The Summer Solstice by Nick Joaquin: Summary, Themes and Ending
Quick answer: The Summer Solstice by Nick Joaquin: summary with the ending, Doña Lupeng, Don Paeng, the Tatarin ritual on St John's Day, the kiss on her feet, themes and craft.
It is the feast of St John in 1850s Manila, the three hottest days of the year, and Doña Lupeng discovers that her cook Amada has spent the night dancing in the Tatarin, a women's fertility rite older than the church. By the third night Lupeng has joined the dancers herself, and her husband has been driven off by a crowd of women. What he does when they get home is the story's final scene.
Nick Joaquin (1917 to 2004) wrote The Summer Solstice in the 1940s and collected it in Prose and Poems in 1952; it was later staged and filmed as Tatarin. Joaquin remains in copyright, so this page summarises and analyses without quotation. The story is standard on Philippine university courses on gender and colonial culture.
The story in brief
Lupeng Moreta, mother of three, hears from the coachman Entoy that his wife Amada has been possessed by the Tatarin and that he dare not touch her while the spirit is on her. Lupeng is disgusted and fascinated. At the St John's Day procession the family meets Paeng's cousin Guido, back from Europe, who has watched the rite and speaks of it with excitement; later he kneels and kisses Lupeng's feet, and she is shaken by his worship and by her husband's dismissal of it.
On the last night of the festival Lupeng goes to see the Tatarin in Paco and is drawn into the dance. Paeng follows, tries to pull her out, and is beaten by the women. At home he tells her she needs whipping, then says he loves her. Lupeng demands that he say instead that he adores her, and that he prove it. Don Paeng gets down on the floor and kisses her feet. The story ends there.
The characters
Themes and meaning
Exam readings treat the story as a contest between Catholic patriarchy and a pre-colonial female cult, and between reason and the body. The Tatarin, a real folk ritual around the St John's feast, is Joaquin's vehicle for what the Spanish order suppressed.
The sharper observation is that the ending is not liberation but exchange. Lupeng does not escape the structure of domination; she takes its top position, and her demand for adoration echoes Paeng's earlier talk of whipping. Joaquin shows power changing hands, not dissolving.
The craft
The turn is Guido's kiss, which plants the story's final image early and in a different mouth. Joaquin repeats it at the end with the husband, so the closing gesture arrives as fulfilment rather than surprise.
The technique worth stealing is the planted gesture. Have a minor character perform, early and half comically, the exact act the climax will require of a major one. When it returns, the reader feels the story close like a hinge.
For class and essays
What writers can take from this
- Explain the Tatarin as a real ritual, not an invention.
- Trace the kissed feet from Guido to Paeng as the structural spine.
- Argue the ending as exchange of power rather than liberation.
- For your own fiction, plant the climactic gesture early in a minor character.
- Use a festival's fixed three days as a natural structure.
- Let a respectable character discover appetite gradually, scene by scene.
Try it yourself
Write a story set across the three days of a public festival in which a minor character performs a small, strange act of homage early on, and the story ends with a powerful character forced to repeat it exactly.
Questions
What is the summary of The Summer Solstice?
During the St John's Day festival, Doña Lupeng learns of the Tatarin, a women's fertility rite, joins the dancing on the last night, and sees her husband beaten by the women. At home she demands he adore her, and Don Paeng kisses her feet.
What is the Tatarin in The Summer Solstice?
A folk fertility ritual performed by women around the feast of St John, presented in the story as a pre-Christian cult that briefly overturns male authority.
What is the theme of The Summer Solstice?
Power between the sexes and between colonial religion and older belief. The ending shows domination reversed rather than abolished.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working writers. Updated September 2026.
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