59 pages • 1 hour read
Jeneva RoseThe Perfect Marriage
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2020A 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
Power Dynamics and Gender Politics
Power dynamics and gender politics, particularly in the context of marriage, are a major theme in the book. Sarah and Adam challenge old-fashioned norms, in which the man would be the breadwinner and leader in the marriage, and the woman would be dependent on her husband. Instead, Sarah has a successful career and Adam is still trying to get his big break as an author. Throughout the novel, it is suggested that power imbalances in a marriage are ultimately destructive, regardless of which partner is the more dominant.
Eleanor’s character serves as a critical voice, questioning this inverted male-female power dynamic. To Eleanor, women should be homemakers and caretakers for their men and children—not career women. Eleanor’s inability to appreciate Adam and Sarah’s inverted gender/power dynamic is so total that she blames the affair—and Kelly/Jenna’s murder—on it. Eleanor tells Adam, “If [Sarah] would have been more focused on loving you than her career, you wouldn’t have been diddle-dipping elsewhere in the first place” (122, emphasis added). Eleanor also tells Sarah, “[If] you would have paid more attention to my son and upheld your wifely duties [...] Adam wouldn’t be in this predicament” (127, emphasis added). Ironically, Eleanor’s indulgence toward Adam has infantilized him, rendering him incapable of fulfilling the traditional masculine stereotypes of strength, independence, and emotional control that would conform to traditional gender roles. While Eleanor regards Sarah’s strength as an issue, she fails to identify Adam’s weakness as a problem.
Sarah’s status as the dominant partner in the marriage is ultimately not, however, a truly liberating or fulfilling position. Sarah cannot consider Adam her equal and struggles to develop the more emotional aspects of her personality, leaving her emotionally-stunted and unable to form genuine connections with others. Her desire for total control and disgust toward any form of weakness leave her unable to experience or accept vulnerability. In theory, Adam and Sarah could serve as an exciting challenge to old-fashioned norms of marriage. However, this illusion is shattered by the way Sarah exploits her power over Adam and seeks to control him at every step—something he realizes at the end. Ultimately, the book argues that no good can come of uneven power dynamics in either direction—a truly “perfect” marriage should be an equal partnership, not a power struggle.
Fidelity Versus Deceit
One of the book’s biggest themes is fidelity versus deceit. In the novel, characters seek to deceive and manipulate one another in a variety of ways. While the inciting incident of the novel is Adam’s infidelity, other forms of deceit come to the fore as the novel progresses, creating a world in which no one truly knows each other because no one can be trusted.
The novel’s preoccupation with deceit is embodied even at the level of narration, with Sarah being an unreliable narrator who seeks to hide the facts of her own crime until the very end. Sarah’s internal monologue is often misleading. When Sheriff Stevens brings up Kelly Summers, Sarah seems to not know the name, thinking: “Maybe she’s our cleaning lady? No that’s not her name” (52). Sarah’s deceitful nature gains fresh heights when she cries in front of Adam after “learning” about the affair she has already discovered, and when she pretends to take on his legal defense out of loyalty and altruism while actively framing him for her own crime.
While continuously deceitful, Sarah paradoxically still places a huge premium on fidelity and honesty. She is motivated to kill Kelly/Jenna and frame Adam as an elaborate revenge plot for his affair, believing that his betrayal of her merits the “justice” of a murder conviction. When Bob and Anne become suspects in Kelly/Jenna’s case, Sarah notes, “I don’t trust either of them” (271), even though Bob is her co-conspirator in the murder. While manipulating Anne into being her alibi and loyal ally, she is nevertheless shocked to discover that Anne knew about Adam’s affair before she did—she ends her friendship with Anne immediately afterwards, angered by the fact that Anne is not as trustworthy as she originally believed.
While Sarah is the novel’s most explicit embodiment of deceit, the other characters are also dishonest in their own ways. The Sheriff suppresses evidence to hide his own embarrassing involvement with Kelly/Jenna; Kelly/Jenna is unfaithful to both her husband and Adam; Adam deceives Sarah and then continues to plot his own investigation and defense behind her back. The chronic lack of honesty and trust creates a social environment in which no one can form meaningful interpersonal connections, reducing all human interactions to power plays based on securing one’s own ends. The novel suggests that deceit and disloyalty tend to breed destructive cycles that are difficult to break, leaving even the novel’s most successful characters in a state of permanent suspicion and paranoia.
Revenge Versus Justice
At the heart of the novel are tensions between revenge and justice. The narrative is driven by Sarah’s revenge plot against Adam in response to his affair. Bob, her co-conspirator, participates in the murder plot to avenge his brother Greg’s death, as Adam’s mistress is believed to have killed him. However, neither Sarah nor Bob characterize what they did as revenge—in fact, Sarah insists that she is enacting her own kind of “justice.” The novel suggests that, without adherence to a clear ideal of justice and legality, unfettered revenge can easily supersede it.
The tensions between revenge and justice are displayed in the language Sarah uses throughout the novel. Sarah insists on characterizing Adam’s infidelities as a “crime” for which he must pay: “Adam may not have murdered Kelly Summers, but he is paying for his crimes” (315, emphasis added). She also tells Eleanor, “I’ll make sure Adam gets the justice he deserves" (127, emphasis added). In depicting Adam as a criminal and repeatedly insisting to herself that what she is seeking is “justice,” Sarah rationalizes her own crimes and obstructions of the legal process: She kills Kelly/Jenna and ensures that Adam gets the death penalty, all while telling herself that her own crimes are excusable.
The novel suggests that justice is always in jeopardy when those tasked with upholding it become corrupted by their own desires and vendettas. Although both Sarah and Bob are lawyers, they show no respect for the law itself or due legal process: Both willingly commit murder and frame an innocent man. Matthew, a fellow lawyer, agrees to obtain DNA evidence from various men without consent just to help Sarah, even though he admits he knows this is illegal and inadmissible in court. The police officers in the novel likewise put personal needs ahead of justice: Scott Summers hides evidence in the Greg Miller murder out of his feelings for Kelly/Jenna, while the Sheriff in the Kelly/Jenna murder investigation in turn suppresses evidence to hide his own affair with her. Due to the scheming and manipulations of all the characters involved in the process, the legal proceedings go entirely awry, leading to the wrong person’s conviction for the crime.
With legal justice so often corrupted or ignored by the novel’s characters, the revenge plot of the guilty parties can go ahead without hindrance. At the novel’s end, Adam is executed, while Sarah and Bob marry and continue their lives and legal careers. Revenge has won over justice, and all of the main characters are guilty of having enabled that outcome.
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By Jeneva Rose
