54 pages • 1 hour read
Ella BermanBefore We Were Innocent
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2023A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Character Analysis
Bess (Elizabeth) Winter
Bess is the novel’s protagonist and the narrator. When the novel begins, she is 28 years old and is now living alone in a cabin near the Salton Sea in California. She is solitary and reclusive and has a remote job working as a comment moderator for a dating app called 5oulm8s. Initially, she is presented through the lens of trauma, and it is clear that she has never recovered from the death of her teenage friend Evangeline and the resulting media storm that occurred when she and Joni were accused of Evangeline’s murder.
Bess is also cast as an outsider in multiple ways. For example, she first meets Joni and Evangeline after her family moves from Sussex to the affluent Los Angeles suburb of Calabasas, and she feels uneasy amongst her wealthy classmates until she meets Joni and Evangeline. However, even as the three-way friendship quickly forms, Bess is never sure of her position within the group and believes that the other two girls have a closer bond with each other than they do with her. This internalized “outsider” status will shift in Greece when she and Joni bristle against Evangeline’s need for control, but it will return after Bess kindles a romantic relationship with Theo. After Evangeline’s death, Bess withdraws from the world and becomes an outsider in society and within her family, feeling a sense of isolation from her brother and her mother.
She also feels tremendous sense of guilt over Evangeline’s death, believing herself to be indirectly responsible due to the intense argument that left Evangeline too angry and distracted to pay attention to her footing on the treacherous cliffside path from which she fell. Bess also feels guilty that she and Joni lied to the Greek police, their families, and the entire world about their precise whereabouts in the moment when Evangeline fell. More so than Joni, Bess was traumatized by the way that the girls were misrepresented in the media storm that followed Evangeline’s death, and because she internalizes all the bad publicity, and judgement inherent in these articles, she becomes convinced of her own poor character and guilt and comes to see herself through the skewed prism of True Crime and Media Distortion.
Although she is in many ways a sympathetic character, Bess is also a complex and multi-faceted one, and her representation speaks to the author’s interest in depicting The Complexities of Adolescent Female Friendships. Like Joni and Evangeline, Bess is capable of both good and bad behavior, and although she feels guilty about her moments of poor behavior, she does act in her own self-interest at multiple points within the narrative. Another complex facet of Bess’s characterization is her willingness to take Joni at face value despite multiple red flags. Because everyone in her family easily sees through Joni’s charismatic façade, Bess seems naïve in comparison. It is not until the end of the narrative that she comes to realize that she had mischaracterized Joni and that perhaps the greatest lie that Bess had ever told herself is to believe that Joni is trustworthy.
Joni (Bonnier) Le Bon
Joni is one of Bess’s high school friends. As an adult, she becomes a famous social media personality. She is charismatic and is characterized by her magnetism and confidence in both timelines. She is physically attractive and has “short black hair and Angelina Jolie lips” (41). Although she comes from privilege, her parents’ unhappy marriage fractures when she is in high school, and she feels ignored by her absentee father. Bess believes her to be steadfastly honest, but the narrative will reveal her to be a liar of grand proportions.
As an adolescent, Joni has dreams of becoming an actress. She enjoys attention and is self-assured enough to publicly identify as a lesbian in high school, during a time period in which, as Bess observes, society was far less accepting of such a declaration than it is today. The teenage Bess feels honored by Joni’s friendship, but other people observe that Joni has a certain neediness and a flair for the dramatic and exhibits behavior that borders on manipulative. In Greece, she shifts her allegiances capriciously, alternately teaming up with Bess to ridicule Evangeline and then favoring Evangeline when it becomes obvious that Evangeline is upset with Bess’s interest in Theo.
Joni also manipulates the negative media attention after Evangeline’s death in order to capitalize on her time in the spotlight and transform it into a successful career as a self-improvement and wellness influencer. She successfully rebrands herself and morphs, chameleon-like, from a hated murder suspect into a strong, resolute survivor of false accusations. She also adopts the shorter, sassier “Le Bon” as her new last name—a moniker that means “The Good” in French. Empowered by this new persona, she builds an online platform to help other young women to find their own voices and turn their own difficult situations into sources of inner strength. She calls her followers “Le Bon babes” (52) and dispenses a mixture of wellness tips that she spins as ways to raise personal vibrations and heal the inner child.
However, her online persona belies much of her true personality, and although Bess is initially unable or unwilling to see this, she comes to realize that under the glossy veneer of “Joni Le Bon” lies a woman whose original flaws remain largely unchanged. Joni is still a master manipulator, for she is cold and calculating, and she has retained a propensity for violence. (In high school, she had a reputation for resorting to physical violence when angry or cornered, and this is revealed to be a significant aspect of her adult relationship with her fiancée Willa as well.) As the adult Bess begins to observe Joni more closely, she notices that Joni often pauses before dispensing wellness advice, and she wonders if Joni sometimes needs a moment to shift from her real personality to her public persona.
Until she spends more time with Joni as an adult, Bess remains sure that Joni is not a liar, in spite of her other faults. Joni herself nurtures this perception, and the illusion of authenticity is ultimately revealed to be Joni’s greatest lie of all. The narrative eventually reveals that Joni was present when Evangeline died. Therefore, the lie that the two girls were both present was not so much an effort to protect Bess as it was an effort to protect herself. Additionally, her entire social media personality is an elaborate lie, for despite Joni’s claim to adopt “radical honesty,” she lies about Willa to Joni, her family, the police, and the public, and it is because of this series of fabrications that Bess figures out how dishonest Joni had always been.
Evangeline Aetos
Evangeline is friends with Joni and Bess in high school, and she falls to her death in Mykonos during the summer trip that she organizes for her friends before they pursue their various college plans. She is initially presented as quiet, contemplative, and calm. Although Calabasas is an affluent area and all the students at Bess’s high school are wealthy, Evangeline is among the wealthiest. Her father is an “oil baron,” and although he and his wife largely ignore their children, Evangeline and her brother Theo are provided with all the material support that they could ever need.
Evangeline is initially presented as a thoughtful student and a counterbalance to Joni’s over-the-top personality. She is “placid in temperament” (24) and does well in school. She and Joni have been friends since middle school, and although Joni loves her fiercely, she does perceive Evangeline as naïve and inexperienced. Whereas Joni enjoys the spotlight, Evangeline is content to sit on the sidelines, and she lacks Joni’s sassiness and overt disobedience of authority. Although her parents remain largely uninvolved in her life, they have managed to pass on the value of manners and decorum, and Evangeline works hard in Greece to appear to be a good host.
Her personality does gain depth and complexity when she is also shown to be controlling. For example, she dictates what and how much the girls eat and when they get up and go to bed, and she is stingy with alcohol and snobbish about restaurants. She often refuses to pay her fair share if she perceives that her control is slipping, and both Bess and Joni begin to resent her as the weeks drag on. This shift is an important point of characterization, as the press will largely ignore her faults and paint her as an innocent, virginal victim. The fact that Evangeline actually does have character flaws and is shown to be difficult speaks to the inherent complexity of identity and illustrates the novel’s thematic interest in the deliberately oversimplified narratives of True Crime and Media Distortion.
Evangeline’s more challenging character flaws are further revealed in her relationship with her brother Theo. The two have bonded as a way to cope with the marked lack of their parents’ love and affection. For Evangeline, this closeness borders on an unhealthy fixation, for she intends to follow her brother to college at Brown and strongly objects to the idea of Bess dating him. Even Theo feels smothered by his sister, and it is obvious that the control she tries to exert over other areas of her life extends to her relationship with her brother as well. As a result, Bess observes that Evangeline is just as “shady” as she and Joni can be, but she hides it better because she manages and controls other people’s narrative about her.
After Evangeline’s death, her name is emphasized to evoke angelic imagery, and the media likewise paints a skewed portrait of her as an innocent, misunderstood victim of two vicious girls. She is portrayed as having been “angelic,” whereas Joni and Bess are depicted as manipulative aggressors. Of course, each girl is much more complex than these two-dimensional characterizations, and the author uses this aspect of the novel to indict real-life media’s misrepresentations of women as “sinners” or “saints.” By crafting these more complex characterizations, Berman endeavors to demonstrate that everyone’s personality lies somewhere between those two extremes.
