What This Theme Explores
The Role and Status of Women in Alice McDermott’s Absolution probes how early-1960s patriarchy scripts a woman’s value—her body, behavior, and ambitions—around her husband’s career and reputation. In Saigon, where American privilege sits behind villa walls, the novel asks what agency looks like when public power is out of reach and private influence is suspect. It also weighs the moral costs of “doing good” across lines of nationality, class, and race, showing how charity can both relieve and reinforce inequality. Most of all, it explores how women craft purpose through performance, subterfuge, ritual, and solidarity when official narratives leave them out.
How It Develops
The theme takes shape through Patricia "Tricia" Kelly, who arrives in Saigon with a role already assigned: the flawless “helpmeet” to her husband, Peter Kelly. From the architecture of her undergarments to the choreography of parties, her body and labor are pressed into service for his reputation. The expatriate compound sharpens the lesson: wives exist as extensions of their husbands’ rank, tasked with smoothing social surfaces and never distracting from male careers.
Enter Charlene, who exposes the gap between performance and power. She masters the corporate-wife stage yet runs a covert network of favors, fundraisers, and informal economies—an underground matriarchy masked as civic virtue. By drafting Tricia into the Barbie–ao dai project, she offers a purpose beyond ornamental support, but the offer is double-edged: the work requires secrecy from Peter, moral compromise, and an acceptance that “helping” can also mean handling cash, status, and people.
Crisis strips away the costume. In the aftermath of Tricia’s miscarriage, Charlene ushers her into a private realm where the women, not the men, decide what matters—baptism, mourning, a reckoning that doesn’t wait for permission or recognition. Meanwhile, Lily (Ly), first seen as a servant and seamstress, steps into her own authority by staying at the leper colony with her cousin, choosing human fidelity over wages and foreign approval. These moments recast “women’s work” as sacrament, skill, and moral will.
Decades later, the frame shifts: Tricia writes to Charlene’s daughter, Rainey, reclaiming the story that official histories of the war ignore. That act of narration becomes an assertion of agency in itself, insisting that wives and workers were not adjuncts to history but its authors in private rooms. “Remember how it was for women,” the book asks—not to excuse, but to understand the ingenious, flawed, and vital ways they worked within and against their confinements.
Key Examples
- The Performance of Femininity
From the opening party preparations, wardrobe becomes indictment and instruction: a woman’s smooth silhouette equals a husband’s smooth career.
You cannot imagine the troubles suggested, in those days, by a stocking with a run: the woman was drunk, careless, unhappy, indifferent (to her husband’s career, even to his affections), ready to go home.
The body is surveilled as résumé; appearance stands in for loyalty, competence, even love—turning femininity into an unpaid, high-stakes job.
- The “Helpmeet” Ideal
Tricia’s father defines marriage as service, and she consents before she has a chance to dissent.
He said, “Be a helpmeet to your husband. Be the jewel in his crown.”
I said, “I will.”
The exchange installs the era’s script inside Tricia’s conscience, making obedience feel like virtue and rendering any deviation a betrayal of family and self.
- Female Agency and Subterfuge
Charlene credits Tricia for the Barbie–ao dai idea, not out of modesty but strategy.
But what she said was “It was Mrs. Kelly’s idea. She’s been working with Lily. Don’t you think it’s perfect?”
She understands that power often travels best in an unthreatening vessel; Tricia’s perceived naiveté gives the project traction in a world suspicious of an overtly “smart” woman.
- Solidarity in Crisis
After the miscarriage, Charlene acts—baptizing the remains with quiet authority.
She wet the fingertips of her right hand and made the sign of the cross over the tiny thing. Softly, she said, “I baptize thee, in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.”
Here, feminine piety becomes sovereignty: the women make their own rite when institutional care and male attention falter, transforming private grief into communal meaning.
Character Connections
Tricia begins as the quintessential early-’60s wife, internalizing duty until it becomes almost indistinguishable from identity. Her complicity—lying to Peter, maintaining appearances—does not negate her awakenings; rather, it shows how agency emerges piecemeal in a world that mistrusts it. Her failed pregnancies, read by the culture as failures of womanhood, push her toward other forms of making: narrative, friendship, ritual.
Charlene embodies a hard-edged, practical feminism forged within constraints. She builds influence through etiquette, logistics, and fearlessness, knowing that sanctioned authority is closed to her. Her methods—morally murky, socially effective—force the novel to ask whether “good” done through skewed hierarchies can ever be pure, and whether purity is a useful standard in an unjust world.
Stella Carney stands as an alternate path: not the private broker of power but the public critic. As a politically engaged activist, she represents the road Tricia admires from afar—one that trades social safety for visible dissent—highlighting how temperament, risk, and opportunity shape women’s choices as much as ideals do.
Lily (Ly) evolves from background labor to moral center. Her craft supplies economic leverage; her decision to stay at the leper colony asserts that loyalty outweighs foreign hierarchy. She refuses the story assigned to her—docile servant, grateful recipient—and writes another: kinship over compliance, presence over permission.
Symbolic Elements
The Barbie Doll
Barbie packages possibility as costume—career girl, bride, stewardess—without granting structural power. Clothed in a handmade ao dai, she becomes a nexus of charity, cultural appropriation, and American self-image, exposing how benevolence can aestheticize and consume the very culture it aims to honor.
Clothing and Undergarments
Corsetry, garters, and girdles literalize social constraint, turning the polished female body into a uniform of service. Against this, the ao dai reads as grace without bondage—suggesting a femininity Tricia perceives as freer, even as the novel reminds us that elegance does not equal autonomy.
The Sewing Room
A women-only workshop where stains are confessed, fabric transformed, and plans laid, the sewing room counters the cocktail party’s performance with creation. It is a sanctuary of competence and candor—proof that female spaces can incubate both intimacy and action.
The Villa Walls
Topped with barbed wire and glass, the walls are protection and prison: a bubble of American privilege that keeps danger—and reality—out. They frame the wives’ lives as gilded containment, intensifying the distance between their curated world and the city beyond.
Contemporary Relevance
Absolution’s portrait of mid-century “helpmeets” anticipates today’s debates about the mental load and the invisible labor that props up families and institutions. Its scrutiny of curated appearances echoes social media’s demand for perpetual polish, where women’s worth is still measured by how seamlessly they perform multiple roles. By foregrounding the unequal relationship between wealthy American women and Vietnamese workers, the novel also models an intersectional lens: it shows how gender oppression can coexist with, and even be cushioned by, racial and class privilege. Finally, its woman-to-woman storytelling mirrors ongoing efforts to center female perspectives in histories long told by men.
Essential Quote
“You have to remember how it was in those days. For women. For wives.”
The line functions as both invitation and warning: understand the context before judging the choices. It frames the novel’s ethical project—not to absolve, despite the title, but to account for how women navigated a system designed to minimize them, and how their imperfect strategies created meaning, community, and change in the shadows of official history.