55 pages • 1 hour read
Jess LoureyUnspeakable Things
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2020A 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
Loss of Innocence
Content Warning: This novel refers to emotional, physical, and sexual abuse; child neglect; murder; violence; racism; and anti-gay bias.
Cass’s loss of innocence is a learned behavior that begins at home and extends to every adult and institution that continues to fail to protect her. Cass and Sephie cannot feel safe in their own home. Their predatory father is so abusive that when he looks at them, his own daughters feel “like a monster had found [their] hiding spot” (13). An act as simple as fetching a glass of water underscores how the girls are prey in their own home, and even brushing their teeth requires coordination to stave off their dad’s advances.
As a result of being unable to feel safe in her own home, Cass has lost faith in the ability of any institution to protect her. Her father is a predator. Her mom turns a blind eye to her husband’s behavior and enables the abuse of her daughters. At school, boys are free to torment and threaten girls in the dark corners and secret cupboards of the band room. Aunt Jin also presented a source of sanctuary; for years, Cass has found solace in writing to her aunt and begging her to visit. Jin’s visits were previously a time of fun for Cass, but now she is old enough to realize that Jin and her dad have flaunted their romantic relationship in front of her mom. Cass feels deeply betrayed by Jin, not just because of the disruption to the nuclear family unit but because Jin becomes one more person who has let Cass down and proved unable to help.
The frankness with which Cass regards her parents’ orgies emphasizes how often she has been exposed to such behavior. She and Sephie recognize that the parties make them uncomfortable, but she seems to believe that being exposed to her parents’ friends having sex is a standard part of her life. Because her parents have warned her not to share details of her “eccentric” home life, she understands that there is something wrong about it, but she cannot see a way out and therefore cannot find the strength to battle against it. Mr. Frais’s observation that it is too early to start drinking and that the girls are too young to be bartenders helps validate her quiet assumption that what her parents force her to do is not acceptable. With the Fraises, she experiences the same momentary glimmer of hope that she has with the state trooper: Someone sees her and makes her feel valid. By the time she is in the hospital, she is ready to open up to the social worker and ask for the help she deserves. The loss of innocence of Cass and Sephie reflects a systematic pattern of abuse. The loss of innocence is a trial that Cass must endure before she is positioned to expose the abuse she has survived to the social worker.
Societal Hypocrisy
Cass is constantly forced to confront the hypocrisy of every institution on which she is supposed to rely. Her parents, her aunt, and institutions such as her school and her local police force enforce the idea that adults are allowed to behave in the ways that kids are explicitly warned against. Cass has been made to accept these unfair double standards, almost completely denying herself the belief that she deserves to ask for help.
At school, teachers are supposed to encourage the value of empathy, but Cass’s teachers consider their colleague Mr. Connelly a likely candidate for a murderous pedophile because he is gay. Cass cannot take them seriously as honest, credible authority figures: “It wasn’t the first time he’d told me I should be a writer, but sometimes teachers had to say gooey stuff about their students so they didn’t feel like they’d wasted their life choosing education” (26). The adults in Cass’s life assign her so much responsibility and force her to grow up so quickly, but they also tell themselves that her age renders her a silent witness.
Sergeant Bauer is very much responsible for Cass’s lack of faith in institutions. He is supposed to uphold and enforce the law, and yet he repeatedly proves to be an untrustworthy law breaker. He grows and sells drugs with her dad. He lords his trumped-up authority over children. In such a small town, he apparently is one of very few policemen, and during the reigns of a Peeping Tom and a serial assaulter, he considers himself so idle that he can stop by the middle school to lecture a friend’s daughter on petty theft.
Bauer engages in and enables victim-blaming. The boys who have been attacked are from the lower-class Hollow neighborhood, which Bauer views as a demographic choice: “I’m telling you, the boys are lying for some sorta attention. You know how Hollow boys are. No dad around, a mom who smokes in front of the television and chows down Twinkies all day”’ (155). Though Bauer himself abuses authority, makes aggressive sexual advances, and uses marijuana, he believes himself to be an indomitable pillar of rightness. By being born into poverty, the Hollow boys were also born into Bauer’s conviction that they do not deserve any kind of chance. Similarly, the victim-blaming by adults makes kids think that this is acceptable behavior. Boys continue to shame Sephie, looking down on her for being sexually active even though they are sexually active with her.
Cass and Sephie are constantly exposed to authority figures who are supposed to uphold certain moral codes but only abuse this power to elevate themselves.
The Darkness Lurking Beneath the Surface of Small-Town Life
Though Cass enjoys certain aspects of small-town life, she also acknowledges its limitations and the ease of acquiring prejudices. In a small town, it becomes easy to ostracize anyone who is the slightest bit different.
Lilydale is home to considerable racism and homophobia. Cass’s parents pride themselves on their supposed superiority because they both have master’s degrees, and they look down on their new neighbors for being less educated. Cass’s parents are neglectful and abusive, forcing their daughters to bartend at their orgies, but they still hold themselves above the Gomez parents. While Cass does not think her parents are racist, there are undeniably racist undertones to her parents’ discussion of the Gomez family.
Lilydale’s citizens fail to acknowledge the basic forensic difference between preferential and opportunistic offenders and categorize any kind of sexual crime as falling under the same umbrella of deviance. Because of this, the Peeping Tom (who targets girls) and Chester the Molester (who targets boys) are thought to be the same person. Mr. Connelly is treated with considerable cruelty because he is gay, and the protesters outside his house are confident that any gay person must also be capable of the abuse and murder of children. Homophobia is conflated with pedophilia by small-minded people within the text.
Often in YA literature that takes place in a small town, the ambitious dreamer protagonist will turn to books as escapism and fantasize about moving far away. Because the adult narrator Cass is now telling her story, she may have gained the strength to do so through distance. Physically and emotionally scarred Cass would be forever stunted by staying in a town where she would be known only as the odd daughter of the orgy hosts. Despite this, she dreams of being able to escape, and even finds hope as she is driving in her family’s old van: “The irony of being reminded of the size of the world through a hole in the floor of a rusted-out van was not lost on me” (200).
In a small town, the ease with which people turn on each other and look for reasons to judge each other is deeply unsettling. Decades-old problems, rivalries, and alliances fester and give way to more toxicity.
