51 pages • 1 hour read
Lisa BarrWoman on Fire
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2022A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Character Analysis
Jules Roth
Content Warning: This section of the guide references sexual abuse and sex trafficking, as well as alcohol and heroin addiction.
Jules Roth is the novel’s protagonist. She is a young woman with long, curly, chestnut-colored hair. She has a bookish sense of style fitting for a journalist. She is a recent graduate of the Medill School of Journalism and has wanted to work for the Chicago Chronicle under Dan Mansfield since she was young. Through her daring and implacable nature, she is able to get a job working for him. Jules’s youth often makes her appear naïve. However, she is bold, independent, and relentless in achieving her goals, which makes her a good protégé to Dan. Jules grew up without a father and was raised alone by her mother, Liz, a high-powered attorney from whom Jules inherited her can-do attitude. Jules references her bat mitzvah, establishing her Jewish heritage.
As the protagonist, Jules embarks on a quest to find Woman on Fire and thwart the novel’s antagonist, Margaux de Laurent. The narration focuses primarily on Jules’s point-of-view, though it diverges occasionally. Throughout the novel, Jules’s character is juxtaposed with Margaux, and their rivalry creates the archetypical hero versus villain quest narrative.
Jules’s greatest strengths are her intelligence, tenacity, bravery, and kindness, countered by her naïveté, inexperience, and egotism. While Jules is a loving and caring person and wishes to help others, she tends to go rogue and do what she feels is best, rather than listen to another’s advice. Her desire to be recognized as the best investigative journalist creates impatience that often places others in danger. Her impulsive decision to see Carice, for instance, alerts Margaux to their investigation, which results in Dan being murdered and her mother being kidnapped.
Margaux de Laurent
Margaux is the novel’s antagonist and is an archetypical villain. The novel describes her as a “psychopath” who kills without remorse. Margaux is a middle-aged woman who strenuously maintains her appearance. She is slender and attractive. She uses her allure and sexuality as weapons of manipulation. She is bisexual, preferring young, attractive women whom she can dominate and control. She has only had a few people in her life for whom she has felt anything approaching love. The most important person in her life was, and still is, her grandfather, Charles de Laurent, from whom she has inherited her art galleries. She also had relationships with Adam Chase and Carice Van der Pol. Margaux also has Jewish heritage, but unlike Jules, she is not raised in the Jewish faith or culture.
Margaux’s raison d’être is to save her grandfather’s art galleries, which her father nearly bankrupted as a result of his frivolous and licentious lifestyle and poor management. Her murder of Carl Geisler and theft of the artworks from his apartment are driven by this desire to save the galleries. She loves art, but she will sell everything to make money for the galleries and herself. She will not, however, sell Woman on Fire, because of its sentimental value to her and its value to her grandfather while he was alive. It is this loving connection to her grandfather’s memory that grants her a semblance of humanity, and this, coupled with the emotional estrangement from her parents, makes her a tragic figure as well.
Ellis Baum
Ellis Baum is a minor character, but his role serves as the driving force behind the quest to find the painting Woman on Fire. Ellis knows Dan through their time in recovery together for alcoholism. He is a good friend to Dan and is Adam’s grandfather. He is an elderly gentleman and a renowned figure in the fashion world because of his shoes. He runs the company Anika Baum Inc., which designs and manufactures high-end women’s footwear.
Much of Ellis’s personal history is a fabricated story, in that for most of his life he has told the world he came from Belgium and inherited his wealth from his family’s diamond mines. The real history is that his father was a person of Jewish ancestry during the rise of the Nazi party in Germany, and his mother was a German national and former beauty queen. They were not married. His mother, Anika Baum (Lang), was Arno Baum’s mistress. Ellis never really knew his father, because Arno attempted to flee Germany with his family. His mother was executed by the Nazis for fraternization with a Jewish person.
Ellis learns his true history only after he is diagnosed with a malignant form of lung cancer and told that he has only a short time left to live. His mother, Anika, was the model Ernst Engel used to paint his masterpiece, Woman on Fire. Ellis’s desire to see this image of his mother again before he dies is the catalyst driving Jules and the others on their quest.
Adam Chase
Adam is the novel’s deuteragonist and an archetypical lover character. He is Jules’s love interest. He is even a love interest for Margaux; thus, he provides a second pivot point around which the novel’s protagonist and antagonist struggle.
Adam’s is tall and rugged, with a chiseled jaw, dark hair, a short beard, and green eyes. He was once a renowned painter, but he became addicted to heroin, which nearly killed him. He has been living in Montana in a small cabin for the four years before the events of the novel. He continues to paint, but his style has changed from a dark and sinister one to a lighter and more focused style.
Adam is the second connection, other than the desire to possess Woman on Fire, that pits Jules and Margaux against one another. They both want his affection and attention. While Adam was a famous young artist, he was sponsored and supported by Margaux. They were lovers, and she is the one who introduced him to heroin and encouraged his continued drug use. Along with Carice Van der Pol, he was one of the few people for whom Margaux cared, even if only a little. He was also, like Carice, on board the yacht the night Margaux pushed her drunken father overboard, which caused him to drown.
Dan Mansfield
Dan Mansfield is Jules’s idol and later mentor. He has a gruff personality and hardened appearance that coincide with the stereotypical investigative journalist archetype. His hands are scarred and missing an index finger, and he wears a patch over one eye. Dan smokes too much, works too much, used to drink too much, is estranged from his wife and children because of his dedication to his job, and stops at almost nothing to acquire the story.
In an event prior to those in the novel’s primary narrative, Dan went too far in trying to get a story about a meth operation run by a cartel. When the cartel found out about the investigation, they blew up the facility, resulting in the death of one of his friends and colleagues. Thus, he serves as a mentor figure Jules, and his rules and past serve as warnings to her on where to draw the line between going far enough to get the story and going too far. Like Dan, she must learn the hard way. She makes a mistake that directly leads to Dan’s murder at the hands of Margaux.
