60 pages • 2 hours read
Ashley WinsteadThe Last Housewife
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2022A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Manipulation and Control in Relationships
Content Warning: This section of the guide discusses death by suicide, sexual violence, trauma, self-harm, misogyny, gender essentialism, and cult activity.
Throughout the novel, Shay is sensitive to the power dynamics within relationships and discrete interactions. Early in the novel, Shay says that “every time I saw two people, I saw a scale, tipping this way and that” (15), noting that, in her marriage, Cal holds the power, as Shay is no longer contributing to the finances of the marriage. Shay resents the power imbalance within their marriage, which leaves her feeling “useless” and alienated; even her home has become a reminder of Cal’s financial power. However, in exploring her childhood, Shay reveals another source of power: sexuality. Pageants allow Shay to take control of her own objectification. She reasons that men are “already looking,” and, by drawing attention to herself, “maybe [she]’ll be in control” (234). Shay’s brief involvement with Dizzy, in which she rewards him with kisses for his compliments, further illustrates how she uses her sexuality to bend men to her will. She relishes the way men will change themselves and their behavior to please her, which makes her feel powerful but makes her relationships feel empty. When Jamie asserts that he doesn’t care whether Shay is manipulating him, Shay realizes how meaning can be found in sharing her true self, instead of simply manipulating others.
Different forms of manipulation arise across the novel. Shay perceives herself as a manipulative person, using her sexuality to control men and gain power, and Laurel sees Shay as a manipulator as well, accusing her of trying to influence her identity. There is also financial manipulation, which Cal uses to try to convince Shay to return to their marriage. However, the most dangerous manipulation occurs at the hands of Don and the Pater Society, who manipulate young women into foregoing their own agency and autonomy. With Clem, Laurel, and Shay, Don speaks like a professor, discussing history and expounding on concepts like “false progress” to associate himself with reason and intelligence in their minds. His manipulative tactics include making himself an object of desire for the women, which allows him to slowly transgress boundaries, as when he spanks Clem without the other women objecting. In the end, Don tells Laurel to kill herself, claiming, “You’ve trusted me, and I’ve grown you” (364), a statement that removes Laurel’s agency. The extent of his manipulation is revealed when Laurel obeys his command.
When Shay murders Don and exposes the Pater Society, she breaks the cycle of manipulation.
The Impact of Past Trauma on the Present
Each of the women in the novel has past trauma that influences their decisions throughout their lives. Laurel’s father’s death leaves her in search of a replacement father figure, and her subsequent experience with sexual assault adds a layer of fear and anxiety to her interactions with men, which makes Don’s protection all the more attractive. Shay’s own traumatic experiences include her father abandoning her family, her mother’s abusive relationship with Mr. Trevors, her own experience with sexual assault, and her act of arson. Shay’s experience with pageants could also be seen as traumatic, as it altered her perception of how men and women interact. Ultimately, traumatic events pull the characters into different situations and influence their decisions, creating the conflicts that drive the novel.
For Shay, sexuality is the ultimate form of control, and this perspective is derived from her father’s abandonment, which drives Shay to relive the feeling of convincing a man to stay with her. Mr. Trevors’s abuse of Nina, as well as Anderson Thomas’s assault on Shay, continue developing Shay’s perception of men as violent and untrustworthy. Shay wonders “if the eyes of those men hadn’t simply burned [her] deep enough when [she] was young, so the scars were still sparking years later” (3), acknowledging how these past traumatic events have followed her into adulthood. In college, Shay concludes that she deserves some form of punishment for her manipulative behavior. Though this perception is misguided, it leads her into Don’s house, where she receives both the attention and punishment that she craves. During the investigation into Laurel’s supposed death, the trauma of her time with Don forces Shay to continuously re-evaluate her own agency, wondering if she is truly aroused by the punishment, or if her seeming obsession with pain is simply the result of her traumatic experiences.
Laurel, like Shay, is in search of a father, but, unlike Shay, she does not see herself as a woman who can control men. For Laurel, Don presents a strong, reliable father figure, and, as with Shay, he provides the punishment that Laurel feels she deserved for her quiet nature and her perceived failure to fend off Andrew’s assault. The woman Shay and Jamie meet at the Sparrow notes that Laurel “was looking for someone to hurt her better than the night before” (92), which Laurel confirms was her punishment for leaving Don. Interestingly, both Shay and Laurel’s past traumas culminate in death, as Laurel dies by suicide and Shay kills Don, reflecting, as well, the difference in each character’s perception of control resulting from their trauma. While Shay seeks to resolve her trauma through repetition and taking back control, Laurel tried to live within her trauma, following Don’s insistence that she could never overcome it on her own.
The Complexities of Gender Roles and Submission
The Last Housewife is an exploration of the ways gender roles manifest in society, focusing on the elements of traditional gender roles that encourage women to submit to men. The overall framing of the novel as a mirror to The Thousand and One Nights, in which Scheherazade tells stories to delay her execution, encourages the reader to seek out the ways that women in the novel prevent or delay male violence through either resistance or submission. Early on, even the house that Shay shares with Cal is “not a home but a museum, a mausoleum” (8), reflecting how Shay feels her life is secondary to her husband’s, making her marriage an act of submission. However, the idea of submission becomes increasingly intense over the course of the novel, as Don uses violence to force Shay, Laurel, and Clem to submit to him, and, later, the Paters repeat Don’s methodology with varying degrees of sadism. These acts of violence are built on a critical analysis of how seemingly innocuous gender stereotypes, such as that men are strong and courageous while women are weak and compassionate, can become identical to characterizations of predators and prey.
Shay acknowledges throughout the novel the little elements that influence a broader understanding of gender roles, such as her comment to Jamie that, in their report cards, Shay’s would read: “Shay is a sweet girl. So polite. Plays well with others,” while Jamie’s would read: “Jamie’s gifted, he’s got so much potential, going big places,” despite the fact that they “got the exact same grades” (234). This disparity in reporting betrays the social conventions of which traits are valued and enforced for each gender. While women are expected to be “sweet” and “polite,” men are rewarded for being “gifted” and “going big places” (234), which opens the discussion to men like Don, quoting from Aristotle that men are inherently superior to women, even though the reality is that Shay and Jamie, as with many men and women, have the “exact same” potential. When Nicole tells Shay, “Life’s going to stomp you no matter what” (278), she is pointing to the social convention of forcing women into submission by favoring diminutive traits in women and aggressive traits in men, inflating men’s control over women to the point that women like Nicole feel that they are being “stomped.”
The most extreme form of this expression of gender roles is at the Paters’ meeting at Adam Dorsey’s home on Campbell Island, where the men literally hunt down the women for sport. The activity forms a microcosm of how gender roles operate socially, in which men are encouraged to “hunt” women, and women are seen as the gatekeepers of sexuality and family. This paradigm, though, encourages men to ignore female agency, and it can even influence women, such as how Shay bristles that Jamie does not see her agency, “[y]et [she]’d never seen Laurel’s” (335). To men, women become objects to hunt, and women, too, might come to see each other as victims of circumstance. By killing Don at the end of the novel, Shay is breaking down the walls of these social expectations, overpowering a man and taking revenge in a way that, according to Don’s readings of Aristotle, should not be possible, and thus refuting the assertion that women are inherently inferior to men. Instead, the conclusion is an opening of the discussion on how society forces women to submit to a rigid gender hierarchy with little room for escape beyond radical action.
