Midge Percy

Midge Percy, born Midge Steering, is the last member of the Steering family, the wealthy heiress whose marriage to Stewart Percy brings him into the family’s fortune and back to Steering School. Seen through Garp’s memories and Jenny Fields’s hostile autobiography, Midge is at once a doting wife and mother and a figure of inherited privilege: her casual confidence about her household, children, and dog becomes a point of friction with Jenny, and the family’s Newfoundland, Bonkers, ultimately injures young Garp.

Identity and Background

Midge is the last Steering, the unclaimed heiress of the Steering School family. The school community knows that Stewart Percy married into her wealth; in its scornful view, he need only remain her husband, rather than demonstrate any particular ability, to enjoy the advantages it brings. His marriage to Midge gives him a position secured by money and family connection, a status that the students treat as a familiar source of ridicule.

Her father-in-law, Jenny Fields’s father, is described as a footwear magnate who would think of Midge’s money and tremble in his shoes. That detail makes the scale of her fortune part of her identity even beyond the school’s own judgments: her wealth commands notice, and Stewart’s access to it shapes how others understand his place in the community.

Marriage and Family

During World War II, Midge traveled to Hawaii on vacation, where she met Stewart and fell in love with him. According to Jenny’s autobiography, Midge began having Stewart’s children before the war had ended. When it was over, she returned to Steering School with Stewart and their growing family and asked the school to give him a job. Her return thus joined a personal choice—her marriage—to a practical act that established Stewart in the institution associated with her family.

The Percy household continued to grow. When Garp was a boy, he remembered three or four young Percys already in the family, with more seemingly always on the way. Jenny made a nasty rhyme about Midge’s many pregnancies; Garp later judged his mother’s poetry even more harshly than her prose. The episode shows how the family’s size became material for Jenny’s ridicule, while Garp’s recollection preserves it as part of the crowded, ongoing presence of the Percy children in his childhood.

Midge’s affection for Stewart appears in her explanation for the family dog’s name. She said she had acquired Bonkers after the birth of her fourth child and used the word to describe how she had felt about Stewart after they first had children: she had been “bonkers about him.” The name, in her account, was a playful declaration of attachment. Jenny’s account, by contrast, turns it into evidence of Midge’s foolishness, making the same domestic detail serve two sharply different portraits.

Jenny Fields and the Percys

Midge’s relationship with Jenny is marked by mutual wariness and class tension. Jenny knew that Stewart looked down on her, but she did not openly challenge him. Garp played with the Percy children, yet they were not allowed to visit him in the infirmary annex. When Midge suggested that her own home was better for children and joked that there was nothing for them to catch, Jenny answered that she knew who was contagious and who was not, adding that nobody played on the roof.

Jenny did not regard the Percy house as simply unpleasant. The former Steering family home was spacious and carpeted, furnished with generations of tasteful toys, and cared for by servants. She recognized that it could be comforting for children. What she resented was the ease surrounding that comfort: the Percys could afford a casualness that Jenny believed they had not earned through attentiveness. She suspected that neither Midge nor Stewart worried enough about their children, and wondered whether having so many children made them less anxious about each one.

That suspicion also informs Jenny’s broader criticism of upper-class freedom. In her autobiography, she presents Midge as foolish for falling in love with Stewart and having children with him, and condemns the wealthy for acting as if their children and pets could not cause harm. Garp likewise used the contemptuous label “The curs of the upper class” for the dogs and children he associated with the Percys. These judgments are not neutral descriptions of Midge; they reveal how her household becomes a target through which Jenny and Garp express their resentment of privilege.

Bonkers and the Attack on Garp

Midge’s most consequential appearance in Garp’s childhood story is connected to Bonkers, the family’s Newfoundland. The dog had grown from a puppy that upset garbage cans and took baseballs into an animal Jenny considered mean. It also defied the town leash law for years, an example Jenny linked to the Percys’ willingness to live by their own relaxed rules.

Before Garp was attacked, Bonkers had mangled a volleyball during children’s play. When the boy who owned the ball tried to take it back, the dog bit him, leaving deep puncture wounds in his forearm. Midge defended the incident by describing Bonkers as excited because he loved playing with children. She had named the dog after her affection for Stewart, but the name’s lighthearted origin contrasts with the danger Jenny saw in dismissing an attack as harmless play.

Bonkers later broke up a touch-football game on the Percy lawn and attacked five-year-old Garp, biting part of his left ear. The other children fled. The incident gives concrete consequence to the conflict between Jenny’s warnings and Midge’s reassurance: what Midge treated as a family pet’s overexuberance becomes an injury to Jenny’s child. It also makes the Percy household’s relaxed approach to its dog inseparable from Garp’s early experience of danger.

Narrative Role and Significance

Midge is characterized largely through the contrast between accounts. Jenny’s autobiography casts her as a “dingbat,” a wealthy woman whose romantic choices and domestic life exemplify the privilege Jenny despises. Garp’s recollections add details of the expanding Percy family and of Midge as the mother of his playmates, while the scenes involving Bonkers show why Jenny’s distrust has practical stakes. The difference between these perspectives keeps Midge from being reducible to Jenny’s insults: her love for Stewart and her effort to secure him work are specific actions, even as the novel frames the household they create through class resentment and conflict over responsibility.

Her place in the story is also tied to inheritance. The Percy family occupies the old Steering home, possesses the wealth that gives Stewart security, and enjoys a domestic ease that Jenny cannot share. The dog’s attacks expose the limit of that ease: privilege may permit a household to disregard rules, but it cannot ensure that other people escape the consequences. Midge’s story therefore connects family affection and economic advantage to the novel’s recurring question of who is made to bear the risks of another family’s freedom.