61 pages • 2 hours read
Victor LavalleLone Women
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.
Themes
The Burden of Keeping Secrets
Nearly every character in Lone Women has a deep-seated secret. Adelaide’s secret is the central focus of the novel, as the narrative follows her struggles with keeping the truth of her monstrous sister and family history to herself even as she longs to share it with others. The other “lone women,” like Grace Price, also have their own secrets. In Grace’s case, she is hiding the fact that she murdered her husband, and she also tries to conceal the details of Sam’s gender. Similarly, Bertie and Fiona must keep their romantic relationship a secret, and even Mrs. Reed, who holds herself up as an outward example of honesty and integrity, is keeping several secrets, including the nature of her husband’s work on the “Vigilance Committee” and the fact that she once gave birth to her own monstrous child. Thus, the novel demonstrates that everyone is always hiding some part of themselves, and the outcome of the story indicates that these secrets can only be shared with those who are most trusted.
Even when these secrets must be kept out of necessity and self-preservation, they are nonetheless depicted as cumbersome, weighing down the characters in the novel. They even directly lead to the demise of several characters, including Adelaide’s parents. The ghost of Adelaide’s mother, Eleanor, explains that she and Adelaide’s father went into the barn to confront Elizabeth that night because “they were tired of keeping secrets.” She asks Adelaide, “You feeling tired yet?” (95). On the surface, this conversation with Eleanor’s ghost seems to serve as a warning for Adelaide: that revealing her secrets will only lead to disaster. However, her mother’s inquiry about whether she is “tired” also points to the fact that Adelaide may in fact be so weary of carrying this burden that she is unable to do so by herself. Later in the novel, when she finally tells her entire story to Grace, Bertie, and Fiona, she realizes that it was not an earth-shattering event, and that perhaps she didn’t need to keep her secret hidden for so long. This revelation causes Adelaide to be overcome with anguish and regret even as she feels relieved that her secret is now known. The novel therefore illustrates that some secrets and burdens are simply too heavy to bear alone.
Self-Isolation Versus the Need for Acceptance
Set within the deeply isolating wilds of the Montana landscape, Lone Women examines many aspects of the tense interplay between the need to remain isolated and the longing for community. As the story opens with Adelaide Henry running away from her home and her past, attempting to disappear into isolation and anonymity, it soon becomes clear that her secrets deny her any kind of community life, for she spends most of the journey to Montana keeping to herself. She is always afraid of revealing too much, and she chastises herself whenever she makes a mistake, such as when she purchases her claim in Montana under her real name. However, even though Adelaide seeks out isolation as a means of survival, she cannot completely repress her desire for acceptance. Reflecting on being ignored by the newspaper reporter at the Big Sandy train station, she remarks that “the little white man ignored her and that was both the best thing for her and it hurt her feelings” (27). In addition to introducing the underlying racism in Big Sandy, this moment allows Adelaide to acknowledge the contradiction between wanting to go into self-imposed exile and wanting to be welcomed by those she encounters.
This tension stems from the fact that although Adelaide and her family were always isolated from their community, she nonetheless had access to others of a similar background and heritage. When Adelaide leaves the Lucerne valley for Montana, she must reckon with the fact that her minority status now excludes her socially in many ways. This pattern first emerges when she asks her wagon driver if there are any other Black people out on the Montana prairie, and he is unable to give a very satisfactory answer. After Adelaide begins to meet her fellow homesteaders and frontier folk, she still feels somewhat removed from her community, for as the narrative states, “she had never been around so many white people” (67). Thus, although Adelaide comes to rely on and cultivate friendships with her rural Montana community, she nonetheless feels distant from them. This distance fuels Adelaide’s desire for connection, which at times is almost subconscious. The first time that Adelaide visits Big Sandy during the day, she is drawn into a crowd gathered around Mrs. Reed, as she announces the opening of the new woman-owned power laundry. Adelaide is struck by the fact that she immediately feels like she is one of the group, and she finds herself enjoying this transitory sense of inclusion, even though it comes at the expense of excluding her friends, Bertie and Fiona. She knows that she should rejoin her companions, but she cannot bring herself to break away from the crowd, for “a lifetime of being treated like an outsider may make a person yearn to finally be let in” (160). This moment also highlights the difference between momentary social inclusion and true acceptance, for as Adelaide and her friends later learn, inclusion can lead to compliance, while genuine acceptance stems from deep and fairly earned trust.
Women and Minorities in the American West
One of the most essential themes of Lone Women is its attempt to foreground the experiences of marginalized groups in the history of American westward expansion. Rather than focusing on white male cowboys and ranchers, the author creates many central and secondary characters who have diverse racial backgrounds, gender identities, and sexual orientations. The very first neighbor that Adelaide meets on the prairie, Grace Price, is something of a rebel, for she is a fellow “lone woman” who cultivates a small homestead and hopes to be a schoolteacher for the children of Big Sandy despite the townsfolk’s open rejection of her ambitions to do so. Similarly, while Adelaide does meet many men after moving to Montana, they are not all the stereotypical white subjects found on the US frontier. She describes meeting “sheepherders” who were “Black men and white men, [and] a few […] men who spoke Spanish, not much English” (67). Her interactions illustrate the fact that the racial and ethnic make-up of the undeveloped American West was much more diverse than the historical accounts describe.
Adelaide also meets and befriends women like Bertie and Fiona, who are of Black heritage and Chinese American heritage, respectively; the two women’s romantic relationship is not necessarily condoned by the townsfolk of Big Sandy, but it is overlooked because of the labor they provide. Bertie owns a tavern and distills liquor, and Fiona launders the linens for the Gregson Springs Hotel. Their work exemplifies the typical labor provided by such racially diverse women, especially during this time period. Their relationship also highlights the ways in which the various marginalized communities collaborated with and depended upon one another as they contributed to the construction of the American frontier. At the same time, a repeated tenet of the novel is that “history is simple, but the past is complicated,” signaling that many of these individuals, despite their essential role in this period of history, have been written out of the official accounts. Mr. Reed acknowledges that this exclusion is an intentional decision by those in power, for the narrative states, “The county was enormous, but soon there would be no room for those women. [Mr. Reed] would miss them but he would not fight for them” (237). “Those women” include Bertie and Fiona, as well as the other “lone women” without whom the state of Montana may have remained a desolate wasteland. The novel Lone Women therefore functions to uncover these women and other marginalized members of American history and to give them their due credit for the development of the frontier landscape and society.
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By Victor Lavalle
