48 pages • 1-hour read
Vicious
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Symbols & Motifs
Cherry Blossoms
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of death, child abuse, and bullying.
Throughout the novel, in both timelines, Emilia repeatedly paints or sketches cherry blossoms. The trees’ blossoms thus become an explicit symbol of Emilia herself, one that both Vicious and Emilia comment on. Vicious uses this connection to further the plot; when he comes to Emilia’s workplace, he knows that she is a longtime employee due to the cherry blossom mural. Likewise, when he peeks surreptitiously into her room in the high school timeline, he can identify her room over Rosie’s due to another cherry blossom mural.
When Vicious and Emilia begin spending time together in the adult timeline, she explains why the symbolism of cherry blossoms resonates with her: “Grandmama said that the cherry blossom was life. Sweet and beautiful, but so darn short. Too short not to do what you wanna do” (156). Despite this claim that life’s brevity necessitates seeking happiness, Emilia does not spend much time pursuing her own desires. Instead, she begins the novel being highly self-sacrificing, though she does not resent any of the work she does to support her sister or parents. As the novel progresses, Emilia learns the importance of protecting herself as well as helping those she loves.
Emilia gets a tattoo of the cherry blossoms toward the end of the novel as part of one of her dates with Vicious. This suggests that her optimism and determination to look for life’s beauty will continue even as she learns to balance her own self-interest.
Todos Santos
Todos Santos, the wealthy Southern California town where Vicious and Emilia spend their adolescence, looms large in the mental landscapes of the novel’s protagonists. For Vicious, Todos Santos represents both the advantages he has gotten in life and the most painful parts of his early years. Though Vicious hates his family and schemes to destroy his father’s legacy and Jo’s chances at any future happiness, he recognizes that his wealthy background has helped him immeasurably when it comes to building the adult life that brings him such professional satisfaction. Since Todos Santos is also the place where Vicious first connected with his friends, whom he recognizes at the end of the novel as his true family, it has complex emotional significance.
Emilia’s feelings toward Todos Santos are also complicated. While she resents Vicious for blackmailing her into leaving Todos Santos as a teenager, this resentment and anger is less about Todos Santos itself and more about Vicious’s cruelty in forcing her to leave her parents. When she visits Todos Santos with Vicious, therefore, she is able to enjoy the opportunity to see her parents without thinking about the other residents of the town who made her miserable as a teenager. To Emilia, Todos Santos also represents the corruption of wealth, as her wealthy classmates bullied her for her lower socioeconomic status throughout high school. Though she spends her early adulthood in New York, a city with significant income inequality between neighborhoods, she equates Todos Santos with this kind of social stratification more than she does her new home city, indicating how profoundly she was affected by her year spent there during her adolescence.
Vicious’s Scars
Vicious has many scars caused by the years of abuse he suffered at the hands of his stepmother’s brother, Daryl. Vicious struggles with extreme shame over his abuse, which leads him to hide his scars. He wears shirts during sexual encounters so that his partners don’t see the marks, and he spends his high school years organizing fights so that he has a plausible reason for being so scarred. He experiences intense anxiety over the visibility of the scars, as they make tangible the part of his life that he wants to hide and forget.
As Vicious reveals his past to Emilia, he finds himself less emotionally burdened by the self-blame that he has internalized. When she does not shy away from his physical scars, he feels emboldened to show his emotional trauma, as well. Emilia’s desire to see all parts of Vicious—what she characterizes as both the beautiful and the ugly—helps him understand that all parts of him are worthy of affection, something that he struggles to accept after his father’s emotional neglect, his mother’s death, and Jo and Daryl’s physical and emotional abuse. Seeing his scars be accepted helps him open up to emotional intimacy, something that proves to be crucial to his happiness.
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