The Whispers

“She’d once heard them described as the whispers—the moments that are trying to tell you something isn’t right here. The problem is that some women aren’t listening to what their lives are trying to tell them. They don’t hear the whispers until they’re looking back with hindsight.”

This line introduces the motif that gives the novel its title; it also ominously foreshadows Blair’s life. She hears the “whispers” her intuition offers about her husband, and she knows that many women fail to listen to those whispers. Nevertheless, she goes on to ignore the whispers herself, leading to a sham of a marriage and perhaps further disillusionment down the road.

“Now she cannot reconcile the love she has for her daughter with how confined she feels by the privilege of being her mother. These are the feelings she hates herself for having. These are the things she’ll never say aloud to anyone.”

These lines reflect Blair’s ambivalence toward motherhood—a feeling she hides because it does not align with society’s expectation that a mother feel totally fulfilled by her children. Blair feels stuck in many ways, not the least of which involves the Sacrifices of Motherhood that society and her own conscience demand.

“But these mothers are all busy, she knows. Too much going on and yet nothing going on at all, creating urgency where there is none, rushing their lives away. They don’t know how to just be. They make no time to think about what’s right there in front of them.”

Mara, who is 82, judges younger mothers, criticizing their priorities, appearances, and attitudes. Her attitude points to the Female Rivalry in which so many women, the novel implies, engage. In her frustration with her own sense of invisibility, Mara fails to realize the myriad pressures that 21st-century society puts on mothers, instead accusing them of failing to appreciate what they have.

“She wants to feel about herself the way Whitney does, she wants to know what it’s like to be in that echelon of women. The gratification of having made the right life choices.”

Although Blair is glad she isn’t consumed with work and doesn’t have to balance her personal life and career, she envies Whitney’s power, confidence, and status. Her belief that Whitney has made the “right” choices implies that Blair feels she has made the wrong ones, despite the pride Blair feels for being attentive and nurturing. Blair doesn’t realize that her envy of Whitney is misplaced or that Whitney actually sees her as a maternal ideal; the rivalry each feels with the other conceals this.

“She lied without even thinking about it. She shouldn’t have been distracted from him, not for work, not for anything. He’s been here for mere hours, he is a miracle, look at him! How could she have taken her eyes off him?”

Becoming a mother forever changed Whitney, altering her relationship to herself and to her husband. She becomes a liar almost the moment Xavier must compete with work for her attention. The lies come effortlessly to her, and they only grow in frequency and significance. Motherhood leads Whitney to sacrifice her honesty, both to live up to society’s and her husband’s expectations and to maintain a sense of control in her life.

“[S]he indulges the pleasure of imagining Whitney in a short-lived moment of struggle. The workday interrupted. The money with less meaning. The trajectory of her accomplished life a little less certain. Blair’s simple existence looking not so bad after all.”

The irony of wishing pain on her so-called best friend, Whitney, is lost on Blair. After snooping in Whitney’s house and thinking of Whitney’s apparently enviable marriage, Blair is gratified to think of something that might hurt Whitney. Such a moment reveals how insecurity and female rivalry can prevent the formation of supportive relationships among women.

“Whitney knows not every woman believes what she does: that independence, in all its forms, is the most important kind of power. That the world is made up of the enviable and those who envy.”

Whitney feels that she is different from other women and mothers, but her willful ignorance of other women’s feelings conceals from her that they too vie for control in their own lives. Whitney fears being in a position where she might envy other women, but she already envies Blair for Blair’s seemingly effortless mothering, not realizing Blair also struggles. Whitney’s focus on being envied rather than respected or loved is another consequence of female rivalry, and it prevents her from supporting other women or accepting their support.

“[M]ost of the time, she’s angry at herself for being hostage to the longing. The desperation feels like her greatest weakness. She can’t find the discipline to escape it, despite how tightly she can focus every other part of herself.”

Rebecca’s overwhelming desire to have a baby is overpowering—the only feeling she cannot control. She turns that inability to control her mind and body inward, thinking of it as something that makes her weak and powerless, even though she never wanted children until she met Ben, which indicates that the desire has more to do with pleasing him and, by extension, society than with pleasing herself. Her infertility and obsessiveness result in a loss of confidence: another kind of sacrifice to motherhood.

“Whitney is the kind of mother with whom other women try to find fault.”

Whitney isn’t wrong; she seems to have it all, including a powerful career, a loving husband, three beautiful children, and a gorgeous home. Her accomplishments seem to put other women to shame. Now Whitney realizes that her outburst has shattered her façade of perfection, and she is more concerned with this than with the potential emotional damage she has done to her son.

“He said he was sorry, that he loved her. That he needed her to understand. He was quiet while she let him hold her. But she hated him.”

When Ben told Rebecca he wanted to stop trying for a baby, she not only could not understand, but she also felt hatred for him, just as Mara hated Albert for his treatment of Marcus. Motherhood can compel a mother to have to choose between loving and being loved by her partner or her child.

“She was mad at herself for feeling this desperate so quickly. She was incompetent. She was useless. She should be better, this was her second time around, she was a high-functioning, enormously privileged thirty-six-year-old woman with help at her fingertips.”

After birthing the twins, Whitney’s internal monologue grows more self-critical than ever before. She has internalized society’s expectations, and the fact that her lived experience differs from them leads her to find fault with herself rather than the expectations. If one’s perceived failures as a mother dictate one’s identity and confidence, then female rivalry disrupts more than women’s relationships: It destroys their self-esteem.

“Pretending is what she is best at.”

Blair partially recognizes that she lies to others and herself to avoid discomfort. However, to avoid further discomfort, she euphemistically thinks of it as “pretending” rather than “lying.” Connotatively, “pretending” is much more positive because it implies fantasy, whimsy, and even imagination; “lying” connotes deception, and she cannot admit that she deceives herself, or else she would have to accept the actual truths of her life.

“Both things can exist at the same time: the resentment, and the comfort. The despair, and all that love.”

Blair resents Aiden, but she is also comforted by his presence. She hates that he only performs the easy parental tasks while she shoulders the majority of the work, unnoticed and unappreciated by him. That one can feel despair and love simultaneously is paradoxical, much as The Whispers suggests motherhood itself is: sacrifice and fulfillment, rolled into one.

“Whitney reaches out to grab him, the instinct as flammable as gas.”

Whitney sees her anger toward Xavier as an instinct: an involuntary, uncontrollable, and innate impulse. This hyperbole emphasizes the strength of the feeling. The simile comparing this instinct—already an exaggeration—to flammable gas further emphasizes her lack of control. A gas fire is dangerous and destructive, just like Whitney’s rage and lack of control.

“But there is skepticism in Chloe’s small face. She knows. And Blair has just told her that she is wrong. That her intuition isn’t valid, not when it’s uncomfortable. No, darling, we pretend. This is how the life of a woman looks.”

Chloe knows Blair is angry with Aiden, and Blair routinely reassures the girl that everything is “absolutely fine.” In doing so, Blair involuntarily teaches Chloe not to listen to her own intuition, tacitly training her daughter to become just like Blair and Blair’s mother. The lesson is that if a wife and mother is unhappy, she pretends not to be; thus, the problems continue to the next generation.

 “She thinks of what Xavier wrote on the wall [and] of what happened right before her son fell from the window. This is when she starts heaving again.”

Whitney’s thoughts foreshadow the end of the novel: the revelation of her affair with Ben, which Xavier witnessed, and her ultimate complete loss of control, implied by Xavier’s question about what will happen to her when he tells the truth. Her body’s involuntary physical response to her emotions symbolizes her gradual loss of control, leading to the denouement.

“She can feel the window closing on the time she has to mold Xavier into the child she wants him to be, instead of the child he is.”

This metaphor is apt considering how Xavier is injured. Blair points out how unsafe the window in Xavier’s bedroom is, but Whitney never corrects it. When she gets his progress report in this chapter, she reflects on her desire to change him to please herself, emphasizing how selfish her desire for control is: She laments the closing “window” of time she has to change Xavier but never fixes the hazardous window that threatens his safety. The word choice emphasizes her desire to control rather than nurture her children.

“Of course, every mother wants their children to be happy. I just mean, it’s nearly impossible for a woman not to lose herself in the process. It’s a kind of…voluntary death, in a way?”

Whitney’s metaphor comparing motherhood to death emphasizes her awareness of social expectations that necessitate mothers’ sacrifices. Choosing to become a mother seems to obligate a woman to put her children ahead of herself. Whitney thinks it is excessive to prioritize children’s happiness over one’s own, as though there is some minimum level of selflessness that must be met before a mother can be anything else. Death is permanent and frightening, making this remark the most honest she ever is about how motherhood makes her feel.

“There is freedom in the truth, she thinks from the front door, watching Blair rinse their glasses over and over at the sink. And there is suffering in the lie.”

Seven months before Xavier’s fall, Whitney considers Blair’s life with Aiden. She has watched Blair shrink from Aiden’s treatment of her, his roving eye, and his lack of appreciation. She knows that Blair pretends not to know things that would hurt her and suggests that these lies cause Blair suffering, whereas accepting the truth would confer freedom. Whitney fails to understand that Blair’s willful ignorance gives her a sense of security she would lose if she acknowledged the truth. Blair doesn’t want freedom; she wants comfort.

“She understood in that moment something about him that she had not wanted to be true. But there are risks people take when they want something badly enough. There are things they learn to ignore.”

When Aiden eyes another woman during the dinner at which he asked Blair to look at houses with him, Blair decides to let it go: the first in a long line of things she consciously ignores to feel happy and secure. She doesn’t want to continue to envy her friends with husbands and children, and Aiden represents the comfort she craved.

“If you want her to pinpoint the moment she’s hungry for, it’s when they enter her. The submission of it. I have you, you’re in me, you’ve surrendered.”

Whitney’s need for control sends her into the arms of men who make her feel powerful rather than ashamed of herself. She wants them to submit to her. The language of them being “in” her is not dissimilar to her desire for Xavier to be back inside her; if he is inside her, she controls him, and they are safe. She likes these men to be “inside” her because that gives her the same feeling of control.

“People are rarely who they seem. But sometimes it’s the good ones who do the very worst things.”

Mara thinks of herself as good, but she is responsible for Albert’s death. She has no trouble reconciling her “goodness” with this fact, which seems to prompt a reevaluation of her judgments of her neighbors, whose appearances are also often deceiving. In the end, her regret over her interference points to her growing empathy now that she is free from her life with (and hatred of) Albert.

“It’s unsettling how a friendship as close as theirs can so quickly be diminished.”

Despite all she has seen of and felt about Whitney, Blair continues to think of their relationship as a “friendship” deserving of being called “close.” The dramatic irony created by her apparent obliviousness to her unfriendly feelings for Whitney—the envy, the enjoyment of her pain, the judgment of Whitney’s lies, and more—never resolves, indicating that Blair will go on deluding herself about all her relationships.