58 pages • 1 hour read
Nghi VoThe Chosen and the Beautiful
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2021A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
Paper-cutting
Paper-cutting, which involves the creation of elaborate shapes that spring into concrete life forms, whether a lion or a high school version of Daisy, is a motif that crops up throughout the course of the novel and is a symbol of Jordan’s personal magic and connection to her Asian origins. Paper-cutting as a craft dates to the sixth century AD in China; however, the history of decorative cuttings predates the invention of paper. As early as 100 AD, people cut leather, thin fabrics, and even leaves to make aesthetic shapes. Paper-cutting spread throughout Asia and even became a style of performance in Japan in kamikiri, where artists would take suggestions from the audience about what to create.
The idea of paper-cutting as performance takes place in Nghi Vo’s novel, where Jordan and Khai’s troupe of paper-cutters use scissors and scraps to create new worlds that come to life, thereby astounding their Western audiences with ideas of the mystic east. Paper-cutting is an instinctive craft for a newly adopted Jordan, and she uses the conduct books that Mrs. Baker gives her to make expressive forms. However, it is not until Daisy enters the scene and Jordan tells her about the dancing lions that the priests cut out of thick red paper and she begins cutting her own lion, that she is aware of her magic. She finds that her hands adopt a magic of their own as they “grew more sure, not less” (15) and she feels the lion’s “hot breath” (16) as she cuts out its jaw. Then, when it is fully cut out, the lion starts to move of its own accord, grow and even sprout muscle and hair. Frightened by her own power and Daisy’s hysterical reaction, Jordan throws down the scissors, causing the spontaneous combustion. Daisy’s panicked reaction, and Jordan’s isolation and shaming thereafter, make Jordan suspicious of her powers and unwilling to use them for herself. As Vo explains, “as a woman of privilege, Jordan gets to ignore this power that she was born with, choosing to rely on her wealth, her beauty, and her wits to get by, and her own relationship with her innate talent is a rocky and untrustworthy thing” (Vo, Nghi. “The History of Papercutting and the Magic of The Chosen and the Beautiful.” Tor.com, 2021). Arguably, Jordan’s growing up amongst white people who see her as inferior causes her to mistrust her own talent and magic, as she seeks to integrate by using the parts of her that they sanction to get ahead, such as her exotic beauty and social ease. Nevertheless, as frightened as Daisy is of Jordan’s talent, she also seeks to exploit it, when she asks Jordan to make a paper cutout of her on the night before her wedding, arguably to save her real self from going through with the event. Daisy’s enthusiastic burying of this doll as she sets upon marrying Tom, reflects her selfish attitude to Jordan, who she summons and dismisses like a genie, only interacting with her when she feels like she can be of use.
Following a chance meeting with Khai in Gatsby’s house, Jordan learns to reclaim her personal magic for her own uses, as she sees it legitimized by others who look like her. Still, when she first sees Khai cutting paper, she feels uncomfortably “exposed” for the crafty Oriental she is, before marveling at the fullness of the illusion as she is “standing in a shower of flowers […] brushing against my arms, my cheeks, and my shoulders” (175). This uncomfortable change in sentiment remarks a turning point in Jordan’s character, as she begins to take control of her craft and magic for herself, rather than using it to impress and satisfy Daisy. When she follows the paper cutters to China and Vietnam, this signals a further step into self-discovery and the fashioning of an identity that embraces her origins and innate power, rather than moving against them.
Gatsby’s House
Both in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s original novel and in Vo’s retelling, Gatsby’s lavish mansion is a tangible symbol of his newfound wealth and status. Complete with a wing for Daisy, it is a dream palace that aims to stake a legitimate claim over the wealthy woman he loves. It is also the location where the parties that cause his notoriety take place.
Vo sets up Gatsby’s house, which springs up overnight from his magical powers, as a building set apart from ordinary time and space. She describes:
At Gatsby’s, the clock stood at just five shy of midnight the moment you arrived. Crossing from the main road through the gates of his world, a chill swirled around you, the stars came out, and a moon rose up out of the Sound. It was as round as a golden coin and so close you could bite it (20).
Here, the reference to “five shy of midnight” (20) creates Cinderella-like notions of anticipation and risk, while the swirling chill indicates a tactile change in atmosphere, as though one is walking into a spell. Lastly, the tropes of the moon being both a gold coin that you can possess in your hand and close enough to bite, suggests that Gatsby’s house is a place where the most impossible dreams—such as reaching for the moon—are tangible. Vo explicitly remarks that the house may have been the result of “money, but there was no lack of magic either” (20). In other words, Gatsby’s house is a place where abundant displays of wealth and decadence are accompanied by magical acts that are unthinkable in the day. Indeed, Gatsby’s house is a place that requires night for its enchantments to work—his guests look washed up and reveal their flaws by daylight, while Daisy only visits after sunset.
Still, Gatsby’s house is an important refuge, not only for his desires, but those of New York’s underworld, whose wishes are shunned in the daylight, establishment realm of characters like Tom. Tom exposes Gatsby, saying that “I suppose you’ve got to make your house into a pigsty in order to have any friends” (218). The reference to pigs dehumanizes Gatsby’s guests and the acts that take place there, rendering his efforts at legitimacy void.
Indeed, although he has built the house for Daisy, it becomes clear that Daisy does not associate Gatsby with homemaking, given that “there was a history he would never have, a kind of homey and dignified pleasure he would never provide” (222). His home in its associations with novelty and depravity is incompatible with her notions of herself as a dynastied Louisville Fay. She thus prefers to indulge in notions of escape with Gatsby, in round-the-world trips rather that setting up a home. Gatsby realizes this when the parties stop and the house begins to lose its charm, even before Wilson arrives to shoot him.
At the end of the narrative, Jordan’s reclaiming of her power and the validity of her narrative is symbolized in her imagining a future for the house and its plot of land beyond Gatsby. Though it appears “locked up and lonely” she can “see it wouldn’t always be that way” (259). She has a vision of its transformations over the future, as she imagines rock-throwing children and gawkers democratizing access to the house and thereby destroying the notion that it is a venerable institution. Then, she imagines that a realtor with trousers and a haircut like her own will plot out the land for a series of “sleek and odd” houses (259). Thus, in this product of decentralizing Gatsby from the narrative, the land does not get to bear the stamp of his tragedy. Instead, it will be open for a multiplicity of dreamers to put to their own use.
The Closet
The closet is an important symbol of clandestine sexual encounters in the novel. While nowadays the metaphor of being in the closet is used to refer to gay people who are hiding their sexuality, this was not a commonplace term until the 1960s and does not appear in early 20th-century literature. While Vo’s novel was published in the 2020s when such a metaphor is well understood, in the 1920s setting, closets did not have the same associations.
Still, Jordan’s sexual initiation with people from both sexes occurs in closets, spaces that are secluded yet roomy enough for experimentation. From the outset of the novel, she states that “my history in closets was well established from Louisville, and in New York, with its wealth of cars, breakfast nooks, private balconies, and boathouses, I scarcely had to rely on them at all” (11). The need to go into the closet was twofold: first, that it provided a place for experimentation during a 1910s Southern society that had yet to throw off the shackles of Victorian prudery, and second, that its discreet surrounds permitted the interracial and same-sex encounters that would be less permissible in the light of day. While Jordan is ostensibly raised as a Louisville Baker, she quickly realizes that her racial difference means that she will not have access to marriage and thereby the socially legitimized female sexuality as her white friends. Thus, her own sexual awakening and pleasure must take place in dark, underground realms. Similarly, the white society folks who are attracted to Jordan also enter the closet, literally or metaphorically in the spaces of beds shared at slumber parties or out-of-the-way rooms. Here, they can experiment with Jordan without openly compromising their racist society’s taboos about racial mixing.
Louisville’s closets are replaced in Prohibition era New York with night spots that serve intoxicating liquor and magical charms alongside providing a realm for non-heteronormative sexual activity. This is particularly the case with the Cendrillon, which is named after the French version of Cinderella, a fairytale in which magic and disguise enable the heroine to fulfil her desires. Like the humble closet, the Cendrillon club has the modest appearance of a rundown theater, which counters the hedonism that takes place there. A costume of a particular flower and password enables entry and the feeling of entering the space is like “falling […] down a rabbit hole” (92), an allusion to Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865), that marks the threshold from an ordinary world to a magical one. Here, Jordan replays some of her closet antics, dancing and making out with men and women. The fact that Gatsby turns up here, fresh from a tryst with a boy from Amherst college, alerts us to a multiplicity in his life and sexuality. He establishes a house not only to nurture his heteronormative bond with Daisy but one to explore a more forbidden sexuality that must take place in darkened spaces. This parallel between Jordan and Gatsby cements their commonality as outsiders, a fact that Jordan realizes before Gatsby does. As a woman of color, her tenuous position in mainstream society is more obvious to her than to Gatsby, a pale-eyed, white-passing man.
