61 pages • 2-hour read
Girl Dinner
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Symbols & Motifs
Content Warning: This section includes discussion of sexual content, sexual violence, and a brief reference to disordered eating.
Isla’s Childhood Illnesses
Isla is intermittently sick through much of the novel, and her illnesses become one of its most overt motifs, speaking to The Tensions Between Motherhood, Marriage, and Career. Isla is a toddler when the novel begins and she falls prey to a series of colds that, although not serious, make parenting her more challenging and add work to Sloane’s busy days.
Since Isla is so often sick, Sloane feels even guiltier leaving her at home or daycare and feels like she never has enough attention to devote to work or her child. She constantly negotiates between her two roles, never feeling like she does a good job at either. Max, by contrast, happily prioritizes work without feeling guilty or inadequate. He doesn’t worry about Isla’s health, nor does he think it unreasonable to focus entirely on work when he is on campus. He is even able to leave the bulk of Isla’s parenting to Sloane when the entire family is at home together.
The author’s depiction of Isla’s illnesses and their markedly different impact on Sloane and Max are part of the novel’s broader interrogation of the politics of gender as they intersect with heterosexual marriage. Sloane, because she is a woman, is expected to prioritize her child while Max, because he is a man, is allowed to devote the bulk of his energy to his work. This unequal division of labor exacerbates the tensions in their marriage, ultimately leaving them emotionally estranged from one another at the novel’s end.
Dinner
The House’s dinners, particularly the ones that involve ritualistic cannibalism, symbolize The Complexities of Ambition and Ethics. Initially, dinner represents freedom and power to Nina. Nina wants to join the House because of the social capital and power that membership would grant her. When she attends the House’s first dinner, she is awestruck by the girls’ appetite. She is accustomed to the calorie-counting, macro-obsessed world of campus and has never before encountered women enjoying food with so much gusto. She feels that the power to enjoy food without fear of weight gain represents a new kind of freedom, one that she associates with the House’s elite position on campus: These girls are so empowered, she thinks, that they value the taste of food over the potential consequences of eating it.
The House’s ritualistic, cannibalistic feasts also represent power, but in a different and more amoral way. Alex, Priscilla, Britt, and even Caroline argue against the kind of feminism that Jasleen espouses. They reject Jasleen’s notion that women need to commit themselves to social justice to create a better world for everyone. They argue that women need to use their skills and resources to seize as much power as possible and shape their lives according to their own self-interest.
The author complicates this approach to feminism through the symbolism of dinner. Alex and Britt in particular are able to “have it all” only because eating human flesh and drinking human blood give them super-human abilities, with their ravenous appetites embodying their voracious, amoral ambitions. The seeming effortlessness with which they run their households and outperform their peers at work is the result not of innate talent but of a willingness to stop at nothing to draw benefits to themselves. While The House’s dinners usually feature men who have harmed women as the meal, Sloane’s killing of Jasleen and turning her into dinner for Isla reflects how such zero-sum power games ultimately only end up harming women as well in the end.
The Country Wife VidStar Account
Caroline’s VidStar Account symbolizes the complexities of contemporary female identity and The Changing Shape of Feminism in the Social Media Age. Sloane is drawn to The Country Wife long before she begins her research on the House or meets Caroline, its creator. The Country Wife provides her a window into what life might be life if she were to abandon her career and try to find happiness, and a new identity, entirely as a wife, mother, and household manager. She judges The Country Wife’s lack of commitment to feminism while envying her happiness and contentment.
When Sloane meets Caroline, however, the reality turns out to be quite different. Caroline admits that she does not actually believe in the conservative ideology she promotes—she simply uses it as a way to make money off of her audience. Caroline’s claim that she does not care much about politics reflects the issue of privilege in the novel, with wealthy, upper-class white women like Caroline not caring about how the ideology they seem to support does real harm to women with fewer resources or in more marginalized groups. Furthermore, her lifestyle is not actually traditional at all, as she makes millions of dollars independent of her husband’s income and does indeed have a career outside of being a homemaker, as she is a successful influence.
The significance of the VidStar account contains one other important element: It is a ruse to cover up the fact that Caroline is actually behind the murders for The House’s ritual dinners. The novel thus plays with the fact that while Caroline makes money by pretending to be a traditional, submissive wife, she is actually someone who both outearns most men and also violently murders them.
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