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Motifs are recurring structures, contrasts, and literary devices that can help to develop and inform the text's major themes.
Passing
The concept of passing is explored in the novel through characters who present themselves as an identity other than the one assigned to them at birth. For example, Stella, who comes from a Black family, passes as white, and Reese, who was assigned female at birth, lives and passes as a man. In the United States, Black people often passed as white to escape slavery, and transgender people sought to pass as cisgender in order to avoid violence and persecution. Stella affects whiteness as a means of claiming the very power that took her father’s life, and though she succeeds in gaining white privilege, she also shuns and endangers the Black people closest to her to protect her privilege, much as the white people in the novel do. Evoking another meaning of the word “passing” (to pass away), Bennett compares Stella living as white to a kind of death, and indeed, Desiree grieves her sister’s absence as though she has died. Reese successfully passes as a cisgender man, and when that passing is imperiled, he is at risk, facing violence at the hands of those who discover his biological gender. Like Stella, he seeks to protect his identity at all costs, even when it causes him to push away those close to him. However, over time, Reese fully inhabits his identity as a man, while Stella never fully eases into her identity as white, which together underscore the complexity of passing in the novel.
Acting and Performance
Throughout the novel, acting serves as a motif that parallels the way characters perform in their real lives. In many ways, Stella has been acting her entire life, playing the role of Mrs. Sanders, a white woman who has hidden her past from her husband and daughter. It’s fitting, then, that her daughter, Kennedy, takes up acting and becomes adept at inhabiting false roles. She has been an unwitting audience to her mother’s performance her entire life, and in a reversal, when Kennedy is on stage playing a lonely woman surrounded by ghosts, Stella struggles to watch the performance, as though it hits too close to home. Without a model for genuineness in her mother, Kennedy is lost as an adult, more at home onstage than she is in her life. In the end, Kennedy continues acting in her role as a real estate agent, staging herself and the picture-perfect homes, staging the lives of strangers the way her mother staged their lives. In the end, both Stella and Kennedy are trapped in a kind of performance, unable to be real with themselves or each other.
Darkness
Darkness is a motif throughout the novel, a force that both obscures and protects. Jude, who has been bullied and ostracized her entire life for her dark skin, finds solace in darkness and some of her most formative moments take place in the dark. First, when she meets up with Lonnie for trysts, it’s always in the dark. This allows Jude to explore in a way she otherwise couldn’t, but it also obscures a truth she doesn’t want to see: that Lonnie is ashamed to be seen with her in the light and has been abusive to her, much as her father was abusive to her mother. Years later, Jude and Reese confess their feelings for each other during a blackout. Again, Jude finds that the cover of darkness affords her the ability to become more intimate with someone. However, with Reese, she finds herself with someone who can see her in the dark and who can love her darkness. It is also in the safety and comfort of the city in a blackout that the two begin to discover the light of their love.
