Whisper Network

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2019

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Summary

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Prologue-Chapter 5

Chapters 6-10

Chapters 11-16

Chapters 17-21

Chapters 22-26

Chapters 27-32

Chapters 33-37

Chapters 38-43

Chapters 44-48

Chapters 49-54

Chapter 55-Epilogue

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Themes

Gendered Violence and Harassment

The novel features many facets of gendered violence and the systems that allow it to occur. Every female character experiences misogyny, sexual harassment, or sexual violence. Each handles this reality differently, but all feel disproportionate levels of fear and guilt.

The primary instigator of gendered violence in the book is Ames, a serial harasser and rapist. Despite the fact that many women in the office come forward about it, Ames maintains his position as President of Legal Affairs and is poised to become CEO. Truviv’s decision to protect Ames instead of the many women he has assaulted shows that women’s reports of gendered violence are often disbelieved. Institutions perpetuate abuse, excusing perpetrators: “Ames was a stand-up guy […] When I heard his name had been added to that stupid list circulating then, well, that was immediate proof to me that the whole darn thing was a load of crap” (242). The lack of punishment teaches Ames that he can get away with being a sexual predator. He weaponizes this invincibility against the women in the office, using his affair with Sloane against her, manipulating Grace into writing him a recommendation for the CEO position, paying Rosalita off to keep quiet about her rape, and openly insulting Ardie as a way to deflect that he raped her as well.

The subplot about Abigail’s bullying demonstrates the origins of gendered violence, showing how society teaches boys that they can treat girls badly without consequence. The school does not hold Abigail’s bullies accountable for sending her misogynist messages, which makes them feel free to escalate their harassment; when Steve exposes Abigail’s underwear to the class and gives her a wedgie, school administrators refuse to acknowledge what happened: “‘Sexually harassed’ is strong terminology. I don’t think it was that serious” (397). Instead, they blame Abigail for defending herself. The inability to recognize this behavior as gendered harassment effectively creates men like Ames.

The Danger of Silence/The Power of Speaking Up

When the book opens, each woman has only discreetly shared her story of harassment or assault. Rosalita and Ardie opened up to Truviv superiors—Rosalita to Desmond and Ardie to Al; other women, including Sloane, Katherine, and the personal trainers, tell one another. These whispered confidences are an attempt to create a small measure of protection: Elizabeth told Sloane to beware of Ames, while the personal trainers code the names of bad men red to warn one another. However, because these warnings are shared in small groups and closed spaces, it is difficult for women with shared experiences to connect and build strength in numbers. The epilogue sums up the problem: “By whispering, whose secrets were we keeping anyway—ours or theirs? Whose interest did our silence ultimately protect?” (460). When women are pressured or guilted into keeping their stories hush-hush, another woman can be harmed in the same way or by the same person.

The novel is the story of women learning to speak up. The first way they do so is the BAD Men List. The list, intended to warn women about sexually predatory men more broadly than simple word of mouth, straddles the gap between whispering and shouting: No institution undertakes to investigate the list’s allegations, so the onus is still on women to avoid the men on it. However, the information does reach a lot more people than whispering does.

The list fails to keep Katherine from becoming Ames’s next victim, so Sloane, Grace, and Ardie decide to speak up. They know that if Ames becomes CEO, he will have almost unlimited power to assault and harass women. Katherine’s silence almost costs them the case, but when Rosalita comes forward about being raped by Ames even though she has the most to lose, the women triumph. The first-person plural narrator generalizes this experience to all women: “when one of us spoke up, it was never just for her. It was for us. If anything, she was the willing sacrifice. Another log on the pyre stoked by us, our stories, our voices” (460). Though institutions, companies, and the patriarchy incentivize and scare women into staying quiet about sexual harassment, but, the novel insists, the time for silence is over. The more women come forward, the harder it is to ignore the issue.

The Construction of Womanhood

The novel’s broadest question is: What is womanhood? The sections of the book written in the first-person plural perspective explore this complexity. One facet is gender essentialism, the misogynistic concept that women are inherently inferior because of their biology. Because this archaic notion still undergirds institutional power structures, men extrapolate one woman’s mistakes to denigrate the gender as a whole:

Failure was a luxury we couldn’t afford, all chained together as we were, our fates locked up tight […] Because when we failed it was because of our chromosomes, it wasn’t because of a market dip or an ineffective advertising campaign or plain back luck (403).

Systemic oppression means that women, like other marginalized groups, are seen by the dominant (in this case, men) as a homogenous block—a characterization that makes them easy to dismiss: “We had long seen the problem at the heart of it all: being a woman at work as a handicap that we’d been trying to make up for by erasing our femininity in just the right ways” (419). Even if women change their behavior, values, and mannerisms, gender essentialism does not perceive them differently.

Bristling under this unfair lumping together, the women cannot help but think of themselves as a “we”—the communal voice that narrates some of the novel. However, this falls into the trap of ignoring intersectional differences that make women’s experiences unique and not always generalizable. Most of the book’s characters are cisgender, straight, upper-class, and white, which limits the version of womanhood that is portrayed—though many of the characters do not consider that they are not representative of all women.

The alternative to gender essentialism is the idea that women are united only by the shared experience of being female while living under the patriarchy. These shared experiences provide a basis for empathy—women recognize the socially mandated pressure to act a certain way to give men power. The women in this novel come together because they have faced sexual coercion and assault, and refuse to continue being victims without recourse. Later, they bond over other common experiences such as guilt about their mothering and professional imposter syndrome. None of these experiences are essential aspects of womanhood or chromosomal outcomes, but rather outcomes of living in a patriarchal system.