45 pages • 1-hour read
Lila
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Character Analysis
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes sexual content and discussion of kidnapping, graphic violence, and death.
Lila Dahl
As the novel’s title indicates, Lila Dahl is the protagonist of the novel. Throughout Lila, the third person narrator is limited to Lila’s consciousness, and depicts the narrative world according to Lila’s experience of it. Because Lila is often by herself and spends her time lost in thought—recollecting and musing on her past—the narrative structure is dictated by Lila’s internal, often cerebral experiences.
Lila is intimate with alienation and displacement. She is an orphan. She never knew her biological parents. All she understands of her birth family is that her caretaker, Doll, took her from them shortly after her birth. Lila believes that if Doll had not taken her, she would not have survived. Allusions throughout the narrative to other women’s difficult births suggest that Doll helped to deliver Lila, that Lila’s mother was ill, and that her father was absent at the time of her birth. Lila grows up to see Doll as a pseudo mother figure. Although curious about her past, she does not ask questions about her origins and Doll offers her no direct answers.
Lila is a thoughtful, earnest character who lives with a constant sense of alienation, fear, and shame. Because she had a peripatetic childhood—living between places and communities—Lila feels perpetually displaced. She longs for a sense of home and family, security and stability, but also believes that she does not deserve these things. After she and Doll are separated—following Doll’s murder of Lila’s father—Lila lives and works as a sex worker in St. Louis for a time. From there, she ventures to Des Moines and ends up living in a cabin by herself outside the town of Gilead. Lila finds herself grateful for the solitude of the cabin, but curiously attracted to the neighboring town and its people. She starts spending time here and develops a kinship with the Reverend John Ames, but also struggles to reconcile these experiences with her fraught past. Throughout the novel, she spends most of her time mulling over the past, desperately seeking some answer to who she is now and why.
As Lila’s relationship with the reverend develops, she becomes more desperate to make sense of her new life in Gilead. She has cared for the preacher ever since they started seeing each other in town and made eye contact outside the church. She even stole his sweater and hugged and talked to it when she was living alone in the cabin. Now that they are married and expecting a child, however, Lila is uncertain that she should in fact embrace this life. She recognizes the preacher’s goodness, generosity, and grace, but can’t understand it. She does not believe these kindnesses should be shown to her in light of her background.
Lila’s pregnancy compels her to let go of the past, to accept her present, and to prepare for the future. As she anticipates her baby’s birth, Lila tries to hold her past and present in balance. She tries to decide what of her life to tell her unborn child. She tries to let the preacher into her heart more concertedly. She is desperate for belonging and love, and discovers that if she simply allows herself to be happy, she might find joy and put her sorrow in its place.
Reverend John Ames
Reverend John Ames is a primary character. Lila at times refers to him by his first name John, but often calls him the reverend. John is the preacher at the church in Gilead. Lila makes his acquaintance when she first starts wandering into the town during her time living in the cabin in the woods. She is immediately attracted to the “old preacher” (19) and his kindly face. She becomes more attached to him the more time they spend together. The reverend always recognizes when Lila is alone or in need. He invites her into his home, makes her coffee, and engages her in conversation. Even though Lila feels ignorant in his presence, the reverend never condescends to her or dismisses her because she is “a field hand” (19) without a home or family. The preacher’s unequivocal grace toward Lila makes Lila feel seen and safe for the first time in her life.
In the narrative present, Lila and the reverend are married. During Lila’s time living in the cabin, she and the reverend strike up a friendship. They have regular conversations, during which the preacher opens up about his own life, losses, and sorrows. In particular, the preacher’s wife and young child died, leaving him alone in the world. He has never quite overcome this loss and continues to grieve his family and live with a burdensome loneliness in the present. His newfound connection with Lila offers him a balm to his suffering as much as it does for Lila.
Lila’s point of view paints the preacher as a purehearted man whose love and kindness she does not deserve. Whenever the two are interacting, the preacher will remark on how intrigued he is by Lila’s mind. He consistently exclaims at how interesting her thoughts are and how challenging her questions are. Although he tries to engage her about philosophical and theological topics, the preacher admits that he does not always have the answers. He is humble, forthcoming, and honest. He holds a position of power in the town, but never wields his authority unjustly. Rather, he tries to reach his parishioners where they are and to approach them like equals. He does the same in his relationship with Lila, which she often struggles to understand. She has been taught to see the world and other people as a threat to her safety, and so cannot justify the preacher’s unconditional kindness toward her.
Lila comes to accept the preacher’s love and care by the novel’s end. She and the preacher are having a child together and so Lila decides that staying with him and embracing her life in Gilead will be best for their whole family. The images of Lila and the reverend curled up together when she is in labor convey their deep intimacy and reify the novel’s theme of Love as an Act of Mutual Vulnerability.
Doll
Doll is another of the novel’s primary characters. She is the woman who Lila lives with and who raises Lila throughout her childhood and coming of age. As far as Lila understands, Doll took her from her parents when she was just an infant. Lila explains this situation to herself via her favorite verse from Ezekiel: “And when I passed by thee, and saw thee weltering in thy blood, I said unto thee, Though thou art in thy blood, live; yea, I said unto thee, Though thou art in thy blood, live” (42-43). Lila thus regards Doll as her savior. She believes that if Doll had not taken her from her biological parents, Lila would not have survived. This story makes sense to her and helps her navigate her identity and life, because Doll has never offered her any other insight into her origins or birth.
Doll is a rough character with an intense, spirited energy. Lila has seen her as her maternal figure, because Doll has tended to her every need since she was an infant. Throughout their life together, Doll’s ferocity also helped the two to survive. Lila could always count on Doll to protect and shield her. However, her unquestioned trust in and reliance on Doll changed after Doll disappeared for four days and Lila was left waiting on a set of church steps with no sense of when or if Doll would return for her. Doll did eventually return, but Lila took the experience as evidence that she was unwanted and that she could not even trust Doll to keep her promises to her.
In the narrative present, Doll is gone from Lila’s life. The two were separated after Doll killed Lila’s father. Lila knew that someday her biological father might come after Doll. When he did, he sought revenge against the woman who took his child, attacked Doll, and tried to kill her. Having anticipated this attack, Doll had her knife already sharpened and fought back in self-defense—ultimately killing the man. When Lila discovered Doll covered in blood, Doll insisted the man she killed may not have been Lila’s father at all but this detail is never clarified. Lila tried defending Doll when she was apprehended, but Doll disowned Lila, pretending she did not know her so as to protect Lila from the authorities.
Lila thinks about Doll almost constantly in the narrative present because she misses her. Doll was the only person who ever cared for Lila. Lila understood love and intimacy according to her relationship with Doll. Doll was also a key figure in Lila’s upbringing, and so her absence disorients Lila. Every decision she makes, she wonders what Doll would think. Every question she has, she wonders how Doll would answer. Every concern she has, she imagines Doll’s responding voice. Doll features so heavily in Lila’s consciousness because Lila is still grieving her.
Doane, Marcelle, and Mellie
Doane, Marcelle, and Mellie are minor characters. They only appear in the context of Lila’s flashbacks. They are three of the people who Lila and Doll temporarily lived, traveled, and worked with. Doane is painted as an authority figure in this group, whose behavior became increasingly volatile and unpredictable over time. Lila often references him growing meaner with each day. She particularly traces his behavior in the context of his relationship with his wife, Marcelle, to whom Lila believes he was always cruel. Mellie is another young woman who traveled with the group, and with whom Lila had some semblance of a relationship. However, Mellie was always more spirited and extroverted than Lila.
These characters also feature in Lila’s flashbacks. Unlike her relationship with Doll, Lila doesn’t think about them often because she misses them, but because they were fixtures in her past life. She understands parts of herself in the context of the pseudo-community they created together.
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