The Widow's Husband's Secret Lie
49 pages • 1-hour read
Freida McFaddenThe Widow's Husband's Secret Lie
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Symbols & Motifs
Absurdity
The novella incorporates numerous ridiculous details that form a motif of the absurd. This motif helps create the story’s humorous tone and establishes it as a parody. Many details of the story are comical hyperbole: Willie is not just seductive in his manner, he actually cleans the house shirtless; Poppy brings not one casserole but five; Marnie does not just have several children with “Grant,” she has eight, and Alice is initially so overwhelmed by the many children that she struggles to count them; the labels that Alice misreads on the lice shampoo, the prenatal vitamins, and the COVID test contain not just accurate product descriptions but large lettering and graphic illustrations demonstrating their intended uses, making her obliviousness absurd.
Other details in the narrative are allusions to internet culture that appear comically trivial in the serious context of a thriller: the cat on the Roomba, the blue-and-black dress, and criticism of Nickelback are all topics that have preoccupied particular corners of online culture at one time or another. The cat on the Roomba, juxtaposed with the tense plot trope of the secret in the attic, is a ludicrous discovery. The debate over the color of the blue-and-black dress is absurd as the origin point of Grant’s campaign of emotional abuse of his wife. A shared appreciation for Nickelback is a ridiculous reason for Alice and “Brant” to fall instantly in love. That serious relationship decisions and the investigation of the apparent resurrection of a dead man would be driven even in part by the trivialities of internet culture is a part of the novel’s consideration of Repetitive Tropes and Arbitrary Plot Twists in Thrillers, as it mocks the logic of the domestic thriller’s plot structure.
The Dress
The blue-and-black dress first referenced in Chapter 14 alludes to a 2015 viral internet controversy over the color of a dress that a Scottish woman chose to wear to a wedding. Because of the lighting in the photo, some viewers experienced the dress’s colors as blue and black, while others experienced the dress as white and gold. In this novella, the dress functions as a MacGuffin—a physical object that, while of little importance in and of itself, is the catalyst for the story’s action. It also functions as a symbol of the ways that individuals can legitimately perceive a single phenomenon in differing ways, developing the story’s arguments about Thrillers as an Escape from the Mundane.
When Grant sees the dress online, he sees it as blue and black—but when Alice looks at the same picture, she sees the dress as white and gold. Grant’s outrage over their differing perceptions is evidence of his extreme desire to control Alice, but it also illustrates how difficult it is to accept that differing viewpoints can be as legitimate as one’s own. In real life, the dress in the photo was blue and black, and when people saw it in person, they could uniformly agree to this fact, even if they had fully believed it to be gold and white when viewing the infamous photo. In The Widow’s Husband’s Secret Lie, however, the dress continues to shift color depending on the viewer even when people see it in person. When Alice and Poppy look at the dresses Grant and “Brant” have bought for Alice, they see white and gold. That, within the world of the novella, people continue to see the dress differently in “real” life emphasizes the importance of individual perspective and the “reality” of these differing perspectives.
Careless Mistakes
Alice’s tendency to make careless mistakes is a motif that characterizes her throughout the novella and helps to create the story’s comic tone. One of the most ridiculous mistakes she makes is when she mixes up Poppy’s house with the elderly neighbor’s. Both women live next door to Alice—one on either side—and Alice has a 50-50 chance at choosing the correct house. She has also been to Poppy’s house before. Yet in Chapter 23, when she is seeking Poppy’s advice and decides to go see her, she chooses the wrong house. Instead of seeing that this is obviously what has happened, Alice jumps to the bizarre conclusion that Poppy must be a figment of her imagination. This amusing incident shows how little attention Alice pays—to her surroundings and to her best friend—and demonstrates how illogical her thinking can be.
Two of Alice’s careless mix-ups have to do with product labels. She confuses a COVID test with a pregnancy test and lice shampoo with regular shampoo, despite obvious images and text that make it clear what each product really is. These comical mix-ups support the characterization of Alice as inattentive. When Eliza catches her with prenatal vitamins, Alice pretends to have been confused about another exaggeratedly obvious label, claiming that she mixed these vitamins up with regular multivitamins. Eliza cannot believe anyone could be so oblivious and is skeptical of Alice’s excuse—but ironically, this would actually be typical of Alice’s behavior. A final illustration of Alice’s humorous lack of awareness is her confusion of the acronyms “LED” and “IUD,” which leads her to the nonsensical belief that installing LED lights in her home will prevent pregnancy. Her plaintive assertion that “they should put some kind of warning on the box of LED lights” about their ineffectiveness in preventing pregnancy is an ironic callback joke, referring to her previous carelessness in reading labels (103).
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