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 6-10Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 6 Summary: “Rebecca
Rebecca recalls her answer to Whitney’s question about her childlessness: that there is nothing in the world Rebecca wants more than a child. She felt “expos[ed]” by the words. She has a hard time keeping her mind off Xavier, though she usually thrives in the ER’s fast pace. Another patient, a two-year-old girl, prompts Rebecca to recall an ultrasound she had and the nursery Ben painted. She was pregnant with a girl who would be two now, had she lived.
Chapter 7 Summary: “Blair”
At the boutique where she works part-time, Blair recalls meeting Aiden. He was handsome, gregarious, and magnetic. He wanted to make her happy, and now he doesn’t seem to care. She remembers her mother’s disappointing response to Blair’s relationship news, but her mother hadn’t always been so cold. She was fun when Blair was small but “seemed to reduce herself, quietly and slowly” over the years (43). As Blair wonders if she and Aiden have basically become her own parents, Aiden walks into the shop.
Blair considers her “unseen value” in the marriage—all the work she does that Aiden doesn’t see. His days seem easy to her; he sells software to banks and earns commissions, though this means some years are richer than others. Blair snaps at him when he looks at his phone and immediately reproves herself for it. She asks if he came home last night, and he looks “stunned,” claiming he slept in the spare room to avoid waking her. She wants to tell him how unimportant and undesirable she feels, how she copes with her feelings by blaming him, but she doesn’t. When he leaves, she does too, and she stops at Whitney’s house to cheer herself up by doing “the one thing she’s promised herself she wouldn’t do anymore. But it’s her only vice. And she feels owed at least one” (47).
Chapter 8 Summary: “Mara”
Mara watches Blair let herself into Whitney’s house. As a girl, Mara had prophetic dreams, seeing her future husband, Albert, the night before she met him and dreaming of pregnancy the night they conceived. She and Albert agreed to leave Portugal for America. He got a sales job and a new Ford, and they started saving money. Just prior to the baby’s birth, Mara dreamed the child would be unique. As a baby, Marcus was playful and sociable, but he grew less verbal and more fearful of others over time. Doctors didn’t take Mara’s concerns seriously, encouraging her to be “more relaxed” around him so that he wouldn’t absorb her mood; Mara felt as though they were blaming her.
Mara wanted to take Marcus to a specialist, but Albert refused the money and grew increasingly distant. By the time Marcus was five, he spoke only to Mara and only in whispers. They were always together. Albert, on the other hand, could go weeks without ever seeing Marcus. Albert was “like stone” and their marriage “hardened.” Now, Mara maintains her routines and wonders if this is all there is to life.
Chapter 9 Summary: “Blair”
Inside Whitney’s house, Blair realizes she doesn’t envy every aspect of Whitney’s life. Blair wouldn’t want to be distracted by work constantly. However, Blair would love to have Whitney’s confidence and the satisfaction of making “the right life choices” (58). The house is spotless, with a “manufactured freshness” about it, and Blair snoops in the fridge and on the laptop. Whitney isn’t an attentive mother, Blair thinks. She goes up to Xavier’s room to find coffee all over the floor, one wall, and the back of the door; the mug is broken on the hardwood. She wonders what made Whitney angry enough to do this, and Blair thinks about how much she hates this part of her friend.
Going into Whitney and Jacob’s bedroom, Blair touches their things, even reaching for the vibrators at the back of Whitney’s third drawer. Whitney told her once that Jacob liked to watch her masturbate, and Blair becomes aroused now. She takes off her own clothes and dons a piece of Whitney’s lingerie before masturbating on their bed, thinking of Jacob. She imagines Jacob entering and desiring her. After getting dressed, she tries on Whitney’s jewelry, “something she does every time” (65). Opening a drawer in Whitney’s nightstand, Blair finds something that wasn’t there two months ago: Aiden’s keychain.
Chapter 10 Summary: “Whitney. The Hospital”
Whitney recalls newborn Xavier and how careful she and Jacob were with him. Whitney had difficulty separating herself from her work, though she’d been promised job security. Whitney always thought she didn’t want children, but when she turned 30 and all her friends were pregnant, she noticed how they thought of motherhood as an “accomplishment.” She feared she might one day regret not having children, so she and Jacob did.
Whitney did not enjoy being pregnant, and once she and Xavier were home from the hospital, she longed for the familiar “lifeline” of her phone. When Jacob went to the store, she plugged it in, gratified to see messages from work, which reassured her of her value and importance. When Jacob returned, she lied about not being able to take her eyes off the baby, frightened by her “potential […] to fail” her family (71). She saw Jacob’s elation with the baby and wished she could feel it, too.
Now, Whitney squeezes Xavier’s arm as he lies unconscious, and she wonders at the familiarity of the feeling, as if she often grabs him here, but in anger. She recalls the “rage” that could “wallop” her so quickly. She reflects that she has now “done something much worse to him” (72).
Chapters 6-10 Analysis
The juxtaposition of the female characters’ marriages and experiences as mothers continues to invite comparison. Faced with a little girl the same age her own daughter would be, Rebecca struggles to remain objective. The imagery in this moment—the smell of peanut butter on the small girl’s breath, the feeling of her “dark curls through [Rebecca’s] fingers,” and the “softness of her warm, plump cheek” (40)—make this child a vivid, present reality in contrast to the daughter Rebecca imagines. Her desperation to become a mother here hinders her professionalism, and she oversteps; that the girl’s “mother clears her throat” suggests the inappropriateness of Rebecca’s touches (40).
Although Rebecca sees motherhood as the answer to her dissatisfaction with life, the experiences of the novel’s mothers paint a more complex picture. Blair’s marriage has suffered in part because of her sense that Aiden does not appreciate the Sacrifices of Motherhood. This relationship dynamic—Blair laboring thanklessly on behalf of her husband and child—contrasts markedly with the beginning of Blair and Aiden’s relationship, when Blair perceived Aiden as sacrificing for her. When Blair first met Aiden, he’d thrown out an arm to stop her from stepping on a piece of glass, “lifted it up in his wide palm like a glass slipper” (41). This simile alludes to the story of Cinderella, emphasizing how lucky and loved Blair felt when their relationship was new. It was, the comparison suggests, like a fairy tale, but the fact that what Blair saw as a glass slipper was merely a broken shard suggests she was idealizing Aiden and their love for one another. Consequently, there is no happy ending in sight for Blair and Aiden. Now, she attacks him with words, even though she knows doing so won’t make her feel better. She longs to communicate with him openly, but she cannot bring herself to do it.
Female Rivalry also contributes to Blair’s dissatisfaction. Blair continues to compare herself to Whitney, acknowledging what she envies as well as what she dislikes. She thinks that she wouldn’t want to be “consumed with work” as Whitney is (58). However, in an earlier chapter, Blair thought of how Chloe’s needs “consume [her]” and how she “finds herself needing to be consumed” (22). In Whitney’s bedroom, Blair thinks that she has “become expert at consuming [Whitney] swiftly, thirstily” (62). This language of consumption has become commonplace for Blair, alternately suggesting her desire to swallow someone else or to be swallowed, losing herself completely. The competition for dominance over other women creates significant pressure for Blair, Whitney, and Rebecca, perhaps explaining the “urgency” Mara senses among them; in their insecurity, the women constantly seek to amalgamate pieces of one another’s lives or even to become one another—something made particularly clear when Blair dresses as Whitney and masturbates to thoughts of Whitney’s husband.
Blair is, of course, unaware that Whitney regrets many aspects of her own life and of motherhood in particular. Blair also judges Whitney harshly, unbeknownst to Whitney; meanwhile, Whitney compares her life to Blair’s, finding her own concerns to be more consequential. These dramatic ironies highlight that women constantly compare themselves to one another because society’s expectations conflict; therefore, no woman feels certain that she has made all the “right” decisions. Whitney’s friends’ “superior” behavior following their “accomplishment” of motherhood and Blair’s assumption that workaholic Whitney never considers work-life “balance” belie the competing demands on women’s time and energy.
These demands were less pronounced when Mara was raising her son. Nevertheless, her life too has failed to live up to her expectations, rendering her supposedly prophetic dreams deeply ironic. When Albert refused to accept that their son was not the “kind of boy” for which he longed, Mara could only express her disappointment that Albert was “not the man [she] thought [he was]” (53, 55). Mara’s marriage “hardened” and Albert came to be “like stone,” comparisons that emphasize how consumed she was by Marcus and the impact this had on her and Albert’s relationship.
