Chapter 2: Lying on Purpose
The only difference between lying and acting was whether your audience was in on it, but it was all a performance just the same — Desiree
Though they make questionable decisions and (unintentionally) inflict emotional harm on their children, Jane, Celeste, Elena, Bebe, and Polly become largely sympathetic characters when their lies are discussed within the context of traumatic experiences and their symptoms. These women lie to and hurt the ones they love not because they want to, but because they lack the language, audience, and strength with which they can process all that has happened to them. Moreover, except for Elena, all these women get the chance to tell the truth and right their “wrongs” by the end of their respective novels and thus are liberated from their stifling secrets. But, as this chapter will prove, not every woman wants to tell her story. As comforting as it is to explain away maternal lies as reactions to trauma or protective acts of love, the reality is many mothers lie with/on purpose. In my pursuit of re-envisioning lying as a potentially ethical act at best and a necessary and practical one at worst, I would be remiss if I did not take an equally serious look at mothers who lie intentionally to their children, who lack zero desire to ever tell them the truth, and whose lies cause immense psychological and emotional suffering in their loved ones.
The mothers centered in this chapter — Mia from Celeste Ng’s Little Fires Everywhere and Stella from Brit Bennett’s The Vanishing Half — are such mothers. They lie to their daughters about the existence of extended family members, conceal their daughters’ “true” racial and economic statuses and, most significantly, refuse to share any information regarding their past lives with their children. Though Mia and Stella arguably grapple with their own traumatic memories, it would be an oversimplification to claim that their lies operate as reactions to those traumas. Neither Little Fires Everywhere nor The Vanishing Half gives any indication that Mia or Stella struggle with memory loss or intrusive thoughts, nor do they imply that each experiences self-fragmentation in any way. In other words, Mia and Stella do not split in two or inhabit multiple personas at the same time; rather, these women actively choose to abandon their past selves and become new people entirely. Their lies, then, largely stem from their desire to keep their pasts in the past, to never take off the masks they don in motherhood. If they had their choice, Mia and Stella would never tell their children who they really are because, in their minds, who they really are no longer exists.
It is tempting to claim that what distinguishes Mia’s and Stella’s lies from those of Celeste, Jane, Elena, Bebe, and Polly is they are freely chosen and therefore selfish. To some extent, this claim is true. There is no apparent cognitive reason why Mia and Stella cannot tell the truth, and they both have people who would love and support them through their disclosures. Moreover, I will not attempt to argue that Mia and Stella are likeable individuals who always try to do the right thing but come up short; lies aside, these women can be cruel without cause. Still, Mia’s and Stella’s lies are also reactions, not to explicit traumatic experiences, but to structural inequalities and the fear, anxiety, and loneliness which they produce. It is my hope that in analyzing the broader racial and economic contexts within Little Fires Everywhere and The Vanishing Half, readers can reconsider the roles of autonomy and freedom in Mia’s and Stella’s lies, i.e. to consider whether one can freely choose to lie when one’s overall options are limited. Once again, I argue that understanding the why behind the lie leads us to imagine even intentional lies as potentially ethical acts necessary to ensure, in the cases of Mia and Stella, physical, and spiritual survival. We must remember that for Mia and Stella, harm is the unintended consequence of intentional deception. While my goal is not to justify the anguish they cause their daughters, I believe this chapter, like its predecessor, can carve a path toward empathetic understanding of even the most gut-wrenching lies by analyzing the institutions and psychologies that lead Mia and Stella to lie in the first place.
Mia’s Lies of Omission
From the moment she appears in Little Fires Everywhere and the town of Shaker Heights, Mia Warren is depicted as an outsider — a too-free spirit with zero regard for the rules that govern the Cleveland, Ohio suburb. Whereas her maternal foil Elena lives a comfortable life filled with fancy cars and cushy couches, Mia can cram all her possessions into her ancient Volkswagen Rabbit. Unlike Elena, Mia does not make plans or form strong attachments to anything or anyone; because she can produce her art from anywhere, she and her daughter Pearl live a nomadic life and reside in a city for only 3-4 months before moving to the next destination. While some daughters might grow to resent their mothers for dragging them from city to city, forcing them to abandon any relationships formed along the way, Pearl for the most part expresses pride in her mother’s work. Speaking of Pearl’s attitude toward her mother’s art and the life they lead, the narrator tells us:
[Mia] would be famous someday Pearl was certain; someday her adored mother would be one of those artists like de Kooning or Warhol or O’Keeffe, whose name everyone knew. It was why part of her, at least, didn’t mind the life they’d always lived, their thrift-store clothes, their salvaged beds and chairs, the shifting precariousness of it all. One day everyone would see her mother’s brilliance. (Ng, 29)[1]
This passage, situated within the early pages of Little Fires Everywhere, possesses a dual purpose. Not only does it provide greater insight into Mia and Pearl’s resourceful and dynamic lifestyle, but it also affirms Pearl’s deep love for and trust in Mia, both as a mother and as an artist. This affirmation is especially important because it juxtaposes the Richardsons’ early observations of Mia. The first description of Mia and Pearl in the text comes from Elena: “A single mother, well spoken, artistic, raising a daughter who is polite and fairly pretty and possibly brilliant” (14). While words like “artistic,” “polite,” and “brilliant” might be taken as compliments, this description is also coded with moral judgments and slights. The phrase “well spoken,” for example, has long been used as a derogatory phrase bestowed on African Americans by white individuals.[2] Mia’s race is not explicitly stated and she is assumed to be white, but Ng has said she originally toyed with the idea of writing Mia as a woman of color; this attempt is evident through Elena’s frequent employment of racially coded language, which serves to position Mia and Pearl as others within the text.[3] This language is so present throughout the novel, in fact, that Hulu chose to cast Kerry Washington, a black actress, to play Mia in their adaptation of Little Fires Everywhere. Moreover, calling Pearl polite and questioning her education are additional forms of aggression often wielded at black individuals. Remembering that Mia is a poor, single mother — a stereotype commonly associated with black women — we can conclude that Elena’s use of racially coded language represents her inability to find any commonality between her and Mia. In Elena’s mind, Mia is so different, so much of an other, she might as well be of a different race entirely. Just several pages later, this othering continues when Elena’s son Moody, who is the same age as Pearl, reveals his upper-class fascination with the Warrens’ minimalist (read: bare bones) lifestyle.
Ng formally introduces her readers to the Warrens through Moody — we meet Mia and Pearl when he does — and thus our image of the duo is peppered with Moody’s disbelief that Pearl has never had her own room, that Mia considers her art a full-time job, and that the two are content to eat the same budget meals every night for dinner, among other classist observations. When Pearl expresses excitement over finally having a “house of their own,” Moody has to “stifle the urge to tell her that this wasn’t a house, it was only half a house” (19). Later, he chooses to speak up and blatantly ask why Mia doesn’t get a “real job” (24), to which Pearl sweetly responds that being an artist is a real job (24) — an answer that doesn’t fully satisfy Moody. In this way, Ng uses Moody to officially cement Mia and Pearl’s roles as others within Little Fires Everywhere. Through him, Ng explores the ways in which white privileged populations are quick to view marginalized mothers as reckless, irresponsible, or selfish for defying normative conventions of motherhood. In Mia’s case, defiance means prioritizing her artistic career over the creation of a stable environment for her daughter. Having established the Richardsons’ temptation to judge Mia’s choices and treat her with skepticism from the beginning of the novel, Ng carves a path for their further vilification of Mia later in the text.
Moody and Elena are not the only members of the Richardson family to find Mia’s attitude curious at best and unsettling at worst. Pearl does what she can to validate her mother’s occupation and affirm their familial integrity, but her optimism is often overpowered by the Richardsons’ interrogations and assumptions regarding Mia’s past, work ethic and identity. One afternoon, when Pearl is lounging on the Richardson couch with Lexie, Trip, and Moody, Lexie begins pestering Pearl with questions regarding her biological father. Her questions begin innocently enough (“Do you ever think about trying to find your father?” “Don’t you ever want to meet him?”) but quickly transition into insensitive and potentially triggering ideas as to his whereabouts/identity: “Maybe he split when your mom got pregnant. Or maybe he got killed in an accident when you were born… He could have left her for another woman. Or...Maybe he raped her. And she got pregnant and kept the baby” (43). There are many problems with Lexie’s unwelcome assumptions here — her readiness to assume Pearl’s father to be an indecent man or the victim of violence, her associating rape with hot gossip, her inability to read the room — but the most glaring one is her dismissal of the fact that Pearl knows absolutely nothing about her father, a fact which will not change as a result of her incessant questioning. Moreover, Lexie here assumes Pearl hasn’t tried to gather information about her father, an assumption which is quickly disproven when the narrator tells us, “It was nothing Pearl hadn’t thought about herself over the years...She had wondered these things now and again, but when she’d asked as a child, her mother had given her flippant answers” (44, emphasis added). This revelation, that Pearl has asked Mia about her father to no avail, is the first of many signs indicating Mia is hiding something from her daughter, though the what and why remain unknown at this point. Instead, the chapter ends with Mia telling Pearl she wanted her “very, very much” (45) as if to say that though Mia may be lying about something, her love for and commitment to Pearl is genuine.
Still, it is never Mia’s love that the Richardsons and, eventually, Pearl question, but the way she chooses to manifest it. To Lexie, Trip, and Moody, whose mom is always around and ready to show her love through lavish breakfasts, new wardrobes, and drives to and from after-school activities, Mia’s carefree attitude, nomadic lifestyle and solitude don’t match their definitions of devoted motherhood. As a result, the three of them are often patronizing and infantilizing toward Pearl. While Trip and Moody develop romantic feelings for Pearl, it is arguably Lexie’s “friendship” that causes the most damage. Like Moody, Lexie is immediately “fascinated” by Pearl and Mia’s minimalism. Despite the fact that Pearl clearly has a loving mother and a roof over her head, Lexie views Pearl as a “Little Orphan” because she wears “baggy t-shirts,” as though she “wants to hide in plain sight” (46). And, because she is her mother’s daughter, Lexie cannot help but take the Little Orphan Pearl under her wing and provide her with all the material goods of which she has long been deprived. Lexie feels the “fuzzy internal glow of teenage generosity” every time she takes Pearl thrift shopping, gives her clothes, or does her makeup. At first, Lexie’s charity appears admirable, if not a bit demoralizing; after all, she seems to be well-intentioned and Pearl enjoys the attention. However, Lexie’s fixation on Pearl’s physical appearance is only the first iteration of her extreme investment in Pearl’s, and by extension Mia’s, life — an investment which ends up damaging Pearl and Mia’s relationship.
As evidenced earlier, Lexie, like her mother, tends to force herself into situations in which she is not welcome and demand information that is not hers to know. This tendency goes too far, however, after Pearl and Moody show Lexie a photograph of Mia hanging in a local art gallery. The photograph, taken by a woman named Pauline Hawthorne and titled Virgin and Child #1, features a young Mia utterly transfixed on a baby in her arms, assumed to be Pearl. Moody and Pearl had first stumbled upon the photograph while on a class field trip. Immediately, Lexie begins asking Pearl questions about the photograph (“What’s your mom doing in a photo in an art museum? Is she secretly famous”) — questions which, again, Pearl cannot answer; and, because Pearl cannot satisfy Lexie’s curiosity, she forces Pearl to question Mia when they get home even though Pearl had a “uneasy feeling” about the situation. Predictably, Mia responds to Lexie and Pearl’s line of questioning with her typical evasiveness, claiming “it could have been [her]” in the photograph because “photographers [were] always looking for models,” and she needed to make money. While Lexie buys Mia’s excuse, Pearl understands her mother’s stiff face as a sign of her discomfort and dishonesty, and she immediately knows she mishandled this situation. Pearl realizes:
She should never have asked her mother like this, in the Richardson kitchen with granite countertops and its stainless-steel fridge and its Italian terra-cotta tiles, in front of the Richardson kids in their bright, buoyant North Face jackets, especially in front of Lexie, who still had the keys to her Explorer dangling from her hand...Already she saw her mistake: this was a private thing, something that should have been kept between them, and by including the Richardsons she had breached a barrier that never should have been broken. Now, looking at her mother’s set jaw and flat eyes, she knew there was no sense in asking any more questions. (97-98).
Here, Pearl expresses a clear understanding of the ways in which she and her mother function as others in relation to the Richardson family. She seems to possess a class consciousness, as indicated by her hyper-awareness of the Richardsons’ wardrobe and kitchen appliances, and locates the Richardson home as a non-home, an uncomfortable and foreign place, in her mother’s eyes. More than that, Pearl expresses an acute awareness of her mother’s body language and a recognition that her mother is withholding the truth about the photograph. Lastly, Pearl understands that in confronting her mother in this way, she has forfeited her opportunity to obtain the truth. In this way, Pearl hints at one of this thesis’s primary messages: mothers do not always owe their children the truth, but if they want to disclose their secrets, they should be able to do so on their own terms and not under pressure from those who believe they have a right to know everything — especially when those individuals are only tangentially related to the mother and her lies, as is the case with the Richardsons. Though Mia is able to shut down the inquiries of the Richardson children, she is unable to stop Elena, who has been conducting her own investigation into Mia’s past, from uncovering the true story behind the photograph, i.e. from uncovering her lie. While visiting Mia’s parents in Pittsburgh, Elena learns Mia originally carried Pearl for a couple, the Ryans, who “couldn’t have their own [baby],” (186) but she chose to keep Pearl for herself instead. We also learn Mia’s real last name is Wright and not Warren, and that she adopted the name Warren in honor of her younger brother who died tragically. After these revelations, the novel jumps back in time to provide a timeline of the events leading up to Mia’s pregnancy. Mia was a poor art student trying to pay her way through college when the Ryans approached her and offered her $10,000, plus medical expenses, to carry a baby for them.[4] Mia accepted the offer simply because she needed the money to pay for school after her scholarship was terminated; as young as she was, Mia did not pause to fully consider the emotional and physical effects of pregnancy. She certainly never expected that she would fall in love with the little girl growing in her womb, that her family would be right about her inability to give up, or put more crudely, sell, her own child. But Mia doesn’t simply run away with Pearl, she kills the Ryans’ image of their unborn child by telling them that she “lost the baby” (229). Only in lying to the Ryans is Mia able to keep Pearl all to herself, and it is precisely this desire — to love Pearl alone — that undergirds Mia’s secrecy in Little Fires Everywhere. Unlike Elena, for whom truth is a potential pathway to reconciliation with her daughter, truth for Mia has the power to permanently alter and physically disrupt her relationship with her only daughter. Thus, it is only in lying to the Ryans, to her family, and to Pearl that Mia can continue to love her daughter and keep her safe.
In many ways, this chapter — Mia’s chapter — answers the why behind many of her actions throughout the novel. We learn that Mia and Pearl move around so much, not because Mia is constantly chasing inspiration, but more so because she is afraid that if she lingers in one place for too long, the Ryans will track her down. We learn that the photograph discovered by Moody and Pearl reminds Mia of her early days of motherhood, the fear she felt, and that Pauline Hawthorne was Mia’s dear friend and maternal figure who died of cancer. And, we learn that the reason Mia tells Bebe where Mirabelle/May Ling is, the reason she believes “a mother should never have to give up her child” (123), is because she maintains some residual guilt over her inability to give up Pearl — a child promised to another couple. Despite these answers, it is wrong to accept this chapter fully as Mia’s version of the truth, because Mia never speaks to the readers in first person about the Ryans or her brother. Her perspective is tainted by the chapter’s third person narration and its location within and next to the story her parents provide Elena. Though the narrator admits to telling the reader more about Mia than the Wrights told Elena (she gets only the “basics” of the story), it is telling that in a book centered around a lie, the character who tells that lie never gets to tell the truth, at least not on her terms. Even later in the novel, when Mia must give Pearl a reason for their sudden departure from Shaker Heights, the reader does not get to hear what she has to say; we only know that she “told Pearl the outline of everything” and that the fuller version of the story unraveled over years (308). We can read Ng’s decision to bury Mia’s version of the truth in two ways.
On one hand, the elimination of Mia’s voice is a frustrating embodiment of a cultural unwillingness to prioritize maternal voices, especially the voices of marginalized mothers. From the unanswered cries of immigrant mothers whose children are ripped from their arms to the desperate pleas of black Flint mothers for clean drinking water to the pleas of all mothers working from home with their children during the coronavirus pandemic (I could go on), this country has repeatedly ignored or silenced maternal voices in favor of advancing exclusionary capitalistic policies. Within the novel, this silencing of marginalization appears in Elena’s investigation into Mia’s life; rather than take her concerns to Mia directly, Elena uses her journalistic contacts to delve into Mia’s past, exploiting her parents in the process. In fact, Elena does not bring her findings to Mia until she is sure she can use them to exert power over her. When Elena confronts Mia at the end of the novel, she tells her, “I almost didn’t say anything. I thought, what’s in the past is past. Maybe she’s made a new life. But I see you’ve raised your daughter to be just as amoral as you” (302). Though Elena wants to pretend that her confrontation of Mia is rooted solely in her belief that Pearl had an abortion after being impregnated by Tripp, her language indicates she takes pleasure in exposing Mia’s secret life. She goes on to condemn Mia for interfering with the McCulloughs’ adoption of Mirabelle and for keeping Pearl from the Ryans. After this conversation, Mia quickly gathers Pearl and leaves Shaker Heights, and, in doing so, exits the narrative without defending herself or providing her version of events to either the Richardsons or the reader. Thus, we might read Mia’s silence toward the end of the novel as a representation of the simultaneous devaluing and exploitation of marginalized maternal voices at work in our current society.
Yet, Mia’s silence might also be a way for Ng to honor Mia’s desires for secrecy. It makes sense that, given their need to leave Shaker Heights before Elena reveals their location to the Ryans, Mia breaks down and tells Pearl about her past; however, we as readers are not entitled to that information and Ng doesn’t let us believe we are. In this way, Ng subtly links the inquisitive, perhaps frustrated reader, with the invasive Richardsons. Just as Elena and Lexie do not deserve access to Mia and Pearl’s family history, readers do not deserve to hear from Mia just because she is a character in a book they are consuming — especially since she repeatedly expresses an unwillingness to share. Though Mia herself never explicitly states her reasons for lying, any close reader can pick up on the potential consequences of her truth-telling. For one, Mia’s decision to keep Pearl has serious legal ramifications. We aren’t told whether she signs a contract with the Ryans, but it seems unlikely that the Ryans would dispose of that much money without one; therefore, keeping Pearl marks a direct violation of that contract. And, because Mia does not fully pay the Ryans back for all her medical bills, she could be charged with theft as well. We eventually learn the Ryans have a case active against Mia, and Elena intends to provide the couple with the information they need to track Mia and Pearl down. Thus, Mia’s decision to tell the Ryans the truth could lead to her imprisonment, destitution, or separation from Pearl.
Of course, emotional distance from Pearl is also a potential result of her truth-telling. Mia has no way of knowing how Pearl will react to the knowledge that she once belonged to the Ryans, that she could have had a more “comfortable” life. Elena exploits the idea of Pearl’s preference when she confronts Mia about her past, saying, “The Ryans are rich. They wanted a baby so desperately. They’d have given her a wonderful life. If Pearl had gotten to choose, do you think she’d have chosen to stay with you? To live like a vagabond?” (302). Here, Elena gives words to Mia’s anxiety regarding how the truth will impact her and Pearl’s relationship. Early in the novel, the narrator tells us Mia is fully aware of the ways she has forced Pearl to “live by her whim” (38). At that moment, Mia decided to establish residence in Shaker Heights, to give her daughter a sense of security — a promise she was unable to keep thanks to Elena. It is after breaking this promise, when Pearl is screaming and crying and refusing to pack her bags, that Mia realizes she must confront her fear and anxiety and tell Pearl the truth if it means convincing her to leave Shaker Heights. Up to that point, Mia had conceptualized her lies as protective measures necessary to keeping her and Pearl safe and together. Philosopher Sarah Ruddick writes in Maternal Thinking, “Mothers protect where protection cannot be assured, where failure usually means disappointing someone they love, where chance and unpredictable behavior limit their efforts, and where their best efforts are flawed by their own impatience, anxiety, fatigue and self-preoccupation.”[5] Ruddick calls this process of protecting despite these realities “cheerfulness.”[6] Though Mia knows there is always a risk that the Ryans will find her, and Pearl might be devastated if she learns the truth, she acts as a mother and lies to protect her child’s physical and emotional well-being; she exhibits cheerfulness when she chooses to love and protect her daughter even as she lives in constant fear that her past will catch up to her. By the end of the novel, however, Mia must adopt a new mode of protection because it is only truthful confession that can free Mia from Shaker Heights and Elena’s harmful intentions. It is also only through confession that Mia can earn Pearl’s forgiveness and maintain their close relationship. Ruddick emphasizes adaptability as inherent to the virtue of cheerfulness when she writes, “Cheerfulness is a matter-of-fact willingness to...start and start over again, to welcome a future despite conditions of one’s self, one’s children, one’s society, and nature that may be reasons for despair.”[7] Yet, Ruddick is also clear that cheerfulness “protects [children] from truths they will have to acknowledge only confuses and inhibits them.”[8] For Mia, choosing authentic cheerfulness means choosing to tell Pearl the truth, even though she doesn’t want to, because continuing to conceal the truth from Pearl would do more harm than good. Telling the truth thus frees Mia from her past and enables her to “start again” with her daughter by her side.
Though Mia, through a series of internal negotiations, concluded that her lies were acts of love, it is undeniable that her actions still caused immense emotional harm. Notably, however, it is not the lies themselves that cause this harm, but the truths that are brought to light which negate these lies. Though this distinction might seem minute, it is critical to understanding the intentionality of Mia’s lies. Here, Ruddick’s definitions of violent versus nonviolent maternal actions are helpful in illuminating both Mia’s thinking and the results of that thinking. Because, Ruddick argues, mothers cannot turn against their children “whom they are pledged to protect...mothers engage in nonviolent techniques that are familiar from more public struggles...these techniques may go to the edge of violence -of real damage- without endangering either a mother, her children, or the people they fight against.”[9] By Ruddick’s definition, being a mother means learning ways of maintaining influence over one’s children without causing distress or inflicting long-term harm. Applying Gandhi’s description of “ahimsa,” or doing no harm, to maternal thinking, Ruddick writes, “[Mothers’] task is to determine which hurts, hates, impatience, and lying are damaging and which strategies are effective and consonant with safety, development and conscientiousness.”[10] As a young mother, Mia assessed her options and determined lying was not in fact “damaging” but an “effective” strategy for ensuring Pearl’s physical safety and emotional development. And, it is worth noting, Mia’s evaluation is accurate; she and Pearl manage to spend fifteen years traveling from city to city, living out of their car, and telling little lies without the Ryans finding and punishing Mia. When Elena calls the Ryans’ lawyer, he tells her their case against Mia “hasn’t been active in quite some time” (238). We can assume, then, that had it not been for Elena’s intervention, Mia’s secret would have never been revealed, the Ryans would have never tracked her down, and she and Pearl would have continued to live a peaceful life in Shaker Heights.
In Mia’s case, lying secures peace while the exposure of truth facilitates harm (violence) because it forces Pearl to leave the one place that finally felt like home. Recognizing Pearl’s distress, Mia continues her nonviolent thinking, also conceptualized by Ruddick as “peacemaking,” by telling Pearl about her past. Ruddick emphasizes the importance of maternal confession and peacemaking when she writes, “Truthful, responsible reconciliation protects children from their own or others’ hatred, which ‘scars the soul,’ and also from forgetful indifference to pain that they have inflicted or suffered.”[11] Though the content of Mia’s conversation with Pearl is not offered to the reader, the fact that it happens marks Mia’s willingness to give her daughter a space to voice her pain and frustration as well as resolve that anger with her honest confession. Even as we acknowledge and analyze the harmful effects of Mia’s lies on those around her, we can commend Mia for her commitment to nonviolence and her desire to care for and make peace with her daughter through the uncomfortable act of confession.
Ultimately, Mia alone is responsible for the violence, i.e. the emotional harm, which her lies bring not only on Pearl, but on her parents and the Ryans; she chooses to conceal the facts of her pregnancy and the identity of Pearl’s father, thus rooting her and Pearl’s relationship in a lie. However, the Richardsons deprive Mia of her right to tell her truth. They do so, not because they are concerned for Pearl’s wellbeing — though they like to claim they are — but because they wholeheartedly believe Mia could have and should have made better choices. In other words, they blame and punish Mia for the choices she makes because those are not the choices they would have made. We know Elena feels this way because the narrator tells us: “What would she have done if she’d been in that situation? Mrs. Richardson would ask herself this question over and over...Each time faced with this impossible choice, she came to the same conclusion. I would never have let myself get into that situation again, she told herself. I would have made better choices along the way” (239). Note the use of the word “let” in this passage, a word which implies a lack of discipline on Mia’s part, as if she had a plethora of options from which to choose when the Ryans asked her to be their surrogate. Because Elena has always lived an upper middle-class life in Shaker Heights, she is unable to imagine Mia’s pre-pregnancy situation: poor, alone, and desperate to be an artist. Even as Elena acknowledges Mia made an “impossible choice” when she chose to keep Pearl, she maintains that Mia deserves to be held accountable for her choice.
I belabor this point because Elena’s opinion is not a singular one. She represents a mass societal belief in American individualism, or the concept that one is responsible for one’s actions, success, etc. regardless of whatever structural inequalities stand in the way. As Jack Turner argues in his essay “American Individualism and Structural Injustice,” “the individualist’s insensitivity to social structures allows him to exploit others with a feeling of innocence.”[12] Citing de Tocqueville, the main subject of Turner’s essay, he goes on to explain the allure of individualism: “Seeing oneself as...perfectly in control of one’s destiny confers a heady feeling of invulnerability, allowing one mentally to escape the all-too-obvious fragility of human existence.”[13] We see Elena’s desire for control through her attempts to manipulate not only Mia but also her daughter Izzy. Instead of grappling with her traumatic pregnancy, her smallness, and her lack of known purpose, Elena chooses to project those anxieties on to a woman who represents true freedom. Making money as an artist, moving from city to city, and living out of her car, Mia embodies an authentic commitment to one’s self. To have empathy for Mia is not to conclude that she always does the right thing, that her lies are legitimate, or that Pearl emerges unscathed at the end of Little Fires Everywhere. Rather, treating Mia with empathy simply means acknowledging that she did what she thought she had to do to ensure her and Pearl’s survival. Understanding the why(s) behind her lies, i.e. recognizing the lack of financial and legal possibilities available to her both pre-and-post-pregnancy, complicates Elena’s and, by extension, society’s conception of lies as universally unethical and unjustified. Moreover, though it appears Mia has little in common with Elena, both women have endured a great degree of physical and emotional pain. Naming the structural barriers preventing Mia from giving her testimony reveals that she, too, has no one to whom she can turn for support or validation. Susan Brison writes, “In order to construct self-narratives [survivors] need...an audience able and willing to hear us and to understand our words as we intend them.”[14] What makes the ending of Little Fires Everywhere so tragic is not only Mia’s and Elena’s separate inabilities to tell their stories, but also their collective inability to recognize their similarities and exchange compassion. Thus, not only are Elena and Mia victims of Rich’s “institution of motherhood,” which finds “all mothers more or less guilty of having failed their children,” but they have also internalized that institution to the extent that they are willing to cast blame on mothers who do not ascribe to their maternal ideal.[15]
The Link Between Passing and Lying
Mothers of color are especially vulnerable to the judgmental eyes of the institution of motherhood, which, again in line with the concept of individualism, chooses to blame the disenfranchised mother for circumstances beyond her control. Even when mothers of color are survivors of state-sanctioned trauma, such as Bebe and Polly, their claims to survivorship are questioned, their voices are silenced, and their choices are heavily dissected and judged. Considering how society views even the unintentional lies told by BIPOC women, it is no surprise that mothers of color who intentionally lie to their children, no matter why or to what extent, are almost guaranteed to suffer society’s scorn and have their love for their children questioned or dismissed. The final mother discussed in this thesis, Stella from Brit Bennett’s 2020 novel The Vanishing Half, is one such mother. Like Mia, Stella creates a completely new identity and vows to never divulge her past self to anyone, including her daughter. Stella passes, meaning she chooses to live and operate as a white woman despite being legally black. She does so both because she wants the privileges afforded to white people in the 1960s and the ability to shape her own destiny. In this way, Stella, a black woman, has more in common with Mia than she does with her own twin sister, Desiree, whom she leaves behind to enter the white world. Just as Mia’s lies rupture her relationship not only with her daughter but also with her brother and parents, Stella’s lies — half omissions and half intentional misrepresentations of her racial identity — shatter her connections to her daughter and twin sister so that, by the end of The Vanishing Half, not even the truth can free Stella and restore her familial relationships.
Despite being the “vanishing half” to whom the novel’s title refers, Stella is largely absent from the first half of the novel. The first sentence of The Vanishing Half reveals only “one of the lost twins, [Desiree], returned to Mallard,” — a fact that not only establishes Desiree and Stella’s fractured relationship, but also communicates their dramatic departure from the Mallard community, a town defined by its light-skinned black residents. Bennett reinforces Stella’s physical absence in Mallard by rendering her largely voiceless throughout the novel’s early chapters; any speech of hers occurs strictly within another character’s memory. What the reader knows about Stella is thus largely dependent on what Desiree, their mother Adele, and the gossiping neighbors know and/or choose to reveal. For example, we learn Stella was always the “practical” twin who “liked school” and “wanted to become a schoolteacher at Mallard High someday” (Bennett 9-10).[16] Given that Stella does not return to Mallard with Desiree at the start of the novel, these informative tidbits suggest that though the young Stella had never imagined leaving town, something in her teenage years propelled her to abandon her mother and embrace the unknown world outside of Mallard.
Moreover, what little information the characters, and thus the reader, think they know about Stella is challenged as Desiree learns more about her sister through the help of her private investigator (read bounty hunter) and lover, Early Jones. For example, Desiree admits to impersonating Stella when the two of them worked for a rich family in Opelousas. The narrator reveals:
Desiree had spent years studying Stella. The way she played with her hem, how she tucked her hair behind her ear or gazed up hesitantly before saying hello. She could mirror her sister, mimic her voice, inhabit her body in her own. She felt special, knowing that she could pretend to be Stella but Stella could never be her. (13)
In this passage, Desiree expresses a belief that her ability to disguise herself, to “lie” about her identity (13), is superior to Stella’s. Because Stella had always raised objections to leaving Mallard and their mother, because she was always the practical and reserved one, Desiree is unable to fathom that Stella “was keeping secrets of her own.” Yet, a secret is precisely what Desiree uncovers after her mother attempts to dissuade her from tracking down Stella. In response to Desiree claiming it was her fault Stella left, that she shouldn’t have convinced Stella to pass as white to land a department store job, Adele reveals, “[The job] wasn’t her first time...Bein white. New Orleans was just her chance to do it for real” (68). Adele then goes on to describe a time when a shopgirl in Opelousas mistook Stella for white — an incident which amuses Stella: “‘Isn’t it funny?’ she’d said. ‘White folks, so easy to fool! Just like everyone says’” (69). Not only does this anecdote reveal Stella has a history of racial passing, but it also offers insight into Stella’s attitudes toward passing, which she appears to view as relatively low-stakes. This revelation marks a turning point in Desiree’s understanding of her sister, for she must reckon with the fact that Stella did not simply leave her sister behind in New Orleans, but she did so to pursue a life as a white woman. This section concludes with Desiree wondering whether “pretending to be white eventually made it so” (69) — a line which introduces a key theme of The Vanishing Half: the connections among passing, lying, and social constructions of race.
Desiree and Adele envision Stella’s passing as a manifestation of her desire to be white, or at the very least to enjoy the perks associated with whiteness. But Stella’s motives for passing, we come to find out, are neither clear-cut nor implicitly stated; rather, her reasons are simultaneously complex, thought out, spontaneous and romantic. Her passing is not prompted by one singular event but results from her stifling physical environment, a series of traumatic events, and her affection for a white man and all he represents. Two specific events, her father’s lynching and her sexual assault, facilitate the formation of Stella’s early racial consciousness and her understanding of whiteness as synonymous with opportunity. Stella and Desiree were only kids when they witnessed their father being lynched by a mob of five white men. The girls hid in a closet during the attack, and Desiree recalls how “something shifted between them in that moment” (34). She goes on to say, “Before [the attack], Stella seemed as predictable as a reflection. But in the closet, for the first time ever, Desiree hadn’t known what her sister might do” (34). Though Stella does not speak in this scene, Desiree implies that this event, this witnessing of a terrible trauma, marked the end of Stella’s practicality and predictability — even if that end is not immediately obvious.
Following this traumatic event, Stella tries to throw herself into school and her ambitions in college so she can one day become a teacher. But when school, too, is taken away from her, Stella realizes there is nothing left for her in Mallard. Then, Stella is sexually assaulted by her white employer, Mr. Dupont, in Opelousas. When “the fear of him became worse than the touching,” and she began to spend every day “worried that he might creep up behind her,” (155) Stella decides that she must join Desiree in fleeing to New Orleans. The sexual assault joins her father’s lynching in forming Stella’s racial consciousness, or her awareness that as a black woman in a white-governed world, she will always be at a disadvantage. Before passing, Stella “imagine[s] another life, another past. No footsteps thundering down the porch steps, no ruddy white man grabbing her father, no Mr. Dupont pressing against her in the pantry” (187). When Stella falls in love with a white man, she officially decides to metaphorically shed her black body, which all her life has been a site of pain and trauma, and embrace her whiteness. In other words, she actualizes the “other past” she had always imagined.
Bennett uses Stella to express that passing is primarily related to power, privilege, and the desire to construct a self on one’s own terms. Stella’s passing is motivated not so much by her desire to be white than by her desire to be anyone else. As Stella admits later in the novel, “Being white wasn’t the most exciting part. Being anyone else was the thrill. To transform into a different person in plain sight, nobody around her even able to tell. She’d never felt so free” (183). Still, Stella happily benefits not only from her whiteness, but also from the ability to date a powerful white man — her boss, Blake Sanders. Stella enjoys the fact that being “Blake’s girl” offers her protection from both “leering white men” and “colored men.” While there is some evidence to suggest Stella truly loves Blake, it becomes evident that Stella is more attracted to what Blake represents — security, stability, and escape. So, when Blake asked her to move with him to Boston, Stella “didn’t give herself a chance to second-guess” (197). Though at the time, Stella “didn’t worry about any of the practical details” of passing (197), years later she maintains that passing was in fact the practical choice. Desiree tends to view Stella’s passing as a departure from her naturally reasonable and cautionary self, but the narrator tells us, “[Stella] had become white because it was practical, so practical that, at the time, her decision seemed laughably obvious. Why wouldn’t you be white if you could be? Remaining what you were or becoming something new, it was all a choice, any way you looked at it. She had just made the rational decision” (225). Stella never meant to hurt anyone, especially her mother and sister, though she knew it was an inevitable consequence; she simply wanted to walk away from a life of trauma and struggle toward a hopeful and protected future. The Brentwood home and swimming pool, fancy furs and jewels, the luxury of not working, and, eventually, a beautiful daughter named Kennedy are all additional perks of passing. To Stella, abandoning the people who loved her and marrying a man who could “never know her” (197) was a small price to pay for safety, comfort, and opportunity.
Even as Stella acknowledges “becoming white” means “becoming something new,” i.e. lying about one’s identity, she also challenges the claim that passing is dishonest or unethical. While passing, Stella neither lies outright nor claims to be white; rather, she successfully passes because of the assumptions that white society makes about her racial identity based on her physical features. Regarding her dates with Blake Sanders, Stella thinks, “If Blake knew who she truly was, he would send her out of the office before she could even pack her things. But what had changed about her? Nothing, really. She hadn’t adopted a disguise or even a new name. She’d walked in a colored girl and left a white one. She had become white only because everyone thought she was” (188, emphasis added). In discussing the assumptions that white individuals make about her, Stella understands that race is not a fixed entity, but rather a social construct. Michael Omi and Howard Winant offer an insightful definition of race in their touchstone book Racial Formation in the United States:
Race is a concept which signifies and symbolizes social conflicts and interests by referring to different types of human bodies. Although the concept of race invokes biologically based characteristics (so-called ‘phenotypes’), selection of these particular human features for purposes of racial signification is always and necessarily a social process.[17]
While one’s skin color is dependent on one’s phenotype, or the combination of light and dark alleles, the categorization of an individual as “white” or “black” refers less to one’s physical appearance — as we know skin tone is not a perfect indicator of ethnicity — and more so to the way one is able (read: permitted) to move through the world.[18] In the United States, claiming blackness does not simply require one to describe the color of their skin, but also to claim or identify with this country’s history of racial oppression as manifested through institutions such as slavery, voting suppression laws, segregation, education, and policing. Simply put, race has historically been used to oppress BIPOC bodies while uplifting white individuals. Understanding that race is a social construction, and therefore human-made, leads us to question whether Stella truly lies about her race at all. In passing, Stella does not really disguise her “true” racial identity as much as she exploits the inherent fluidity of that identity. She can pass successfully because, physically speaking, she is white. Rather than choosing to let her black bloodline fix her in a subordinate social position for her entire life, Stella chooses to pass through the doors that white individuals freely open for her.[19]
According to Carlyle Van Thompson, author of The Tragic Black Buck: Racial Masquerading in the American Literary Imagination, Stella’s understanding of and motivations for passing are not atypical. Though Van Thompson is primarily concerned with literary representations of black men who pass, his analysis of the common threads found across passing narratives is helpful for placing Stella within a broader historical context. He argues, “The phenomenon of passing for white is a kind of Faustian paradigm that represents a profound paradox that both challenges the doctrine of white supremacy and (the essentialism of whiteness) and requires a denial of one’s blackness at the same time that it reaffirms the existing social hierarchy of white power and white privilege.”[20]
We see this paradox in Stella; even as she seemingly recognizes that she deconstructs the racial binary, she simultaneously understands that whiteness possesses an inherent power that blackness does not. By marrying a rich white man and giving birth to a white daughter, Stella challenges the strict racial codes that existed at the time, but doing so also requires her to “deny” her blackness. She enacts this denial when she abandons Desiree and her mother, which Van Thompson says is a common trope in passing narratives. He writes, “Geographic mobility was critical in passing. In order to pass successfully, individuals often had to move away from their black families, their black communities, and their black friends.”[21] Like the black men Van Thompson studied, Stella understands that passing successfully requires her to eliminate all remnants of her past (black) life. In other words, Stella must symbolically kill not only her loved ones, but she must also bury the self she occupied prior to knowing Blake. Van Thompson describes this death as the “sinister form” of the “realization of desire” that comes with passing.[22] Here desire refers primarily to economic opportunity but also encompasses a desire for autonomy and a need “to remove oneself from the margins” of society.[23] Having experienced a series of deeply traumatic events which led her to see her status as a black woman as akin to living what Van Thompson calls a “death-within-life,” Stella views passing as a gateway to safety and security.[24]
Prior to passing, Stella had only been physically white. Despite her light skin, she lived and operated in the world as a black woman, a positioning which subjected her to trauma and inopportunity. In passing, Stella is able to become functionally white, meaning she is able to reap the privileges of white existence. By “acting” white, however, Stella chooses to forget her black identity; a psychological shift occurs in which Stella no longer sees herself as pretending to be white, but rather as occupying two racialized bodies at once. This shift begins to take place even before Stella marries Blake. The narrator reveals, “Sometimes [Stella] wondered if Miss Vignes was a separate person altogether. Maybe she wasn’t a mask that Stella put on. Maybe Miss Vignes was already a part of her, as if she had been split in half. She could become whichever woman she decided, whichever side of her face she tilted to the light” (188-189). Here, Stella asserts that her white self, to whom she refers as “Miss Vignes,” is not a “mask” or false identity but rather a facet of her authentic self. Put differently, Stella does not see herself as performing whiteness because she maintains that she is white, at least partially.
Accepting that race is a social construct and the act of passing only highlights its performative aspects might lead us to justify Stella’s initial passing not as a lie, but as a response to society’s presumptions about her racial identity. Considering her fair complexion, it is not illogical to claim that Stella is functionally white and that her blackness only exists in relation to a white other. Yet, even if Stella’s passing itself is not a lie, there is a point where it produces lies, for in passing Stella must conceal all aspects of her identity and family history from her husband and daughter. When Kennedy, as a child, would ask her mom about her family, Stella simply told her, “My family is gone” (152). It is not until years later, when Desiree’s daughter Jude — who befriends Kennedy to learn more about Stella — angrily tells Kennedy, “[Your mother’s] been lying to you your whole life” (252), that Kennedy learns her mother’s family is very much alive. Yet, every time Kennedy attempts to hear her mother’s side of the story, to learn the truth, Stella refuses to engage in conversation. When Kennedy asks her mother, “‘Did you ever have a sister?’” Stella responds angrily with “‘My God... Who do you believe? Some crazy girl or your own mother?”’ (258). Much like Mia refuses to come clean to Pearl after she discovers the photograph in the art gallery, Stella refuses to confide in her daughter even after Kennedy reveals what she knows about Jude, Desiree, and Mallard.
For Stella’s loved ones, this refusal to let anyone, especially her family, in on her secret marks her biggest betrayal and not the passing itself. As Jude thinks, “Sometimes you could understand why Stella passed over. Who didn’t dream of leaving herself behind and starting over as someone new? But how could she kill the people who’d loved her? How could she leave the people who still longed for her, years later, and never even look back?” (238). Later, when Kennedy attempts to seek answers to her questions, she asks Stella, “Why don’t you want me to know you?” (260) and says, “I want you to tell me who you are!” (298). Still, at the end of The Vanishing Half, Kennedy and Jude don’t really know Stella. After lying for so long, not only about her race but about her life in general, Stella is not able to admit the truth to her daughter both because she does not want to lose her and because, after so many years, Stella doesn’t even know what the truth means regarding her identity.
Not only do Stella’s lies directly rupture her relationships with the people who love her most, but they also lead those individuals, namely her daughter Kennedy, to internalize feelings of inadequacy at best and adopt problematic racial and moral assumptions at worse. To sell her white identity, Stella often feels the need to actively belittle black people in front of her husband and white suburban friends, as well as fight for continued racial segregation; these racist efforts represent Stella’s fear that her proximity to a black person would mark her downfall, i.e. the exposure of her passing. This fear is not uncommon amongst white-passing individuals. In a personal essay published in The Washington Post, author Gail Lukasik shares how her mother, who possessed olive skin and pale eyes, silently listened to her white father’s racist remarks in fear that speaking up in defense of black Americans would signal her true racial identity. Lukasik writes:
In escaping the Jim Crow south, coming north and marrying my white father, she must have thought gaining white privilege was worth the price of losing family ties and her authentic self. The irony was that in gaining white privilege, in passing for white, the onslaught of racism was splayed open to her. Its ugly face could now be shared with her, a “white” woman who would understand and possibly agree.[25]
Stella is a literary representation of Lukasik’s mother’s real hope that, in passing, one can gain the luxuries of “white privilege.” Yet, unlike Lukasik’s mother, who “reprimanded [her father] with little vigor” and remained mostly silent during his outbursts,” Stella does not remain silent when suburban racism rears its ugly head; in fact, she facilitates it.
Stella’s identification with whiteness, and subsequent disdain for blackness, becomes stronger the longer she passes, and is especially evident in her interactions with her neighbors. When an affluent black family desires to move into the Brentwood subdivision in which she lives, Stella shocks her white friends and husband with her public opposition to their move. At an emergency Homeowner’s Association meeting, Stella cries out, “You must stop them [from moving in]...If you don’t, there’ll be more and then what? Enough is enough!” (146). A couple passages later, Blake reveals, “She was always jumpy around Negroes, like a child who’d been bit by a dog” (147). While the root cause of Stella’s attempts to thwart the move is her fear that black individuals can tell that she is passing, the vitriol with which she ridicules black people to her white colleagues suggests a genuine disdain for black people and identification with white individuals. And, because she must raise Kennedy as fully white in order to preserve her secret, she transfers this racial ideology to her daughter. In a case of extreme identification with the white world, Stella chastises Kennedy for “playing dolls in the cul-de-sac with the Walker girl” by telling her, “We don’t play with niggers” (165). Here, Stella attempts to project her racial anxieties on to her daughter by way of racist language. Later, after Kennedy calls Cindy Walker a nigger while paying with her, Stella slaps her daughter as punishment, as if Kennedy is to blame for her use of the word and not her mother. More than passing, abandoning her loved ones, and concealing her past, this is Stella’s worst lie: she teaches her own black daughter to hate black people, to hate herself.
Miraculously, Kennedy grows up to be a relatively progressive young woman, if not a bit patronizing toward minorities — though Kennedy is a bit patronizing toward everyone. When Jude takes a job as an usher at the theatre where Kennedy is performing, Kennedy freely strikes up conversation with her and treats her as a friend and confidant, not even knowing yet that they are cousins. Years after Jude reveals Stella’s secret, Kennedy enters a long-term relationship with a black man named Franz, but this relationship simultaneously pushes Kennedy closer to, and pulls her farther from, her racial identity. Stella, by way of lying about her blackness, shatters Kennedy’s sense of self, and this shattering is reflected in Kennedy’s relationship with Franz. The narrator reveals, “Even Franz was, essentially, foreign to her. Not because he was black, although that, perhaps, underscored it. But his life, his language, even his interests were apart from her...There were many ways to be alienated from someone, few to actually belong” (275). Here, Kennedy projects her anxieties regarding her relationship to herself and to her mother onto her romance with Franz; looking at him, Kennedy is reminded not only of her potential racial otherness, but of the space between her past and present selves. This disorientation directly results from Stella’s refusal to answer Kennedy’s questions and own her truth. What’s worse is this refusal leads Kennedy to believe her own cousin is lying to her, because surely she would know if she was half black. So, when Franz refuses to believe Kennedy’s claim to blackness, Kennedy decides that she, too, will refuse to claim it. She convinces herself, “You couldn’t go through your whole life not knowing something so fundamental about yourself. She would feel it somehow. She would see it in the faces of other blacks, some sort of connection. But she felt nothing” (275). Not wanting to believe that she doesn’t know herself or that her mother has been lying to her, Kennedy tries to suppress any doubts regarding her race or her family.
Eventually, however, Kennedy must accept that her “mother [is] a liar” (270) and that she truly is half black. The ultimate proof that Stella “spent her whole life lying” (289) comes when Jude gives Kennedy a photograph of Stella and Desiree at their father’s funeral. With the photograph, Jude provides more information regarding Stella’s past in Mallard and the reason for their father’s death. Confronted with the double portrait of her mother, Kennedy must simultaneously grapple with her dual identity. When Jude tells her, “Your mother is a [Negro]...So that makes you one too,” Kennedy rebuts, “You don’t get to show up and tell me what I am” (296). Like Stella, Kennedy can’t stand “the idea of anyone telling her who she had to be” (296). Moreover, Kennedy, despite all the evidence Jude provides, only really wants to hear the truth from her mother. She shows her mother the photograph, hoping that “she would show her a picture of her family and her mother would start to cry. Wipe away tears and finally tell her daughter the truth about her life.” (298). But, of course, Stella does not “tell her daughter the truth” in that moment. Instead, she waits until after she returns to Mallard, buying herself time to construct what she hopes will be the final version of her story.
When Stella finally returns to Mallard to visit Desiree toward the end of the novel, she does so not because she is ready to let go, but because she needs Desiree’s help to continue her lie. Note the following dialogue between the two sisters:
‘She’ll never stop! Your girl will keep trying to tell mine the truth and it’s too late for all that now. Can’t you see that?’
‘Oh sure, it’s the end of the world. Your girl finding out she ain’t so lily white—‘
‘That I lied to her,’ Stella said. ‘She’ll never forgive me. You don’t understand, Desiree. You’re a good mother I see that. Your girl loves you. That’s why she didn’t tell you about me. But I haven’t been a good one. I spent so long hiding—’
‘Because you chose to! You wanted to!’
‘I know,’ Stella said. ‘I know but please. Please, Desiree. Don’t take her away from me.’ (322)
I quote this exchange at length because it reveals several things about Stella. First, this passage marks the first time we hear Stella express her fear that she is a bad mother because she lies; put differently, Stella is fully aware of the ways in which her lies have fractured her relationship with her daughter. Yet, and this is my second point, she admits that she does not plan to stop lying. Here, Stella says she has no choice but to keep lying because “it’s too late” for the truth. Elsewhere in the text, the narrator explains that Stella is not even sure she knows what the truth is anymore: “Stella had spent too long lying to tell the truth now, or maybe, there was nothing left to reveal. Maybe this was who she had become” (259). In addition to the social construction of race discussed above, Stella’s admission that “maybe there was nothing left to reveal” further breaks down the binary between truth and falsehood and troubles our classification of Stella as a liar in the first place.
The third, but most important, information revealed in Stella’s conversation with Desiree is how much Stella loves her daughter and how far she is willing to go to keep her close. The repetition of “please” in Stella’s line signifies her desperation for closeness to her daughter, but the irony is that Kennedy will never feel close to her mother until she learns the truth. Perhaps it is this recognition that finally compels Stella, in the car ride home from the airport after her Mallard trip, to confess to Kennedy. She tells Kennedy, “I want you to know me” (326) before proceeding to answer any questions Kennedy has. Importantly, as in Little Fires Everywhere, the confessional scene between Stella and Kennedy is never recorded for the reader, meaning that we never know how much of the truth Stella discloses to her daughter — if any. However, Kennedy does reveal to Jude toward the end of the novel that she and her mother continue to root their relationship in lies, even after Stella’s car confession: “Secrets were the only language they spoke. Her mother showed her love by lying, and in turn, Kennedy did the same” (333). This line suggests that either Stella did not answer all of Kennedy’s questions or she did so dishonestly, either route a direct contradiction of Stella’s stated intentions. Unlike Pearl, who expresses at least some satisfaction with her mother’s confession, Kennedy ends The Vanishing Half still feeling as though she doesn’t truly know her mother.
Even as she recognizes her mother’s need for secrecy, Kennedy also recognizes that this secrecy itself is an act of maternal love. As an adult, Kennedy understands that her mother lies not to hurt her, but because she is scared. Not only do Stella’s lies have the potential to push her daughter away, but they can also put her life and social security at risk. Interracial marriage was not legal in the United States until 1967, when the Supreme Court ruled in Loving v. Virginia that laws banning interracial marriage violated the fourteenth amendment. Stella and Blake got married in 1960, meaning that Stella implicated Blake in an illegal act. Though the second half of The Vanishing Half takes place in the 1980s, we know that changes in laws have not always meant changes in treatment toward black individuals.[26] Thus, we can assume that the exposure of Stella’s secret could result in destitution at best and physical harm against her at worst. And, because Kennedy is the product of a once-illegal interracial union, she, too, relies on Stella’s secrets for protection. According to Patricia Hill Collins, Stella’s actions are in line with those of many black mothers. She writes, “African-American mothers place a strong emphasis on protection, either by trying to shield their daughters as long as possible from the penalties attached to their derogated status or by teaching them skills of independence and self-reliance so that they will be able to protect themselves.”[27] Stella shields her daughter from “the penalties attached to [her] derogated status” by concealing that very status from her. When Stella declares, “Sometimes lying [is] an act of love” (259), she expresses a belief that her lies are necessary to ensure her and her daughter’s safety and economic security. While Stella originally lies to escape her feelings of powerlessness and past trauma, she continues to lie to her grown daughter because she loves her and does not want to lose her, whatever “losing her” might mean. By accepting this fear as justification for her mother’s lies, Kennedy exemplifies a maturity that Collins deems common in black daughters: “For a [black] daughter, growing up means developing a better understanding that even though she may desire more affection and greater freedom, her mother’s physical care and protection are acts of maternal love.”[28] Though she is deeply hurt by her mother’s lies, though she knows she might never hear the truth, Kennedy still manages to empathize with her mother and chooses to love her anyway.
Bennett never tells us what comes of Stella’s relationships with Desiree, Jude, or Kennedy; instead, the novel ends with Jude, the only one who ever truly hoped to bring both halves of the Vignes family together, “begging to forget” (343). In this way, The Vanishing Half neither attempts to argue for the supremacy or necessity of truth nor provide one concrete definition of truth. Instead, The Vanishing Half joins the other novels discussed in this thesis in exploring maternal lies through a lens of understanding while also moving the genre in a new direction which seeks to privilege the black maternal experience. Where the novel really shines, however, is in its willingness to explore the pain and betrayal embedded in that maternal experience and portray its mothers as deeply flawed. As Jude asserts in The Vanishing Half, Stella’s motives for lying are understandable. Given the trauma she experienced as a black woman in an era of white patriarchal supremacy, it follows that Stella would jump at the opportunity to embrace a life of safety and privilege, and that she would do anything to maintain that life even if it means hurting her loved ones. Still, Stella, like Mia, is not always a likeable character; she actively employs racist rhetoric, gaslights her daughter, and abandons her mother and sister. Yet, these flaws and mistakes are precisely what make Stella, and all the mothers discussed in this thesis, refreshing representations of real mothers. In presenting Stella’s lies as neither right nor wrong, Bennett allows the reader to focus on the circumstances and thoughts that precede them. In other words, Bennett forces readers to contend with both the structural forces and psychological burdens with which black mothers must contend daily.
Unlike Jane, Celeste, Elena, Bebe, and Polly, Mia and Stella do not accidentally or unintentionally lie to their daughters. While these two women experience their fair share of traumatic experiences and hardships, they do not exhibit the same repression of memory, intrusive thoughts, or panic attacks found in chapter one’s survivors. Rather, Stella and Mia choose to lie to their daughters about their pasts and their true identities, and these lies have long-lasting effects on their relationships with their daughters. As discussed at length in this chapter, Pearl and Kennedy experience disillusionment, sadness, and rage upon learning of their mothers’ secret lives. But the irony is that, as much as Pearl and Kennedy are hurt by their mothers’ secret selves, their individual identities are also the fruits of those secret selves. In other words, without Mia’s and Stella’s lies, their daughters would not exist. This acknowledgment is the final step in understanding that these women’s lies do not stem from a place of selfishness, cruelness, or apathy but from a place of self-preservation and desire to protect their children. By devoting entire novels to the unpacking of these motivations, Celeste Ng and Brit Bennett push against societal discourse which seeks to judge mothers for their lies rather than understand the whys behind them.
[1] Ng, Celeste. Little Fires Everywhere. Penguin Books, 2017.
[2] Clemetson, Lynette. “The Racial Politics of Speaking Well.” The New York Times, 4 Feb. 2007, https://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/04/weekinreview/04clemetson.html. Accessed Feb. 12, 2021.
[3] Peterson, Anne Helen, “Celeste Ng says ‘Little Fires Everywhere’ Is a Challenge to ‘Well-Intentioned’ White Ladies. Buzzfeed, 18 March 2020, https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/annehelenpetersen/little-fires-everywhere-hulu-celeste-ng-reese-withersppon. Accessed Feb. 12, 2021.
[4] The Ryan family picked Mia because of her striking resemblance to Madeline, Mrs. Ryan. Mia’s vulnerable economic position was only an added convenience.
[5] Ruddick, Sara. Maternal Thinking: Toward a Politics of Peace. Beacon Press, 1995, p. 73-74.
[6] Ibid, p. 74.
[7] Ibid, p. 74.
[8] Ibid, p. 75.
[9] Ibid, p. 166.
[10] Ibid, p. 168.
[11] Ibid, p. 175.
[12] Turner, Jack. “American Individualism and Structural Injustice: Tocqueville, Gender, and Race.” Polity, vol. 40, no. 2, 2008, pp. 197–215. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/40213468. Accessed 7 Mar. 2021, p. 199.
[13] Ibid, p. 201.
[14]Brison, Susan, “Outliving Oneself,” Aftermath: Violence and the Remaking of a Self, Princeton University Press, 2002. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt7rvsb. Accessed 13 Nov. 2020, p. 50.
[15] Rich, Adrienne. Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution. Norton & Company. New York, 2010, p. 223.
[16] Bennett, Brit. The Vanishing Half. Riverhead Books, 2020.
[17] Omi M, Winant H. 1994. Racial Formation in the United States: from the 1960s to the 1990s. New York: Routledge. Rev. ed, p.55.
[18] Allele (noun): any of the alternative forms of a gene that may occur at a given locus. “Allele.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/allele. Accessed 5 Mar. 2021.
[19] Throughout American history, lawmakers have attempted to “codify the legal definition of people whose racial pedigree was less than completely pure.” Virginia passed the one-drop rule in 1662 and then the blood-fraction laws in 1705, which specified that a 1/8 relationship to blackness meant one was fully black, and Arksansas categorized anyone with “any Negro blood whatsoever” as black. See: Kluger, Jeffrey. “Who’s White? Who’s Black? Who Knows,” TIME, 10 Dec. 2010, https://healthland.time.com/2010/12/10/whos-white-whos-black-who-knows/. Accessed March 6, 2021.
[20] Van Thompson, Carlyle. The Tragic Black Buck: Racial Masquerading in the American Literary Imagination. Peter Lang Publishing, 2004, p. 3. “Faustian” refers to the legendary German protagonist who reportedly makes a deal with the Devil in which he exchanges his soul for knowledge and worldly materials. According to dictionary.com, referring to something as “Faustian” means that it involves “sacrificing spiritual values for power, knowledge or material gain.” See “Faustian.” Dictionary.com, https://www.dictionary.com/browse/faustian. Accessed Apri 26, 2021.
[21] Ibid, p. 7.
[22] Ibid, p. 18.
[23] Ibid, p. 11.
[24] Ibid, p. 18.
[25] Lukasik, Gail. “My mother spent her life passing as white. Discovering her secret changed my view of race — and myself,” The Washington Post, 20 November 2017, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/inspired-life/wp/2017/11/20/my-mother-spent-her-life-passing-as-white-discovering-her-secret-changed-my-view-of-race-and-myself/. Accessed March 3, 2021.
[26] “50 years later, interracial couples still face hostility from strangers,” CBS, 12 June 2017, https://www.cbsnews.com/news/50-years-loving-case-interracial-couples-still-face-hostility-from-strangers/. Accessed March 10, 2021.
[27] Collins, Patricia Hill. “Black Women and Motherhood,” Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. Vol. Rev. 10th anniversary ed., Routledge, 2000, p. 185-186.
[28] Ibid, p. 188
