66 pages • 2 hours read
Ashley AudrainA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
As the novel’s title suggests, the “whispers” motif plays a central role. For Blair, whispers refer to her intuition, the inner voice that tells her she is right to suspect Aiden of cheating. Blair struggles to trust herself, in part because she does so much “pretending” that she confuses reality with desire. As she goes to deliver Chloe’s card, “All the whispers she so masterfully ignores […] are screaming at her” (248). However, when she learns Whitney is sleeping with Ben, not Aiden, she convinces herself that her misgivings were wrong. She chooses to ignore the whispers because accepting the truth is too painful and humiliating. This motif illuminates the Effects of Willful Ignorance.
There are other kinds of whispers, too. Whitney doesn’t hear internal whispers; she’s concerned with the ones that come from other people. After her outburst at the party, she knows her guests “will replay it in their private conversations […]. Because Whitney is the kind of mother with whom other women try to find fault” (106). She can usually brush off other women’s judgment as coming from a place of jealousy. However, this time, she has no choice but to acknowledge that the whispers will be right in pointing out her loss of control. For her, the whispers emphasize the Female Rivalry that exists in her relationships.
Mara also experiences whispers, but they are spoken directly into her ear by her son. For many years, Marcus spoke only to his mother, and then only in whispers. When she asked him why, he said, “It’s like I’m on the stage all day [….]. Like everyone’s watching me [...]. They’re going to laugh at me” (54). Marcus’s whispers are linked to judgment from others, like Whitney’s, but they mean something else to his mother. They represent her physical and emotional closeness with Marcus. When Mara opted to accept her son’s differences, she chose him over Albert, and this drove Mara and Albert apart forever. For Mara, the whispers draw attention to one of the many potential Sacrifices of Motherhood.
The motif of invisibility emphasizes the many sacrifices characters make as mothers. Mara feels invisible because her neighbors often ignore her and because her husband acknowledges her only when he wants something. “It’s amazing what you can learn about people when you’re more or less invisible” (32), she thinks when she decides to figure out what is going on at the Loverlys’. Her neighbors seem not to hide their actions from her because they forget she is there. The motif culminates in Mara kneeling next to the dying Albert, when “his eyes go through her” (136). His inability to see her in this moment renders literal the truth of their marriage: They haven’t looked each other in the eye for decades because of the way Mara felt about their son, and this lack of visibility to one who is supposed to love and accept her is a sacrifice she has accepted on behalf of Albert.
Blair also feels invisible to her husband, particularly where her efforts to maintain her family and home are concerned. Walking Chloe to school, Blair thinks, “Look at my value. Look at how our daughter still needs me. She likes to orate in her head the things she wants her husband to hear” (24). When she dances with Whitney after the twins’ birthday party, she thinks Aiden is admiring her, but he isn’t: “He is fixated on Whitney’s body, her breasts, the bare back of her dress [….]. Blair stops moving. The tequila burns hot in her chest. She is not there at all—she never is” (109). This feeling of invisibility grew only after Blair became a mother, and though Blair largely embraces the role, the motif highlights that she is in danger of losing herself to it.
The neighborhood in which the characters live was built by Portuguese immigrants like the Alvaros but has since undergone gentrification. The way the affluent newcomers have renovated the community, hiding the parts of it that remain unchanged, symbolizes the effects of willful ignorance. The Loverlys’ house has been landscaped and fenced to block any “undesirable” sights: “The back fence is lined with a strip of mature trees, newly planted, lifted and placed by a crane. There’s no sign of the unpleasant back alley they abut” (3). Just as Jacob deals with his wife’s infidelity by ignoring it, so too does the couple construct a backyard that allows them to overlook the elements of the old neighborhood they dislike.
The changes in the neighborhood show how effortlessly affluent people can move in, taking no notice of the families and businesses they displace and treating their less affluent neighbors with an aloofness that fails to acknowledge what those neighbors built and how they feel. Gone are the neighborhood grocery stores and family businesses, replaced with overpriced coffee shops and baby boutiques. This breeds resentment among characters like Mara; she “knows these neighbors don’t really want people like her and Albert there” and that people are just waiting on her to sell (4). Audrain suggests the dangers of the situation in the simile she uses to describe the new neighborhood; the “houses [are] lined like monsters’ teeth, unmatched and crooked” (24). The comparison highlights just how obvious and ominous the changes are, and yet families like the Loverlys strive to maintain a veneer of perfection in both their residences and their relationships.