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Themes are the fundamental and often universal ideas explored in a literary work.
The Power and Perils of Reinvention
Throughout the novel, characters face both the power and perils of reinvention. Characters like Stella and Reese escape painful pasts in which they struggle to fully inhabit their identities. To strike out again and recreate their lives on their own terms, they reinvent themselves, often severing ties with past selves that have become in some ways synonymous with pain. Stella, suffering in the wake of her father’s lynching, decides to reinvent herself by passing as white. This reinvention allows her to access white privilege: she marries a white husband, lives the luxury of a wealthy white life, and raises her child with all the safety and entitlement whiteness provides. None of this would’ve been accessible to her if she lived as her Black self, a fact proven by her twin sister, Desiree, who continues to live her life as Black—without many of the privileges and protections that Stella enjoys. Reese, unable to live as a man in the family he was born into, severs ties with his past so that he can be his true self. Thus, reinvention allows both Stella and Reese to escape painful pasts and live in ways that are truer to who they are.
In the wake of their reinventions, though, Stella and Reese each live double lives filled with danger and doubt, and they are both haunted by the selves they left behind. Stella lives in fear of being discovered, even by her own white family, which leads her to hide herself from the people she’s closest to. She also misses her sister, a fact that’s most apparent when Loretta Walker moves in next door. Though Stella tries to prevent a Black family from moving in—for fear of being discovered as Black herself—she finds that Loretta reminds her of Desiree and the Black family that she erased from her history. She ultimately sacrifices her friendship and closeness with Loretta in order to maintain her secret, wielding her perceived whiteness as a weapon against Reg to run the family out of the neighborhood, which leaves her culpable, and more alienated than ever. When her daughter learns her secret, it drives a wedge between them, as Kennedy understands how little she’s known her mother her entire life. Reese also struggles with the fear of being discovered, given that he suffered violence when his gender defied others’ expectations. This drives a wedge between Jude and him, as the two must navigate the self that Reese left behind in order to find their way to loving each other. Though Stella and Reese again and again choose their reinvented selves, a sense of loss and danger pervades their new lives.
Societal Tendency Towards Colorism
Mallard, a town created as a sanctuary for light-skinned Black people, sits at the center of the novel, and it is emblematic of the societal tendency towards colorism, or the belief that light-skinned people are superior to dark-skinned people. Alphonse Decuir, the town’s biracial founder, was rejected both by white society because of his Black mother and by Black society because of his white, slave-owning father. He founded Mallard to, in many ways, bestow its light-skinned Black citizens with the privileges that society had reserved for white people. However, this experiment fails in two crucial ways. First, many of the townspeople develop suspicions of dark-skinned Black people that reiterate the racism of white supremacy. For example, Adele forbids Desiree from seeing Early because he’s dark-skinned, an act which thwarts their budding romance. Jude is a lightning rod for the town’s colorism, as one of the few dark-skinned citizens in Mallard. She suffers regular bullying and rejection her entire life and struggles to maintain a clear idea of her own worth. Even her own grandmother attempts to keep her skin as light as possible by preventing her from running in the sun. Second, the social experiment of Mallard fails to protect its citizens from the prejudice of society at large. This is seen most starkly in Leon Vignes’ lynching, as the lightness of his skin cannot protect him from white hatred. Mallard is a failed utopia, unable to protect its citizens from racism, replicating many of the structures it sought to escape.
How the Past Lives on in the Present
Throughout the novel, the past does not stay in the past, constantly reasserting itself to haunt the present. Stella, Desiree, and Adele are all haunted by the past, whether they are aware of it or not. As an adult, when Desiree returns to Mallard, she essentially steps back into a past life that she had walked out of. Desiree also lives with her sister’s constant absence, a void that continuously keeps her returning to memories and experiences of when the two sisters lived nearly as one person as children and teenagers. She feels her absence like a lost limb, and though she hesitates to bring Stella back into a past that Stella chose to walk out of, her desire for her sister is too great to leave the past alone. Stella is also haunted, though as Desiree moves towards her, Stella continually retreats, deciding at every juncture to bury the past, no matter how homesick she feels. Though she speaks Mallard’s name only once, doesn’t tell her white family of her Black family’s existence, and lives as a person who would be unrecognizable to her sister, Stella can’t escape, and her past eventually finds her. Adele attempts to banish the past, refusing to speak of Stella. However, when she loses her memory, she’s sunk permanently into the past. This, in turn, causes her to continually bring the past into Desiree and Early’s present as she becomes unable to distinguish between the present and the past. In this way, none of the characters can move forward until Stella returns and faces the family she ran from.
