Perception, Reality, and Gaslighting
What This Theme Explores
Perception, Reality, and Gaslighting asks who gets to define “what really happened” when experiences conflict—and what it costs when one person’s truth is routinely dismissed. Through the intimate, confessional narration of Blythe Connor, the novel probes how partners can erode a loved one’s confidence by reframing observations as overreactions or delusions. Blythe’s fear that her daughter, Violet, harbors cruelty collides with her husband Fox’s insistence that she is unstable, forcing readers to navigate the space where love, doubt, and manipulation overlap. The story ultimately explores how a person fights to reclaim reality when their intuition has been relentlessly invalidated.
How It Develops
Early on, Blythe’s uneasy bond with Violet is treated as pathology rather than perception. Fox confidently translates her lived experience—endless crying, a baby who won’t settle with her—into a neat diagnosis of maternal anxiety, positioning himself as the arbiter of reason and her as the source of distortion. That early pattern makes doubt the ground Blythe stands on; the more she senses something amiss, the more she is told the problem is her.
In the middle stretch, the gaslighting intensifies and broadens, enlisting family and institutions to corroborate Fox’s version of events. Even when external signs suggest Violet’s calculated coldness, Fox reframes them as normal childhood missteps or, worse, as the mirror of Blythe’s supposed deficiency. A pivotal moment—Blythe’s lapse while Violet cries—becomes the cornerstone of Fox’s case against her, weaponized as proof that her perceptions cannot be trusted and isolating her inside a private, contested reality.
The climax fuses perception and consequence: the death of Sam forces Blythe to name what she believes she witnessed, only to be silenced by authority, family, and grief’s chaos. Official narratives label the event a tragic accident; Fox’s “shhh” reduces her testimony to hysteria. The ending preserves ambiguity—Blythe may see Violet mouth a confession, or she may be seeing what she needs. Either way, the novel shows how, after prolonged invalidation, perception can harden into the only reality one has left.
Key Examples
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Fox’s early dismissals set the template for a reality managed by him and felt—but deprecated—by Blythe. By naming her fear as anxiety, he recasts evidence as emotion and replaces her observations with his interpretations.
“You’re anxious. She can sense it,” you said. She’d cried for five and a half hours. I cried for four of those... “I think the baby hates me.”
“Shhh.”
(Chapter 10-11 Summary) -
The preschool conference exposes a crack in Fox’s narrative when a teacher validates Blythe’s concerns, yet he swiftly redirects blame back onto her. The move underscores gaslighting’s power: even corroboration becomes suspect if it threatens the preferred family story.
“She’s four, Blythe. She can’t even tie her shoes.”
“Look, I love her, I’m just saying—”
“Do you?”
(Chapter 27 Summary) -
Sam’s death is the crucible where perception collides with sanctioned truth. Blythe offers a specific, devastating claim; Fox’s response—calm, minimizing, paternal—reasserts narrative control and reframes her certainty as something unsafe to voice.
“I think she pushed him,” I said to you quietly as you dabbed ointment on my burned skin. I couldn’t feel a thing. “I think she pushed him into the road. I told the police.”
“Shhh.” Like I was a baby. “Don’t say that. Okay? Don’t say that.”
(Chapter 44 Summary) -
Joe’s memory of the accident contradicts Blythe’s account of Violet’s remoteness, muddying the line between inner conviction and external testimony. The scene shows how recollection is partial and how competing witnesses can deepen, not resolve, uncertainty.
“I just remember how distraught you were. You were in shock. Your daughter clung to your waist and wanted to be held, but you couldn’t bend down. You couldn’t move.”
(Chapter 80 Summary) -
The final, distant “confession” dramatizes the novel’s central question: is this truth at last, or the ultimate projection of a mind denied? The moment implicates the reader, who must decide whether to trust what cannot be verified.
I pushed him.
I pushed him.
These are the words I think I can hear.
(Chapter 85 Summary)
Character Connections
Blythe Connor narrates from a posture of doubt carved by maternal lineage—her memories of Cecilia and Etta seed the fear that she is destined to repeat harm. That inheritance makes her both attuned to danger and vulnerable to self-suspicion. Her manuscript becomes an act of resistance: a meticulous attempt to name what she saw before her voice is erased.
Fox Connor embodies the seductions of a curated reality: confident, reasonable, and invested in pristine family mythmaking. He does not merely disagree with Blythe; he delegitimizes her interpretive authority, a subtler violence that allows him to protect his image of fatherhood while isolating her as the unreliable outlier.
Violet Connor is written into ambiguity, the narrative’s ethical and interpretive hinge. Her moments of tenderness and distance keep the reader oscillating, mirroring Blythe’s loop of vigilance and doubt; the ambiguity itself becomes the instrument of gaslighting, because nothing can be definitively proved or disproved.
As Fox’s new partner, Gemma represents the triumph of his preferred narrative—a warm home, a “sweetheart” daughter, a stable mother figure—all the things Blythe is told she failed to be. Blythe’s incursions into Gemma’s life read as a transgressive attempt to puncture that façade, to force another adult to see what Blythe insists is there.
Symbolic Elements
The Manuscript: The book’s framing as Blythe’s letter to Fox—her “side of the story”—literalizes the struggle over narrative authority. It is evidence and plea at once, reminding us that truth arrives clothed in perspective.
The Glowing House: Fox’s luminous, picture-perfect home operates as the visual embodiment of his curated reality. Its warmth throws Blythe’s shadowed interiority into relief, underscoring how appearances can eclipse painful, contested truths.
Windows and Mirrors: Windows stage surveillance and separation—Blythe looking in, others looking at her—while mirrors fracture her self-recognition. Together they externalize the gap between who she is told she is and who she believes herself to be.
Contemporary Relevance
The novel’s preoccupation with gaslighting resonates in an era when psychological manipulation is both widely named and persistently minimized. It speaks to postpartum experience and the cultural demand that mothers convert ambivalence and exhaustion into Instagram-ready serenity. In a world thick with curated feeds and official narratives, Blythe’s fight to have her perceptions dignified becomes a larger argument for respecting lived experience, especially when it unsettles comforting myths.
Essential Quote
“Shhh.” Like I was a baby. “Don’t say that. Okay? Don’t say that.”
This soft command encapsulates the novel’s harm: the soothing tone that silences, the intimacy that enforces disbelief. By infantilizing Blythe at the very moment she asserts a hard, dangerous truth, the line crystallizes how gaslighting operates—not through overt cruelty, but through gentle, persuasive control that renders a woman’s reality unspeakable.