Boy, Snow, Bird

The novel’s main characters are mostly women, and they all wrestle with gender constructs and norms in various ways. Boy’s experience upon arriving in Flax Hill is that of the single-minded search for marriage, as embodied by Veronica Webster, despite that she isn’t all that interested in it. A strong contrast is in their respective weddings: Veronica’s is a lavish affair, while Boy’s is a simple City Hall wedding. On the other end of the spectrum is Mia Cabrini, who bucks these norms—she dates, but does not seem particularly interested in settling down, and despite being hyperaware of the uphill battle she faces in a male-dominated world, is laser-focused on her career. Indeed, at the end of the novel, she is successful in her career and remains unmarried, but happy—she is not the regretful spinster who might otherwise have appeared. Vivian Whitman is likewise successful in her own right but is a victim of circumstance; she claims to be happy, like Mia, but was previously engaged (although the engagement itself was a victim of racism). Lastly there is Frances, who reacted to her rape by discarding her female self entirely in order to become the oppressor, eventually turning that violence onto his daughter. 

The novel’s commentary on family as a source of strength, as with its commentary on gender and race, is more nuanced and complex than is typical of folklore and fairytales. Boy, of course, comes from an abusive, single-parent home, so we begin about as far from a strong family structure as we can get; indeed, the inciting incident of the novel is Boy’s escape from her only living relative to Flax Hill.

As a result, Boy seems to desire safety and stability more than devotion: she implicitly rejects her childhood sweetheart, Charlie, who is utterly devoted to her, in favor of Arturo, who makes her feel safe. The family as a unit is malleable in the novel, though; rather than making the claim that we must always stick by family through the actions of the characters, family members are often treated like playing cards, to be discarded in order to make the best hand: Clara threatens the illusion of whiteness carefully cultivated by the Whitmans, for example, so she is sent away. Snow, who is Boy’s stepdaughter, threatens the safety of Bird (in Boy’s mind), so she is likewise sent away. Nevertheless, family is depicted as being important; the final section features a reconciliation and reuniting of the Whitmans, however precarious, and the conclusion of the novel shows Boy attempting to reclaim what she can of her mother from her father, with both of her daughters in tow. 

Boy locates racism in American society explicitly as a product of the worship of whiteness, rather than as a hatred of people of color, and many of the events of the novel support this understanding. Snow, for example, is preferred to Bird because of her fair skin, and both Bird and Boy seem to come to the conclusion that Snow’s version of beauty is worshipped because of external exaltation, not because Snow demands it of people. White worship is, of course, likewise heavily present in the actions of the Whitmans, not because they necessarily worship whiteness, but because they believe that they must in order to survive in American society, and their colorism reinforces the concept insofar as lightness is emphasized over darkness. The fairytales that are present throughout the text reinforce this as an inevitability; idealists like Clara seek change, but Kazim’s comic strip and Snow’s version of La Belle Capuchine suggest that this is the way of society and will continue to be so, and evil will continually consume the world.