51 pages • 1-hour read
Happy Wife
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Symbols & Motifs
Content Warning: This section includes discussion of domestic violence.
“Interloper”
Throughout the novel, Nora refers to herself as an “interloper” among the Winter Park social circle (6, 15, 118, 175, 186, 226), invoking The Power of Cliques. The term emphasizes Nora’s working-class status and socioeconomic vulnerability among the wealthy elites of Winter Park.
The word appears as a recurring motif in moments of discovery within Nora’s relationship. In the novel’s opening chapters, she throws a party for her husband Will to prove to his friends and their wives that she is a permanent fixture in Will’s life, and not just the “strange interloper” they believe she is (6). When Nora begins to question her relationship with Will after his disappearance, the word appears again, as Nora worries, “[M]aybe I am the interloper everyone keeps saying I am: how can I not know these things about the man I am married to?” (118). When Will’s body is found, Nora is gratified to find that the women who once considered her an “interloping gold digger” are now sending her condolence flowers (175). In each of these episodes, the recurring word “interloper” signals an important change in Nora’s relationship to her husband and Winter Park.
In the novel’s final chapters, the term interloper appears again as Nora finally accepts that her marriage was valid and that she can leave Winter Park because she wants to, not because she is driven out. Describing Winter Park as a safe, Marcus reminds Nora that “it’s not interloping when they give you a key and the combination to the safe” (226). Nora repeats the idea, arguing that she “wasn’t an interloper. [She] was invited in, given the access” (227). Although she chooses to leave town at the novel’s end, she does so with more confidence in herself and a refusal to accept others’ belittling of her, feeling in control instead of an “interloper.”
Nora’s Drinking
Throughout the novel, Nora uses alcohol as a coping mechanism to deal with the stress of her husband’s disappearance, which speaks to The Complex Nature of Grief. When Will first disappears, Nora is shocked by Este’s suggestion that she has “earned a glass of wine” (41) in the early morning. Later, when Nora realizes that she is a suspect in her husband’s death, she doesn’t wait for Este to offer her a drink: “[T]his time, I go to the refrigerator, pull out the opened bottle, and swig directly from it.” (142). She takes things a step further by bringing alcohol to Este’s house, storming into Este’s “living room, bottle of wine in hand” (143). The escalation from rejecting drinks to taking them without asking reflects her loss of control as she is pulled into the murder investigation.
When Will’s body is found, Nora’s drinking escalates further as she begins to hide her drinking from others. While planning Will’s funeral with Gianna and Constance, Nora has “Bailey’s in [her] coffee” (197). At the funeral, she drinks “what looks like a club soda but mercifully is a very, very large glass of tequila with a hint of lime” (207). Nora’s frequent drinking reflects her difficulty in confronting the complexities of her feelings about Will, with her rising alcohol intake mirroring her increasing awareness of Will’s secrets and the flaws in their dynamic, and her desperate attempts to avoid looking too closely at them.
Hotels
Throughout Happy Wife, Nora and Will stay at a number of hotels, which become a symbol of the problems in their relationship. When Will first disappears, Nora assumes that she cannot contact him because he is “holing up in a room at the Ritz-Carlton” to work on a case (27). Will is notorious for these work-funded hotel stays, when he “works twenty-two-hour days and survives on room service while he storyboards opening statements and talks to his experts and witnesses” in preparation for a case (27). Nora misses Will desperately during these long hotel stays, and considers herself a “work widow” in his absences.
Will frequently attempts to atone for his reclusive hotel stays by taking Nora on elaborate vacations. In one instance, Will spends weeks “in a hotel a mile from the Orange County Courthouse” (121) where he is totally inaccessible except to “text [Nora] good night” (121) once a day. In order to make up for his absences, Will takes her to the luxurious Four Seasons in St. Kitts and Nevis. Later, when Will throws a glass tumbler at Nora during an argument, he offers to book “an oceanfront suite” at a luxurious hotel in Palm Beach (246). Will’s habit of booking luxurious hotels to cover up for his chronic absences reflects larger problems in their marriage.
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