52 pages • 1 hour read
Emiko JeanThe Return of Ellie Black
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2024A 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 Psychological Impact of Trauma
Content Warning: This source material contains depictions of abuse, neglect, suicide, sexual violence, substance use disorders, and murder. Additionally, this source material discusses racism and sexism.
Emiko Jean explores the impact of trauma through Ellie and Chelsey’s guilt over their pasts. Though Ellie experiences PTSD and anxiety over West’s sexual and physical abuse, it is her guilt about Gabrielle’s murder that proves the most significant stumbling block to recovery. Chelsey feels similar guilt over Lydia’s presumed murder, and it leads her to repress her trauma and fixate on work. Both Ellie and Chelsey believe that they must atone for their past “mistakes,” which the novel suggests is a key manifestation of trauma.
One of the primary ways West and Doug manipulate the girls they kidnap is through victim-blaming; they make those they kidnap feel responsible for their own circumstances, as well as for the circumstances of those around them. This culminates in the scene when West forces Ellie to betray Gabrielle to save herself. Ellie’s ensuing guilt over Gabrielle’s murder severely impacts her ability to heal; she believes that she can never be forgiven for her role in Gabrielle’s suffering despite the fact that she was acting under coercion. In this context, Ellie’s struggle to reacclimate to her old life while being watched symbolically highlights the depths of her psychological trauma. Ellie cannot heal because she knows that anything she does wrong will jeopardize Willa’s life, and this emotional extortion encapsulates the broader interplay of trauma and guilt.
Similarly, Chelsey blames herself for not telling the police that she knew where Lydia went on the evening of her disappearance, although she herself was only a child at the time. While the novel implies that Chelsey’s father’s abusive behavior conditioned her to respond in this way, it also links Chelsey’s attitude to a kind of survivor’s guilt. In particular, Chelsey’s dedication of her life to finding missing women and girls implies a need to “justify” her own existence.
Forgiveness therefore becomes central to both Chelsey and Ellie’s character arcs. Chelsey receives a second chance once Lydia reappears, as seeing Lydia again makes her understand that she cannot hold herself responsible for her actions when she was a child. Once Chelsey recognizes this, she symbolically releases her guilt by selling their childhood home. By contrast, Ellie cannot receive forgiveness from Gabrielle, so she realizes that she must forgive herself. By imagining that Ellie and her adopted sisters escaped their trauma, Ellie begins to release her guilt and regret.
The Complexities of Home
The fact that West and Doug describe the bunker where they keep their victims as “home” highlights the fraught nature of the concept in the novel. To be sure, the framing West and Doug adopt is explicitly manipulative. However, their ability to persuade the kidnapped girls that they are in fact home speaks to how often home can be a site of trauma, where love and less positive emotions intersect.
Notably, trauma need not be abuse. As Chelsey investigates the missing girls, she discovers the difficulties of their personal lives. Indeed, West targets girls who he believes come from “troubled” homes; Gabrielle’s mother, for example, was addicted to alcohol, which led to Gabrielle and her siblings being raised by their grandparents. However, Chelsey also sees the desperation and love of family members who only want to keep their relatives safe. Although they may not have the money to search for their daughters, families such as the Blacks show Chelsey that they would do anything to save them. In these instances, home may render a person more vulnerable to certain kinds of trauma or exploitation while still being a source of comfort and strength.
In other cases, however, the characters’ home environments are themselves exploitative or abusive. On a societal level, this can occur due to racism or other forms of prejudice and inequality. Chelsey, for example, feels out of place in her hometown due to her ethnicity. Within individual families, abusive dynamics can lead people to view the idea of home in similarly conflicted ways. Although Chelsey thinks of her time with her father fondly, Noah and Lydia both confront her on her romanticization of the past. Noah shows her that her father taught her about police work rather than let her grieve for Lydia—an extension of her father’s prioritization of work over family. Lydia, meanwhile, draws attention to their father’s misogyny and abusive treatment of their mother. Ultimately, Chelsey comes to a more balanced understanding of her childhood home, cherishing her memories of happy times with her sister while recognizing that the environment was in many respects unhealthy.
This internal struggle reveals itself externally in how Chelsey cannot bring herself to remove anything from her parents’ home. As Chelsey finally faces her childhood memories by boxing up her parents’ house and moving on, she makes the decision to create a new and more straightforwardly positive home with Noah—one where she can feel safe to express her emotions and sift through her past.
Identity and Transformation
As Ellie struggles to face her trauma, she must rediscover the identity that West stole from her. Indeed, one of Ellie’s primary symptoms—dissociation—involves disconnection from her sense of self. As Ellie rediscovers her identity, she learns that change is possible even after extreme suffering.
West dominates the girls he kidnaps in part by stripping them of their identity, particularly as it relates to their autonomy. Doug does not take Ellie out of the school bus until she forgets her name, which shows West’s intention of destroying her sense of self. West then renames them and tells them never to say their old names again. Their names for the most part refer to Christian virtues—hope, charity, etc.—and they themselves must be beautiful, submissive, and grateful: “David did not let us cut our hair. He made us keep our nails nice with a file. He told us to smile, to say thank you, to be happy” (139). West blames his mother for the breakup of his parents’ marriage and therefore seeks to mold the girls into pictures of traditional, compliant femininity.
Gabrielle, Hannah, and Ellie resist this erasure, reappopriating West’s description of them as “sisters” in a desperate attempt to regain their sense of self. Nevertheless, as West continually breaks down the girls’ spirit with his abuse, he slowly transforms Ellie into someone who she does not want to be. He even turns Ellie’s kindness against her in forcing her to save Willa by hurting (or attempting to hurt) others. Because this represents a perversion rather than a mere suppression of Ellie’s true self, it proves particularly difficult to challenge.
Ultimately, however, the malleability of identity proves to be as key to healing as it is to trauma. After months of therapy, Ellie experiences a new transformation. Ellie’s decision to mentally free the girls and herself shows her desire to reclaim her sense of self and heal from the past. Notably, it is only after doing so that Ellie recognizes herself in her reflection. Ellie’s realization that “she is here. She is” shows that Ellie has retained a core sense of self throughout her trauma (294).
