66 pages • 2 hours read
Janet FitchWhite Oleander
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 1999A 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
What It Means to Be a Woman
White Oleander takes place during the protagonist Astrid’s adolescence as she goes from being a young girl to a grown woman. It explores issues of femininity, what it means to be a woman, and the specific struggles women endure. Astrid’s mother is her first and, for many years, only example of womanhood. Astrid looks up to and emulates Ingrid, seeing her as strong, wise, and independent, and wanting to be like her someday. Ingrid believes that women should refrain from attachment and hold themselves up, remaining at odds with the world and ever above it. She muses on the importance of challenging norms and following one’s own drives in one of her letters to Astrid:
If evil means to be self-motivated, to be the center of one’s own universe, to live on one’s own terms, then every artist, every thinker, every original mind, is evil. Because we dare to look through our own eyes rather than mouth cliches lent us from the so-called Fathers. To dare to see is to steal the fire from the Gods. This is mankind’s destiny, the engine which fuels us as a race. Three cheers for Eve (74).
Ingrid ironically struggles to uphold her responsibilities as a mother, abandoning Astrid at two different points in her life. The first time, Astrid was only a toddler, and Ingrid admits to feeling overwhelmed by the pressures of motherhood:
Imagine my life, for a moment. […] Imagine how unprepared I was to be the mother of a small child. The demand for the enactment of the archetype. The selfless eternal feminine. It couldn’t have been more foreign. I was a woman accustomed to following a line of inquiry or inclination until it led to its logical conclusion. I was used to having time to think, freedom. I felt like a hostage. Can you understand how desperate I was? (426-427).
Astrid appreciates her mother’s willingness to finally be honest but resents her inability to be the mother she always needed. Ingrid also sees the world as a patriarchy and strives to fight against it in any way she can. This becomes one of the motivations for her murder of Barry, as she feels that his power over her emotions and mind was unjust and wrong. When Astrid writes to Ingrid about Olivia, Ingrid scoffs at the thought of Astrid admiring a woman who Ingrid believes to be just a cog in the system: “Yes the patriarchy has created this reprehensible world, a world of prisons and Wall Streets and welfare mothers, but it’s not something in which one should collude!” (155).
Astrid is slowly exposed to many different examples of womanhood; she tries them all on but finds none work for her—she must find her own version of womanhood. She discovers that becoming a woman means separating from her mother and becoming her own person. Astrid’s development into womanhood is influenced by each woman she lives with and her mother from a distance.
Astrid is also exposed to sex when she becomes involved in an inappropriate relationship with Ray, which seems to permanently change her into someone who has been through more than her age lets on. Astrid lives with Starr and Rena and also gets to know Olivia, and all of these women use sex to their advantage in life. Astrid’s descriptions of these women are often sexual, as she notices details like Starr’s breasts as they spill out of her shirt or Rena’s teasing of the working men nearby. She eventually becomes skeptical of beauty after being permanently scarred and cutting her hair, noting,
What was beauty unless you intended to use it, like a hammer, or a key? It was just something for other people to use and admire, or envy, espies. To nail their dreams onto like a picture hanger on a blank wall. And so many girls saying, use me, dream me (301).
Astrid also meets Claire, who is fragile and lives her life for Ron, depending on him to keep her afloat. All of these examples of womanhood seem not to suit Astrid, and she realizes before long that she is growing up much faster than she should be: “I had been moving too fast. I had been too hungry to become a woman” (164). Astrid also thinks of Ingrid, who, unlike Olivia or Rena, seems to be permanently resistant to the world: “The world parts for Olivia, it lies down at her feet, where you hack through it like a thorn forest” (154). Astrid acknowledges the importance of each of these women in shaping the person she becomes by the time she is 18 and does not regret knowing any of them. Each taught her a valuable skill, or something about herself, that she will remember forever.
The Delicate Balance of Mother-Daughter Relationships
Mother-daughter bonds are both sacred and complex. The relationship between Ingrid and Astrid is one of dominance, ownership, and dishonesty, and Astrid spends most of her life feeling like she lives as her mother’s pet more than her daughter. Astrid is desperate for her mother’s love and attention but feels like she is nothing more than a burden to her: “Didn’t they know they were tying their mothers to the ground? Weren’t chains ashamed of their prisoners?” (11). It is not until Astrid experiences real motherly love from Claire that she has a basis for comparison. Then, she realizes her mother failed her as a parent. Ingrid also reacts poorly to Astrid’s relationship with Claire, doing what she can to drive Claire into depression and separate her from Astrid by any means necessary. Ingrid’s biggest failure is murdering Barry because it separates her from Astrid and sends Astrid through a series of abusive foster homes.
After being separated from her mother, Astrid realizes how “tenuous the links were between mother and children, between friends, family, things you think are eternal” (52). She finds that she cannot rely on anyone for an extended period and must always expect her life to fall through at any moment. This is what Ingrid teaches her daughter by leaving her. Even after everything, Astrid still craves her mother’s love and feels this way even when she is 21 and living in Europe with Paul. She remembers her mother, the Santa Anas, and how at home she felt under Ingrid’s wing. Astrid’s unconditional love for her mother showcases the purity of a child’s love for their mother. Another example occurs when Davey refuses to tell anyone that his mother dislocated his shoulder; he wants to protect her at all costs.
One of Astrid’s inner conflicts stems from her desire first to be someone her mother cares about and then to separate and distinguish herself from her mother as she enters adolescence and womanhood. Astrid comes to identify the separation from one’s mother as a crucial stage in development and observes this when Carolee finally abandons the trailer and her mother:
This was how girls left. They packed up their suitcases and walked away in high heels. They pretended that they weren’t crying, that it wasn’t the worst day of their lives. That they didn’t want their mothers to come running after them, begging for their forgiveness, that they wouldn’t have gone down on their knees and thanked God if they could stay (104).
When Claire dies, Astrid blames herself, feeling like she has become her mother and contributed to Claire’s death. She eventually discovers that she and her mother share different views and live in different realities and that she can love her mother without being controlled by her. She forever feels as if she was deprived of a true mother, someone like Yvonne, who sacrifices everything to ensure her child's safety.
By the end of the novel, however, Astrid has made peace with the cast of women who have, for better or worse, mothered her during her adolescence. Rather than being embittered over the varied level of care and concern she experienced from her mother and foster mothers, Astrid withholds judgment, instead focusing on the lessons each one has imparted to her.
All my mothers. Like guests at a fairy-tale christening, they had bestowed their gifts on me. They were mine now. […] I carried all of them, sculpted by every hand I’d passed through, carelessly, or lovingly, it didn’t matter. (437)
The Meaning of Home
The Meaning of Home is a theme that circulates through White Oleander and becomes a source of longing and unattainability for Astrid. In the novel’s exposition, Astrid only knows her mother. She fully depends on her and goes wherever Ingrid goes. One of Astrid’s early childhood memories sees her traveling from place to place with her mother and getting sick. When Astrid asks about going home, Ingrid tells her, “We have no home. I am your home” (116). Ingrid intentionally tries to keep Astrid’s world limited to her own influence, and when they are separated, Astrid’s experience of home evolves into something else entirely. She maintains a fierce dependence on her mother at first, and when she goes to see her in prison, she admits as much: “I wanted to curl up in her lap, I wanted to disappear into her body, I wanted to be one of her eyelashes, or a blood vessel in her thigh, a mole on her neck” (66). When Astrid is forced to take care of herself, she realizes she has no true home and that many others also struggle to define what or where their home is.
Astrid is shuffled around, apart from her mother and the only true home she ever knew. She is used to having no long-term residence and moving frequently, but now she is doing so alone. Astrid's homes are abusive and dysfunctional in their own ways, and none of them prove to be anything that Astrid can settle into. People who are supposed to care for Astrid and provide a safe place for her to live instead attack, assault, and hurt her. Astrid does feel like she finds a home in Claire, but Ingrid picks up on this and makes it her mission to ruin it. She is jealous of Claire and does not want to be replaced by someone so kind and fragile, and Astrid feels guilty knowing this: “I was a traitor. I had betrayed my master. She knew why I’d kept Claire in the background. Because I loved her, and she loved me. Because I had the family I should have had all this time, the family my mother never thought was important, could never give me” (252).
Astrid internalizes these experiences and learns not to rely on anyone or expect to stay in any place for too long. She carries what she considers to be the imprint of a foster child even into adulthood, moving around with Paul and struggling to settle into place. Paul has a word to say about this phenomenon they both experience when Astrid asks him about going home: “It’s the century of the displaced person. You can never go home” (441). Astrid’s story is one which illuminates the importance of a stable, consistent, loving environment for a child, while also shedding light on the serious and disturbing failures of the foster system to care for those children like Astrid who are in desperate need of adults who care about them.
The Capacity for Human Suffering
The Capacity for Human Suffering is a prominent theme in White Oleander, as protagonist Astrid suffers through a series of abusive foster homes after her mother goes to prison. Ingrid also suffers, although she is rarely honest about her pain; she instead prefers to be strong and hard, and preaches to Astrid to be the same: “We received our coloring from Norsemen. Hairy savages who hacked their gods to pieces and hung the flesh from trees. We are the ones who sacked Rome. Fear only feeble old age and death in bed. Don’t forget who you are” (4). In her letters from prison, Ingrid often reminds Astrid to be strong. Although Astrid does slowly distance herself from her mother and form into her own unique person apart from Ingrid, she does keep this mantra close to her heart and maintains her strength through the most harrowing of circumstances. Oleanders, a recurring symbol throughout the novel, represent this theme, and Astrid often refers to their persistence and ability to survive in harsh environments. Astrid compares her perseverance to a river, noting how she is “alive despite everything, guarding the secrets of survival. This river was a girl like [her]” (396).
Astrid becomes characterized by her suffering, shaping the woman she grows into. Astrid’s suffering truly begins when her mother is rejected by Barry and starts to lose herself to the jealousy and rejection she feels. Ingrid’s suffering leads her to murder Barry, which only multiplies the suffering she and Astrid experience afterward. Ingrid is sent to jail, where she is alone, imprisoned, and unable to see her daughter. Astrid is sent into foster care, where she is abused in various ways, delves into drugs and alcohol, is the victim of serious violence, and witnesses the suicide of Claire. All the while, she is criticized and used by her mother. Astrid is a part of and a witness to various toxic relationships, each of which alters her worldview. Astrid attempts to reflect the world’s suffering in her art and is acutely aware of all she and those she has known have been through: “How vast was a human being’s capacity for suffering. The only thing you could do was stand in awe of it. It wasn’t a question of survival at all. It was the fullness of it, how much could you hold, how much could you care” (378).
