59 pages • 1 hour read
Lucinda BerryThe Perfect Child
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2019A 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 Sinister Side of Unconditional Love
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of child abuse, physical abuse, graphic violence, death, animal abuse and death, and mental illness (including postpartum depression and psychosis).
The novel’s events reveal the unexpected and tragic consequences that can result from unconditional love. Lucinda Berry shows that while unconditional love is usually viewed as positive, it can have dire consequences, like preventing one from recognizing danger or neglecting one’s other important relationships.
Although the novel explores this theme through various characters (e.g., by showing the consequences of Hannah’s obsessive love for Cole), Christopher is particularly central because unconditional love is his defining trait. It is both a strength and a weakness and sets him up as an altruistic parent who can do nothing but love Janie, no matter how horribly she treats him or anyone he cares about. Janie hits Christopher, doesn’t speak to Hannah for weeks, and openly admits to Christopher that she enjoys hurting people and seeing them cry. She also kills her cat, tries to hurt Cole, bites Hannah, and kills Allison. Through it all, Christopher never stops loving her, his tendency to give of himself for others exploited by Janie, all of which implies that a loving disposition makes one vulnerable to manipulative tactics.
However, this is not the only downside the novel associates with unconditional love. Christopher is not simply a bystander as Janie’s behavior escalates; rather his refusal to acknowledge the threat she poses exacerbates the situation, costing the family time, psychological health, and eventually Hannah’s own sister. His attitude even influences those who might have the power to intervene; Like Christopher, Piper never realizes Janie’s danger, swayed by Christopher’s love for the girl. Christopher doesn’t fully reflect on the extent of his love for Janie or what it means until after everything has unfolded: “I’d never been blinded by love before. I’d thought that was reserved for romantic love, but it wasn’t. I loved Janie in ways I couldn’t describe or understand. I probably never would. Even after everything she’d done” (338). In taking stock of the events that unfolded and how he responded to them, Christopher realizes that he always put Janie first and that his love for her is as all-consuming as love can get.
Though it comes too late to avert disaster, this self-awareness tempers the overall portrayal of love and its dangers, suggesting that it is not so much unconditional but unreflective love that causes harm. After all, Christopher also loves Hannah deeply, staying with her even after she tries to kill Janie and in a sense becomes a different person, and the novel does not condemn him for this. His loyalty knows no limits, but as long as he recognizes his tendency to ignore the flaws of those he loves, it can be more of a blessing than a curse.
How Parenting Changes a Marriage
The Perfect Child uses the Bauers’ adoption of Janie, a child with a history of severe trauma, to explore the broader ways in which parenting changes marriage dynamics. In particular, it suggests that the introduction of a new person into the family carries with it a new set of interpersonal dynamics; a child may bond more strongly with one parent than the other, for example. As families are a web of relationships, these dynamics inevitably impact the marital bond as well, potentially causing strain.
The unique challenges Janie poses, coupled with Christopher’s temperament, exacerbate this tendency. Christopher and Hannah’s marriage starts out peaceful, supportive, and communicative; they support one another in their difficult line of work and have nothing to worry about at home except their struggles to have a child. However, when Christopher starts taking care of Janie, he almost immediately begins neglecting Hannah, first by being late to dinner, but soon in more significant ways. He ignores Hannah’s wishes and needs and pressures her to accept Janie, which the novel implies would inevitably have led to disaster regardless of the child in question; a person parenting under duress will likely struggle to meet any child’s emotional needs. When Janie moves in, Christopher starts putting Janie first all the time and ignores Hannah’s concerns about her. While he wants to be on the same page as Hannah, he can’t mentally separate his relationship with Hannah from his parental obligations to Janie. At one point, he even shames Hannah for not wanting to urinate in front of Janie. Dr. Chandler points out that it’s normal for couples to have to relearn their relationship after having children, but Hannah and Christopher have neither the energy nor the motivation to do so.
Indeed, their attempts to reconnect only deepen the divide, underscoring how dramatically the relationship has changed. When Hannah and Christopher finally make love, they conceive a child. Hannah is thrilled about it, but Christopher is anxious and hesitant, which makes Hannah grow colder toward him. As their marriage deteriorates, Christopher too stops making an effort to be affectionate and attentive: “Normally, I would’ve grabbed her hand, but she’d been so cold to me lately that she’d probably just pull away anyway, so I didn’t bother” (168). Christopher also lies to Hannah for the first time in their marriage when he says that he’s excited for the baby, when in fact he would prefer to just raise Janie.
The introduction of a second child thus heightens the tensions that resulted from the first, not least because of Janie’s antipathy toward Cole. Once again, the dynamic echoes and exaggerates real-world phenomena—e.g., jealousy between siblings, which here becomes violent due to Janie’s personality and past. This in turn impacts the relationship between Hannah and Christopher. When Janie starts acting spitefully in response to the new baby, Hannah’s perception of her takes a dark turn, and she refuses to let even Christopher be alone with Cole, no longer trusting him as her partner as a result of his love for Janie. The tendency to “side” with one child over the other culminates in Christopher hitting Hannah in response to her abuse of Janie and Hannah trying to kill Janie to protect Cole. By the time Hannah is in a psychiatric hospital, Christopher no longer recognizes his wife. That he stays by her side says more about his capacity for unconditional love than it does about their relationship, which will never be the same.
The Desire to Be a Parent
Much as it examines the dark sides of love and parenting, the novel also explores how the desire to have a child can prove harmful. Both Christopher and Hannah want to become parents, though their desires manifest differently, with Christopher becoming desperately infatuated with being Janie’s father and Hannah never fully accepting Janie even as she becomes extremely protective of her biological child. These differences contribute to the disintegration of their relationship, but the fundamental desire to have a child also proves destructive due to the couple’s misconceptions and unexamined motivations.
The wish to become a parent is entangled with pain from the novel’s beginning. One of Hannah’s first comments is about how frustrating she finds it that so many people who are not fit to parent are able to have children, while people like her, who are kind and capable, cannot: “The angry knot of unfairness lodged in my stomach. Why did the universe allow people who hurt kids to have them? Why couldn’t it give them to people like me, who wanted them?” (8). Nevertheless, Hannah is reluctant to take in Janie, recognizing that caring for a survivor of child abuse will be uniquely difficult.
Though Janie’s case is extreme and Hannah’s reservations are warranted, this subtly comments on Hannah’s unrealistic expectations of motherhood; parents do not typically get to “choose” their children or the challenges they will face in rearing them. In fact, parenting Janie only makes Hannah long all the more for the fantasy vision of motherhood she has in mind: “I can’t ever give up because no amount of disappointment is worth giving up on what it feels like to be a mom. She gave me a taste of it, and I know I’ll never be satisfied until I get to enjoy the experience” (85). However, even parenting Cole proves far less “enjoyable” than Hannah imagined. Overwhelmed by the strain of living with Janie, Hannah develops postpartum depression and psychosis and ultimately nearly kills Cole.
Like Hannah, Christopher always wanted to be a parent. He is therefore eager to adopt Janie, whom he instantly bonds with and starts taking care of long before she ever comes home with him. Once again, however, there is a subtle undercurrent of selfishness to Christopher’s desire. Christopher is inspired by Janie and how she sees everything as brand new: “My heart swelled like it did every time she got excited. I loved experiencing the world through her eyes” (188). Christopher here projects his needs and wishes onto Janie, living vicariously through her. He is therefore unprepared for the reality: that taking care of Janie is a more than full-time task. As both parents quickly become exhausted and start neglecting themselves, the novel cautions against choosing parenthood without fully considering one’s reasons for doing so.
