Gracie DuBois

Gracie DuBois is a senior member of the English faculty whose department life is shaped by competing claims to professional authority, disciplinary territory, and personal recognition. She can be both William Henry Devereaux, Jr.’s antagonist and a surprisingly candid source of information: she helps advance the effort to recall him as chair, yet tells him that she has always liked him. Her part in the novel resists a simple division between adversary and ally. The same person who defends her standing within the department also warns Devereaux about the threat forming around him.

Identity and Departmental Position

Gracie has worked in the department for about twenty years. Her academic field is twentieth-century British literature, and she has published two volumes of poetry, the second of them through desktop publishing. Those details matter in the personnel committee’s debate: when she argues against hiring Professor Threlkind, a poet whose work includes publications in small magazines, she is not speaking from outside the areas at stake. The candidate might share both her literary field and her claim to poetry teaching.

The department’s older account of Gracie’s arrival is filtered through the men who remember it. William Henry Devereaux, Jr. recalls a younger Gracie as a woman passed through an all-male group’s gaze, and he remembers Jacob Rose’s crude summary of how the men regarded her. The recollection tells as much about the department’s habits of looking as it does about Gracie. The men’s present-day reflection that they have aged, while she has become more substantial in presence, does not free the narration from that gaze; it exposes its persistence. Devereaux recognizes that the past image still matters to Gracie, but the episode remains his interpretation of her, not an account she gives of herself.

Her perfume becomes one of the narrative’s recurring markers. In a small, windowless committee room, its intensity contributes to Devereaux’s distress, and he repeatedly reacts to it while the others appear more composed. Later he remembers that meeting when Gracie visits his office. The scent links separate scenes, turning an ordinary personal detail into a reminder of the earlier confrontation and of the way Devereaux’s attention to Gracie can become intrusive.

Professional Conflict and the Threlkind Deliberation

At the personnel meeting, the committee has already narrowed its search to three candidates. Devereaux’s account describes a defensive hiring culture: the group has removed applicants it found threatening, fears comparison with distinguished scholars, and explains away its choices by saying that strong candidates are difficult to retain. That institutional context frames Gracie’s objection to Threlkind. She wants the final three reduced to two and calls him untenable under the department’s existing staffing plan.

Her case has a practical surface. The department is already overstaffed in twentieth-century literature, she says, and has no demonstrated need for another poet. She also points out that Threlkind is another white man. These arguments are part of the committee’s deliberation, but Devereaux supplies a competing explanation: Gracie would have missed the meeting when Threlkind might otherwise have been removed, having been ill with flu, and she has reason to guard courses she has long treated as her own. She would have to share teaching in both her field and poetry if he were hired. The account therefore presents principle and self-interest together rather than allowing either to cancel the other.

The meeting’s tension becomes physical when Gracie’s spiral notebook strikes Devereaux in the face. Its coil has been pulled apart through repeated use, leaving a hooked end exposed; when she tries to retrieve the notebook, it catches him, and the surrounding committee members react in alarm. The incident grows out of their verbal antagonism but is not presented as a deliberate attack. Its awkwardness intensifies the department’s absurd atmosphere, while the notebook gives material form to the committee dispute: an ordinary working object has become an unexpected instrument of conflict.

Devereaux, Grievance, and Warning

After the meeting, Devereaux provokes Gracie in his office by wearing a fake nose and glasses obtained from Charles Purty, an attempted comic response to his earlier injury. Gracie does not give him the reaction he expects. Instead, she asks whether they can conduct the meeting as adult professionals. Her composure frustrates his effort to turn their antagonism into a joke, and his narration reveals that he is still measuring her response against the guilt he imagines he would feel if their positions were reversed.

Gracie says that personal matters should be separated from professional ones, then announces that she intends to file a grievance against him. She explains the professional stakes in terms of her status as a senior faculty member and her refusal to be pushed aside. Devereaux tries to make the distinction itself the object of a joke, but she does not follow him into the exchange. Her action establishes that the conflict is not merely a private quarrel: she is asserting a formal claim within the department’s institutional process.

The conversation then shifts unexpectedly. Gracie tells Devereaux that she has always liked him and describes him as almost real, unlike professors generally. He finds the remark odd but touching. It unsettles the straightforward antagonism of the grievance: Gracie can oppose his conduct and still feel personal affection for him. She also tells him that Finny is sounding people out about recalling him and may introduce a motion at the next department meeting. Gracie says she expects to know how she would vote. Her warning gives Devereaux advance knowledge of the challenge, although it does not make her an ally against it. She believes she may have to support the motion even as she expresses fondness for him.

Recall and Later Developments

During the recall vote, Gracie appears with Jacob Rose as the ballots are being counted. Devereaux, concealed above the room, has arranged for a folded sheet of paper to drop among the committee. Gracie notices a smell; Jacob focuses on the paper, which is mistaken for a ballot and then read. The episode gives Devereaux a small private reversal after the earlier perfume-filled encounter: this time, he uses scent to unsettle Gracie. The narrative makes the exchange comic, but it also shows how their conflict has become a contest of attention and perception, conducted amid the formal business of the department.

After Devereaux leaves the ceiling space where he has been hiding, Gracie insists that he had been up there and connects his presence to the paper that fell. Her deduction is correct. The scene also confirms that she is willing to say plainly what she thinks, even when others have not yet assembled the evidence. Around this period, Billy Quigley tells Jacob that Gracie has been telling people that they are getting married. Jacob responds by referring to Devereaux as a possible best man, but the exchange does not establish that a marriage has occurred. Later, Gracie and Jacob are building a house on land Devereaux sold them, giving their association a material and continuing presence in the story without resolving the earlier report into a confirmed wedding.

In a later glimpse at Evergreen’s, Gracie and Jacob appear together at dinner with Teddy Barnes and June Barnes. The scene places her among colleagues whose private relationships are entangled with departmental life, but it offers no explanation of the couple’s status. The restraint matters: what the book shows is not a settled domestic account but the persistence of Gracie and Jacob’s connection beyond the committee-room politics in which it first becomes consequential.

Characterization and Narrative Role

Gracie’s characterization is built from unresolved combinations. She protects her teaching territory, invokes staffing and representation in a hiring decision, files a grievance, and signals support for a recall. At the same time, she tells Devereaux that she likes him and gives him advance notice of the danger facing his chairmanship. The text does not convert that disclosure into a reconciliation. Her professional judgment and personal regard coexist, as do her concern for her position and the institutional arguments she makes on its behalf.

The contrast between Gracie as remembered by the men and Gracie as a senior faculty member is central to her narrative role. Devereaux’s account acknowledges the department’s earlier sexualized gaze while continuing to describe her through his own impressions, including her clothes, hair, and perfume. That tension keeps the portrait from being wholly neutral: the narrator’s attention can reduce her to an object of observation even as the narrative exposes the men’s nostalgia for their former selves. Against that gaze, Gracie speaks in the practical language of courses, staffing, seniority, grievance, and votes. She is not simply the department’s provocateur or Devereaux’s foil; she is a participant with professional interests and the power to affect the institutional struggle.

Her scenes also make the novel’s academic politics personal without making them only personal. A candidate’s field becomes a question of whose courses are shared; a committee meeting becomes a confrontation over conduct and status; a grievance and a recall motion develop alongside a moment of unexpected affection. Gracie’s significance lies in that double pressure. She helps show how institutional procedure can carry private rivalries, while her own divided position prevents the conflict from resolving into a simple choice between loyalty and opposition.