60 pages • 2 hours read
Samantha DowningMy Lovely Wife
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2019A 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
The Complexity of Identity
Content Warning: This section of the guide describes and discusses the source text’s treatment of violence, murder, death by suicide, and infidelity.
In My Lovely Wife, identity is shown to be so complex that truly knowing another person, or even oneself, is nearly impossible. Characters in this novel are not always what they seem to be at first, because many of them are keeping dark secrets or living double lives. Additionally, characters change over time, calling into question whether someone is really the same “person” from day to day or year to year. The narrator learns the painful truth that a single person can have both an appealing side and a dangerous side. This is true of himself, his wife Millicent, the notorious serial killer Owen Oliver Riley, and even the narrator’s teenage children Rory and Jenna.
Some characters create deliberately misleading identities by concealing aspects of themselves. Although Millicent appears to be a responsible, hard-working mother, she is a vindictive serial killer who deliberately sickens her own daughter. The narrator reflects that Millicent “gave the family structure. Both our kids play sports. They aren’t given money unless they work for it […] This is all because of Millicent. The same Millicent who kept Lindsay alive for a year while doing god knows what to her” (44). It is difficult for the narrator to renounce Millicent because, for a long time, he thought she was helping him live a better life. Still, he has to face the truth that she’s a “monster” to provide a better, safer future for his children. Owen is similarly dualistic, presenting one image to the general public and a very different image to his murder victims: “People knew him, had spoken to him, had sold him goods and services, and waved to him as he passed. I stared at his picture on the TV, thinking that couldn’t be him. He looked so normal. And he was, except that he had killed nine women” (68). Millicent and Owen illustrate the gulf that can exist between who a person seems to be in public and who their private actions reveal them to be.
The narrator recognizes that identity fluctuates in relationships. He wishes he had never met Millicent because “I wouldn’t have turned into who I am now without her” (347). In addition to shifting in response to major life events, and shifting slowly over time, identities can shift as a result of being around a certain other person. The narrator wrestles with whether to be a good person and a good parent or to be a “good” husband to Millicent, which entails doing bad things. He acts out all of these roles, being both good and bad at different moments, but ultimately he chooses to become better and renounce the goal of pleasing Millicent through murder. Yet that choice does not necessarily reveal that this is his “true” identity. When the narrator introduces himself to a stranger at the end of the novel as “Quentin,” a new persona, it suggests that he has simply adopted a new persona or personas, rather than arriving at a stable sense of self.
Finally, the rapid swings in public perception of the identities of the kidnap and murder victims illustrate the arbitrariness of public identity. The news and other media influence how the public views characters who enter the public spotlight, like Owen, “Tobias,” Naomi, and Lindsay. After news breaks that Naomi sometimes slept with hotel guests, “the talk starts to change. People stop saying it is a travesty and a shame. […] Instead, people start asking how Naomi could have prevented it. […] Naomi is one person and then another in the blink of an eye” (200). Naomi’s identity is not fixed even in death. Who she “was” depends upon how others remember her and how the media portrays her. Once she is discovered to be dead and not just missing, public perception of Naomi changes once again, and she’s rendered back into a “nice” victim whose life was cut short, rather than the object of judgment. Her identity, those of all the characters, is a complex interplay of perceptions, actions, and interpersonal relationships.
The Challenges of Parenthood
For the narrator, the appeal of murder is intertwined with his socioeconomic class as well as his role as a father. The first murder he commits is to defend his family from a woman who has broken into his house and who he believes wants to kill his wife. This demonstrates the complicated challenge of family love and the desire to protect one’s family at all costs. For the narrator, the urge to protect and please his family is so powerful that it blurs the lines between good and evil. When Millicent starts killing other people who are not a threat to the family, the narrator at first finds it appealing because it allows the couple a level of control that is not accessible to them financially: “The world is filled with things I can’t do and can’t afford, from houses to cars to kitchen equipment, but this, this, is how we can be free. This is the one thing that is ours, that we control. Thanks to Millicent” (78). This illustrates the crushing pressure of financial stress, which appears to be never-ending. Even though the couple is well-off financially, they never feel like they are well-off enough, which produces constant anxiety and rage. This capitalist sickness does not always lead to murderous rage but is a realistic, commonplace problem that even non-murderers face, as is parenthood.
Ironically, for the narrator, the challenge of getting away with murder pales in comparison to the challenge of being a good parent. Throughout the text, he juggles his job, kids, and criminal activities, but the area in which he fails the most often is with his kids. He reflects upon his failure with Rory: “My son is trying to blackmail me. With evidence. I am impressed because he is so clever, and petrified because the last thing I want is for my children, especially my daughter, to grow up with an asshole cheat for a father” (50-51). There are many scary things in this novel, but to the narrator, the scariest things are being a bad parent, raising children who turn out to be bad people, and leaving his kids alone with Millicent once he realizes she has been poisoning Jenna. Slowly, he realizes that his and Millicent’s criminal activities are fundamentally incompatible with good parenting. Rory starts to exhibit morally questionable behaviors that mimic his father’s, such as sneaking out, lying, blackmailing, and cheating on tests at school. Jenna lives in constant fear, cuts her hair off, attacks a boy she does not know, and brings a weapon to school. The narrator concludes that several of these problems are a result of his and Millicent’s criminal behavior.
Though the narrator’s parenting issues are tangled up with his criminal activities, the novel connects his struggles with parenthood to his own unhappy, if more mundane, childhood. The narrator nurses resentment against his parents, who were emotionally neglectful of him. Part of his attraction to Millicent is the fact that she provides him with the family and the connection he felt he was missing as a child. Eventually, he begins to recognize that he is inadvertently perpetuating his parent’s mistakes: “Ten minutes […] was all it took to tell my children their grandparents were not good parents. The irony of what I had done hit me years later, after Holly and the others. Someday, Rory and Jenna might have a talk with their kids and say the same thing about Millicent and me” (189). As Jenna and Rory exhibit more and more signs of unhappiness and dysfunction, the narrator makes the opposite choice his parents did, prioritizing their needs over his own. This illustrates that though intergenerational trauma can make parenting challenging, it is always possible to atone for the mistakes of the past. The novel ends on a hopeful note. Although both kids have been traumatized, they have relocated, been freed from Millicent, and are in therapy along with their father.
The Wide-Ranging Effects of Infidelity and Murder
Both infidelity and murder are shown to affect a large web of people, not just the individuals who are directly involved. At first, the narrator seems to think that his infidelity is not a big deal as long as others do not find out about it. Likewise, he thinks he and Millicent can murder people without causing any problems for their children, friends, or others in the community besides their direct murder targets. The infidelity and murders in the novel almost always have consequences that far surpass what the narrator originally anticipated. These actions are shown to be morally bad not only because of their immediate and direct consequences but also because of indirect and/or delayed consequences.
The narrator is unfaithful to Millicent with Lindsay, Petra, and Megan. He never tells her about these transgressions, but she still finds out, and the consequences are dire. First, Rory discovers his father’s infidelity and blackmails him, which displeases the narrator. Rory becomes a less appealing person as a result of his father’s infidelity, though not in the expected way. Presumably, the narrator did not want Millicent to find out because she might leave him. What she actually does is much worse and goes beyond what the narrator would have suspected: She kills two of the women he was unfaithful with, along with several others, and frames the narrator for the group of murders. The narrator is not surprised that his infidelity came with negative consequences, but he is surprised at how drastic and wide-ranging these consequences turned out to be. This illustrates that despite all the “planning” the narrator attempts to do, it is not always possible to predict the multitude of negative consequences that can result from things like infidelity.
The couple’s murderous activities also result in consequences beyond what the narrator expected. He thought that if they chose victims who did not have many close family members or friends, their murders would have fewer consequences. This proves to be false when the serial killings become major news, and the entire community enters into a panic. Trista is so emotionally distraught that her ex-boyfriend, the serial killer Owen, is supposedly back and killing more women, that she dies by suicide. The narrator reflects that “[p]oor, dead Trista will never even be recognized as a victim. And she was, even if she did take her own life” (246). The narrator realizes that his actions have created more victims than he originally intended, and that murder does not give him as much “control” as he thought.
Far from being somehow separate from their family, the couple’s murders interfere with their parenting. First, Jenna develops an anxiety disorder as a result of the serial killings and the media’s portrayal of them. Next, the narrator discovers that Millicent has been poisoning Jenna whenever she needs to distract the narrator so she can commit murders or torture people alone, crossing a line the narrator never thought she would cross: “[T]he thought makes me physically ill. Jenna is our child, our daughter. She is not Lindsay or Naomi. She is not someone to torture. Or maybe she is. Maybe Jenna is no different. Not to Millicent” (350). This is ironic because Lindsay and Naomi were people too, just like Jenna. At first, the narrator possessed the ability to love some women (like Millicent, Jenna, and Trista) while objectifying others (like Naomi and Lindsay). Ultimately, he makes the right choice to quit murdering people, although he arguably does it for only some of the right reasons. He quits murder because it indirectly hurts people he loves and views as human. He does not necessarily learn that his victims were also humans and should not have been treated as objects. Still, there is hope that he can learn to view all humans as deserving of life, perhaps using his love for his children as a model for how to treat others.
