Florence Connolly

Florence Connolly occupies a singular place in Mary Antin's account of her years at the Boston Latin School: she is the one exception to the rule of friendly distance that governed Mary's relations with her schoolmates. For three years the two girls occupied adjacent seats, yet they did not walk arm in arm, did not call each other nicknames, did not share their lunch, and did not correspond in vacation time. Mary herself hesitated even to call Florence her "chum," and she described their bond as "a sort of intimacy of propinquity"—the companionship of two very studious girls who never strayed far from their desks at recess. The relation was graciously American in its mutual respect, and Mary recalled it happily to the end of her days.

Identity and Background

Florence was of Mary's own social order, her father presiding over a cheap lunch room—a detail that placed her among the working poor of Boston rather than among the Back Bay girls who came to school in carriages. Yet Mary did not on that account feel especially drawn to her. Florence's appearance marked her as resolutely unfashionable: she wore her light brown hair brushed flatly back and braided in a single plait at a time when pompadours were six inches high and braids hung in pairs, and she carried a pocket in her dress for her handkerchief in a day when pockets were repugnant to fashion. These very signs of humble circumstances and intellectual earnestness ought to have made Mary feel kinship with her, but they did not. Florence was quiet as a mouse, and Mary was reserved as an oyster; and perhaps the two had no more in common fundamentally than those two creatures in their natural state.

Life and Character

Florence was always perfect in her lessons, yet so modest that she recited in a noticeable tremor and had to be told frequently to raise her voice. Her perfection in scholarship was the quality that most defined her in Mary's eyes, and it was the ground of whatever intimacy the two shared. Mary spent more time studying Florence than loving her, she confessed, and yet she acknowledged that she ought to have loved her, for Florence was such a good girl. The portrait is drawn with a kind of affectionate detachment: Florence's virtues are enumerated precisely—her diligence, her modesty, her unfashionable plainness—but they are observed from a distance, as specimens of a character Mary could admire without ever quite entering into fellowship with.

Relationship with Mary Antin

Mary's relation to Florence was determined not by social distinctions nor by intellectual or moral affinities, but by her consciousness of the unique elements in her own character and history. It seemed to Mary that she had been pursuing a single adventure since the beginning of the world, guided by the same star, divided from other men's affairs by the same purpose; and so it mattered little whether her neighbors spurned or embraced her, if her way was no man's way. Florence was the one exception to the rule of friendly distance, but even this exception was qualified: the two girls practised their intimacy of propinquity without ever becoming true friends in the school-girl sense. Mary admired some of her schoolmates for good looks, beautiful manners, or more subtle attributes, but always at a distance; with Florence, the distance was narrower but never closed. The one concrete gesture that binds them in the memoir is Mary's exhibition to Florence of the letters written to her by the Honorable Senator Roe from Worcester, under the embossed letter head of the Senate Chamber—letters Mary could not help showing her quiet seatmate, as if Florence were the natural witness to the extraordinary ascent that was carrying Mary out of the slums and toward the State House.

Narrative Role and Significance

Florence Connolly functions in the memoir as a counterweight to the more spectacular figures who populate Mary's American story—the senators, lecturers, and philanthropists who opened doors for the immigrant girl. Where those figures represent the splendid processions of opportunity that Boston laid before its slum children, Florence represents the ordinary, the modest, the unremarkable: a girl of Mary's own class who remained what she was, while Mary herself was being made over. The contrast is implicit but sharp. Mary's schoolmates rated her by her scholarship and not by her father's occupation, and the Back Bay girls were generous in their appreciation of what it meant for a girl from the slums to be in the Latin School on the way to college; but Florence, who shared Mary's social order, could not be the object of such generous condescension. She was simply there, adjacent, studying as hard as Mary studied, perfect in her lessons and tremulous in her recitations. In the end, Florence's significance lies in what she reveals about Mary: that even the one exception to her rule of friendly distance was held at arm's length, because Mary's sense of her own unique destiny made ordinary friendship impossible. The intimacy of propinquity was the closest Mary could come to fellowship, and Florence—quiet, good, unfashionable, always perfect in her lessons—was the worthy but distant companion of that intimacy.