66 pages • 2 hours read
Ashley AudrainThe Whispers
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2023A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 11-15Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 11 Summary: “Blair”
Shocked at finding Aiden’s keychain in Whitney’s nightstand, Blair imagines Aiden and Whitney together. She feels “shrunken,” knowing she won’t confront Aiden as some women would. When she leaves, she sees Ben across the street, watching her. When he glances toward the Loverlys’ house, she realizes he’s about to tell her something big about Whitney and feels a momentary sense of pleasure at the idea of Whitney struggling. Ben tells her about Xavier’s fall, and Blair calls Aiden, who is quiet when she tells him this news. He tells her to go to the hospital to be with Whitney, and Blair worries about telling Chloe. She refuses to “let herself spiral” (76), so she tells herself that Xavier will survive and that the key is insignificant.
Chapter 12 Summary: “Rebecca”
Rebecca is more exhausted than usual, and Xavier’s condition is unchanged. She goes outside for some air, and a young mother runs up with a baby. The mother is frantic because she dropped the baby, though Rebecca is sure he’s fine. She runs through the questions she will have to ask the woman later to make sure the baby is safe in her custody. Rebecca isn’t sure if she asked Whitney these questions.
Rebecca takes an elevator to the basement, allows her fear to “consume” her, and gives herself an ultrasound, seeing her baby’s feet and toes and hearing its heartbeat. She has not told Ben, sure she will lose this baby, too. She looks at her phone, which contains pictures she secretly took of mothers whose children wouldn’t survive. Rebecca could be fired for her actions, but she finds the photos reassuring: These women “remind her that despite how much she wants it, becoming a mother is the most foolish thing a woman can do” (81).
Chapter 13 Summary: “Whitney. Wednesday”
The day of Xavier’s accident, Whitney throws a baby shower for an employee, though she didn’t have one herself: “She doesn’t like that babies and marriages are the only things in a woman’s life celebrated like this” (83). Whitney is also preparing for a presentation tomorrow that will elevate her growing company and increase her influence. She thinks about the expectant mother and how the woman may never return to work, deciding after childbirth that “giving” herself to her child is most important. Whitney thinks that independence is the most important power.
Whitney recalls her childhood with a father who always complained of the world’s “unfairness.” Whitney asked him why he never did something to change it, and her mother smacked her head for the disrespect, then kissed her in the same spot: “She did this often, followed her aggressions with affection, like one erased the other” (84). Due to this, Whitney values control, which is why Xavier angers her. Jacob calls her from London, and she considers how different they are. Her income and her ambition maintain their lifestyle, but she resents the pressure she feels. He is “wishy-washy and anxious” now (88), wishing he’d stayed home, and his demeanor irritates Whitney. When they hang up, she sees a text asking her to confirm plans for 11pm.
Chapter 14 Summary: “Rebecca”
Rebecca needs to sleep. Driving home against rush-hour traffic, she thinks about how her life always seems to be moving opposite to most others’. She likes the odd hours at the hospital because it keeps her mind off the daily “routines” associated with motherhood. At work, she is needed, whereas at home she feels “broken” as a result of her infertility.
Ben is consulting from home, having taken a leave of absence from teaching this year. Rebecca suspects it might be too hard to be around children all day. She thinks of her first date with Ben; he asked if she wanted children, and she responded with some uncertainty. In reality, she hadn’t wished for children before this relationship, though she felt terrible about disappointing her single mother, who “desperately” wanted grandchildren. Nevertheless, she told Ben that she did want children, and then she began to want them.
Now Rebecca feels like a “hostage to the longing” for children (96), which feels like a terrible weakness to her. When Ben asks why she doesn’t drink her coffee, she lies about having too much at work, thinking how easily she lies to him now. Upstairs, Rebecca looks at her body and realizes she can only hide her pregnancy for another week. She’s never had a pregnancy last this long.
Chapter 15 Summary: “Whitney. The Hospital”
Whitney bites off a piece of Xavier’s fingernail and holds it in her mouth. She can’t recall the sound of his laugh and remembers very little laughter from her own childhood. Her mother always kept a single bus ticket hidden in a coat pocket, and Whitney’s father would frequently back her mother against a wall with his harsh, “spewing” words. Whitney realizes there isn’t much laughter in her home when she’s around and that she hates to play because it seems pointless: “She isn’t that kind of mother. A mother like Blair” (101). When she threatened to rub onions on Xavier’s fingernails to prevent his biting them, he asked her to stop talking about it, saying that sometimes it was the only thing that made him feel better. She understood how doing something one isn’t supposed to can confer a sense of relief. She never could imagine Xavier as a man: only the challenging child who pushes her “right to the very brink” (102).
Chapters 11-15 Analysis
Blair and Whitney continue comparing themselves, sometimes regretting their dissimilarities and at other times smugly celebrating their differences. Blair feels “pleasure” when she imagines “Whitney in a short-lived moment of struggle” (75), hoping it will shake Whitney’s self-confidence. Whitney compares herself to Blair too, thinking that she isn’t the kind of mother who watches clouds with her children or otherwise delights in their mere presence: “A mother like Blair. Who has made different decisions than she has” (101). Blair is a nurturing mother, though she feels inadequate as a person and doubts her choices as a woman. Whitney has a career, employs a nanny, and feels confident in her occupational skills but deficient as a parent. Both women feel something is missing, but rather than look to the unrealistic societal expectations of women, they instead engage in Female Rivalry with one another.
Rebecca too is keenly aware of her strengths and her privations. She longs for the routines that Blair and even Mara resent. She’s a capable, proficient doctor, but her fear of being forever childless “consume[s]” her. The language of consumption reveals her fear of disappearing—a fear she shares with Blair, despite the apparent dissimilarity of their lives—and is related to the desire for control. When Whitney bites Xavier’s fingernail, for example, she literally consumes a piece of him in a symbolic reflection of her desire to control both herself and Xavier.
The similarities between the novel’s main female characters suggest that Rebecca is wrong to think that “Her life flows in a different direction than most people’s” (91). She feels pulled in opposing directions, grateful for the ambition and ability that led to her successful career but resentful of her inability to become a mother. Now, her marriage suffers, and she is lying to her husband. However, Rebecca is not unique in this. Whitney also values her ambition, work ethic, and the life she has built, but she feels guilty about her failures as a mother, especially for whatever she did that hurt Xavier. Her marriage suffers because she resents her husband for the lack of control she feels. Finally, Blair is happy to devote herself to Chloe, but she also feels inadequate when she compares herself to Whitney; her marriage is also suffering because she suspects her husband is having an affair with the very person who makes Blair feel so insufficient as a woman. All three women feel the same thing, caused by slightly different circumstances: They cannot be and do all the things they feel they should.
The women’s failure to recognize their similarities stems partly from their failure to fully recognize themselves. Whitney, for example, thinks that “[s]he doesn’t submit to the social contrivances that cause other working mothers [to feel] so much guilt” (85), but this isn’t true at all. She feels guilt when Xavier is in the hospital, and she felt guilt when he was a newborn. That Whitney cannot see the traits she has in common with other women—and therefore struggles to empathize with them even as she harshly judges herself—is among the Effects of Willful Ignorance.
The women’s self-deception also impacts their relationships with men. In a pattern that repeats throughout the novel, Blair persuades herself that the key she found in Whitney’s drawer means nothing. Narratively, the key is in fact a red herring; Aiden and Whitney are not having an affair, while Ben’s anxiety about Xavier’s accident provides a clue as to the actual identity of Whitney’s lover. Blair, however, can’t know any of this, and her willingness to overlook such a clear red flag signals her preference for stability over honesty.
