a basic element of Alma’s self, just as the carriage house (the place that housed vehicles for transportation and pleasure) houses and holds her intellectual self.