49 pages • 1 hour read
T. KingfisherA House With Good Bones
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2023A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Family Lineage and Trauma
The theme of Family Lineage and Trauma explores the ways that trauma and power are passed from generation to generation. This theme concretely ties the novel to the Southern Gothic tradition, which examines the ambivalence, secrets, and dark underbelly of family. T. Kingfisher uses the rose motif and the underground children to explore this theme.
Family lineage manifests in the narrative in several ways, especially the symbol of the rose. Roses appear throughout the novel—for example, in Gran Mae’s rose garden and the epigraphs describing rose varieties. They represent Gran Mae’s lingering presence in the house and Sam and Edith’s lives, as the roses, which Gran Mae planted, survive her. The roses suggest the trauma passed down in this family lineage, as implied by Edith’s shock when Sam places some of them in a vase. Sam’s memory of Gran shoving her hand into rose thorns also manifests this theme, tying the physical pain of the memory to both the roses and Gran.
The roses also retain Gran Mae’s magical power, which symbolizes her emotional power within the family. Gail hypothesizes that Gran Mae put all her considerable power into the rose garden, ensuring that magic—and her influence on her family—would persist for years after her death. That stored power ultimately allows her to manifest literally in the form of a rose puppet. The fact that Sam inherits Gran’s power ties the roses back to both family lineage and trauma, given her childhood experience with the roses. Gail’s assertion that “some things run in families” (96) bears out when Sam discovers that she can use magical power to control the roses just as Gran Mae did. It is only when Sam realizes that her family lineage includes both strengths and weaknesses and connects with this power that she can defeat the underground children and begin to heal from her family trauma. Connecting with Gran Mae’s magic also allows Sam to acknowledge the trauma Gran Mae experienced with her own father. This deepens Sam’s understanding of her grandmother without excusing the trauma she enacted on the next generation.
The underground children lend literal, concrete form to the dark, ugly secrets within Elgar Mills’s lineage. Sam learns that Elgar passed his genetic material to the magical children, making them her literal relatives, as she reveals to Edith. These grotesque creatures are also part of Edith and Sam’s inheritance, a persistent reminder of Elgar’s hunger for power and control, which Gran Mae likewise inherited. They also, like generational trauma, present a persistent problem to future generations. Sam can only defeat the children after she confronts her family’s root trauma and embraces her inherited power. Through this, Kingfisher suggests that people with generational trauma also inherit power and strength because of the trauma. That power, the author suggests, is only accessible once a person confronts the trauma. Sam’s use of the power suggests that she learned from her previous generations’ mistakes. Unlike Elgar and Gran Mae, for instance, Sam uses her power only to protect her friends and family.
The Illusion of Normalcy
The theme of The Illusion of Normalcy stems from the Family Lineage and Trauma theme and echoes back to the Southern Gothic tradition. Gran Mae responds to the dark secrets and trauma she experienced with her father by obsessing over normalcy. She fanatically maintains a veneer of Southern politeness and cruelly enacts a fantasy of “nice and normal” family life that resembles the wholesome 1950s sitcoms she watches, like Leave It To Beaver (31). Gran Mae complains that Elgar refused to even pretend to be normal, which is ultimately one of the reasons she allows the underground children to kill him.
Gran Mae’s house illustrates her need for normalcy early in the novel. Sam describes it as a completely average “cookie-cutter” middle-class white suburban home indistinguishable from others of its kind in the completely unremarkable neighborhood. However, Sam points out that Edith initially painted and decorated the house with vibrant colors and quirky art, suggesting that the house’s appearance at the beginning of the novel is unnatural. As the novel unfolds, Kingfisher reveals that Gran Mae’s ghost forced Edith to portray herself and her home differently from her natural inclination. This illustrates that the “normal” house is merely a facade beneath which hide ugly family secrets and literal monsters, both common tropes of Southern Gothic literature.
Gran Mae’s behavior, when she manifests as a puppet constructed of roses, further illustrates the depth of her illusion. The epigraph for “The Ninth Day,” describing a rose variety called the “Sunday Dinner” (169), foreshadows Gran Mae’s appearance and final attempts at forcing her family into normalcy. She appears in the house, determined to create the perfect picture of a “normal” family through a perfect Sunday dinner. Gran Mae’s keeping Phil captive illustrates how far she will go to enforce her vision of normalcy. Dissatisfied with Sam’s single status, like Edith before her, she determines that Sam needs a husband so that she does not “end up” (196) like Edith. Further, the author suggests that Gran Mae’s expectations for normalcy are unrealistic with the ham incident, in which Edith asserts that nobody can cook a frozen ham in five minutes, as her mother expects her to do.
For Gran Mae, the need to build a family that upholds her image of “nice and normal” justifies terrorizing her family, both before and after death. As Sam reflects in the final chapter, this does not stem from any real love for her family but from Gran Mae’s belief that her family members are extensions of herself. Like her roses, they must be controlled and, when they resist control, pruned. With her father and with Edith and Sam, Gran Mae shows the extent to which she is willing to impose normalcy. If her image of family does not adhere to the illusion of normalcy she insists upon, it should be destroyed.
Science Versus Magic
The theme of Science Versus Magic emerges as Sam insists upon rational explanations for the many strange occurrences she encounters, conflicted between the rational and the irrational. Kingfisher sets up Sam to embody the scientific and rational, while Gail and Gran Mae embody the magical and irrational. Gail explicitly acknowledges Sam’s struggle when she tells Sam that her scientific mindset will make it hard for her to grasp or accept what Gail has to say about magic. This proves true. Despite mounting evidence that something uncanny, even supernatural, is happening in her mother’s house, Sam refuses to seriously consider the possibility until she can no longer deny it.
Sam’s job as an archaeoentomologist informs much of her attitude toward the supernatural phenomena she experiences. He first encounter with magic occurs her first time in Gran Mae’s garden, where she realizes there are no insects. She knows that this is a scientific impossibility but struggles to explain it. Her doubt, telling the ladybug there should be more of it, leads to the ladybugs’ swarming her bedroom later that night, as Gran explains to her later. She devises a rational, scientific explanation for the ladybugs’ strange behavior, recalling an incident in England when ladybugs swarmed “like a Biblical plague” in 1976 (58). Though this explanation seems plausible, the continued strange occurrences suggest her rational explanations are not satisfactory. Sam responds similarly to further phenomena, such as the second swarm of ladybugs and her experiences with claws combing through her hair. Her scientific explanations persist even when they imply she is hallucinating or losing her grasp on reality.
Sam’s doubt persists even when other people disclose their magical experiences to her. For example, Edith tells Sam that Gran Mae is haunting her and offers a litany of evidence to support that claim, but Sam insists that ghosts are not real, clinging to rationality even when the evidence points to the contrary. As she does with her own experiences, Sam assumes that her mother is experiencing dementia or hallucination. Her insistence on rationality recalls Gran Mae’s illusion of normalcy: Magic and the supernatural are not normal. They do not happen in average, cookie-cutter suburban neighborhoods. Only when The Illusion of Normalcy dissolves and Sam sees the literal monstrosity of her family and its history is she able to accept the magical reality of her experiences. In this way, Kingfisher connects the two themes, suggesting that insisting on normalcy and insisting on rationality are similarly limiting perspectives.
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