White Is for Witching

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2009

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Prologue and Part 1, Chapters 1-2

Part 1, Chapters 3-4

Part 1, Chapter 5

Part 2, Chapters 6-7

Part 2, Chapters 8-10

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Part 1, Chapters 3-4Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 1: “Curiouser”

Part 1, Chapter 3 Summary: “When Miranda”

Content Warning: This section of the guide mentions suicide, self-harm, and disordered eating. It also includes racist and xenophobic content, including offensive terms for Black people and undocumented citizens, which is replicated in this guide only in direct quotation of the source material.

Chapter 3 explains why Miranda went to an adolescent psychiatric unit and traces the pervasive xenophobia in Dover. As Luc and Eliot pick Miranda up from the facility, she recalls the night that convinced her family that she needed medical intervention. On a night with a full moon, Eliot found Miranda not speaking verbally in front of the white fireplace at the Silver House. She was bleeding from her scalp, hands tied with her own hair (which she pulled out). The narrator doesn’t share the details of Miranda’s intensive treatment at the psychiatric unit.

During the car ride home, Eliot shares he’s applying to Cambridge, and Miranda also decides to apply, creating an uncomfortable situation as neither Luc nor Eliot wants to imagine Miranda on her own, away from Dover. Eliot’s memories of his and Miranda’s imaginary games at King Arthur’s court surface, clarifying his conflict between his own desires and care for his sister. He reads about a streak of murders in the Kosovan refugee community, and his judgment is swift: He believes the murderer is a Kosovan refugee, and that the community has chosen to protect itself from the authorities by hiding them. Luc chides his son for his facile interpretation, encouraging him to turn away from bookish knowledge.

As if in response, a group of girls, schoolmates of Eliot and Miranda, chase after the car, as it approaches the last signal light before the Silver House. Led by Tijana, a Kosovan refugee, the girls target the car, and Miranda closes her eyes in fear. Later, Luc and Luc’s employee Azwer deal with the disappearance of Azwer’s eldest daughter Deme during the night. Deme is eventually discovered in the Silver House’s elevator, disoriented. The Silver House has begun to punish Azwer and his wife Ezma, its xenophobia manifesting physically.

Miranda discovers her clothes no longer fit the next day, and Luc takes her to London to shop for dresses. Horrified at her size and stature, Luc disapproves of every dress, and promises to make Miranda healthy again. When they return, they learn the Silver House lost power, and Azwer and Ezma feel unsettled. That night, Eliot’s girlfriend Emma acts out, demanding he cut her hair short, and they break up.

Upset, Eliot takes refuge in his mother Lily’s photo studio, and Miranda intrudes, demanding to be let in. They physically fight and eventually rest together, as Miranda eats chalk and Eliot pretends to smoke one like a cigarette. This conflict precedes another, as Cambridge offers to interview Miranda for admission. During her interview, she meets Ore and convinces her to stay for her own interview (as the latter believed she doesn’t belong at Cambridge). The same day, Azwer and Ezma formally announce their resignation, tired of the Silver House’s harassment.

Chapter 3 ends with a Christmas trip to Paris to visit Luc’s parents, “The Paul” and Sylvie. Sylvie appreciates Miranda, despite finding her a bit odd. Miranda’s style is unique, and Eliot makes it clear that she resembles Sylvie in many ways. On the way back home, a seemingly injured bird befriends Eliot, using him to carry it from Calais in France to Dover, where the bird flies away. Cambridge offers Miranda a spot and she, like the bird, flies from Dover.

Part 1, Chapter 4 Summary: “The Goodlady”

Chapter 4 connects Miranda to the ancestral spirits that inhabit the Silver House. Originally, “the goodlady” was Lily’s way to encourage Miranda to eat. She’d ask whether Miranda would like to have Lily or the goodlady as her mother, implying that the goodlady would punish Miranda.

The goodlady crosses Miranda’s mind during Lily’s last trip, as she and Eliot compose essays for classes on the ethics of suicide. While writing in her psychomanteum (a room with a mirror to channel spirits), Miranda exchanges questions with the goodlady, mirroring different narrators’ questions about her own disappearance at the beginning and end of the novel. This memory introduces Anna Good (Anna Silver), Eliot and Miranda’s maternal great-grandmother. Connected to the goodlady, Anna Good helps raise Lily, and leaves the house to her after death. Anna participates in the same xenophobia as the house, which past copies of The Dover Post from World War II reinforce. These newspapers, tucked away in Anna’s attic cupboard, feature cartoons centered on propaganda and the distrust of foreigners during the war—with one of the cartoons, dated 1943, signed by Andrew Silver, Anna’s husband.

Eliot relates that Miranda’s psychomanteum was once their mother Lily’s childhood room, and that she, like Miranda, contacted the spirits of the house. He briefly mentions Jennifer Silver, Lily’s mother, before relating that Anna Good had a mental health episode in the house, before moving to a nursing home. Miranda seems to know details that no one else remembers about the episode and aftermath, and Lily accuses her of lying.

Chapter 4 returns to Miranda and the New Year Eve’s celebration at the Silver House (where Chapter 3 left off). She’s avoided dinner, instead chewing on the remnants of a blue spatula. At 6:00am (in Haiti’s time zone), she searches the house and kitchen for her dinner. She eats the meat Luc left her, and then notices the vegetables are gone. Across from her, Miranda sees a mirror reflection with jagged teeth, recalling the teeth of a vampire or Anna Silver who ate pebbles until her teeth were jagged. This spirit-like double is all-white. Hearing the door slam, Miranda walks outside, wearing her coat and shoes. Heading to the water, she sees a dead body, wearing green. She decides the body isn’t hers, and that she still lives. She jerks awake to Luc asking her for help with the other guests, as he needs to interview Ezma’s replacement, Sade.

Part 1, Chapters 3-4 Analysis

These chapters emphasize the connections between Miranda and the ancestral spirits that inhabit the Silver House. Both chapters link Miranda to the activities of the house and the histories of the women who lived there. Chapter 4 uses the concept of the goodlady to flesh out the vampiric power of the house, foreshadowing Miranda’s fate and hinting at her role in the house once she disappears.

Miranda’s recollection of her mental health episode in Chapter 3, which led to her treatment at a psychiatric facility, and Anna’s own episode in Chapter 4 establish the ties between Miranda and her great-grandmother. Both experience extreme mental distress in the house and must leave for medical facilities, with blood literally linking them together. The narrator claims Miranda “had been bleeding slightly from the scalp” (29) after having her hair pulled out. Chapter 5’s focus on suicide reinforces the idea that she hurt herself. Her injuries echo those of her great-grandmother Anna. In his recollection, Eliot claims Miranda had knowledge of Anna’s mental anguish. Miranda tells her mother Lily that Anna was like the “heraldic pelican,” a bird “that pecks itself to death to feed its children. She tried to give us her blood, but we didn’t want it” (84). Describing an oft-repeated myth about this pelican, Miranda ties the imagery of blood and sacrifice to Anna’s last moments in the house. While the pelican myth often has connections to Jesus Christ and the Crucifixion, Miranda’s telling offers evidence of the house’s vampiric nature. Blood creates community, and Miranda depicts Anna as someone willing to sacrifice herself for her family.

These chapters also emphasize blood and family in the murders of Kosovan refugees. While Eliot is quick to blame the refugees for self-harm (believing the killer in question is a member of the community), Luc counsels him to think beyond textbook explanations. Luc counters that family is more important than a struggle against authority, and those mourning loved ones would want justice. This explanation carries more authority than he knows, as familial bonds, living and dead, become the rationale for the Silver House to hurt those who are different. This xenophobia maintains its own life within the house, as the relics of wartime propaganda (cartoons) in Anna’s cupboard have a vampiric afterlife. Xenophobia persists after the war, nurtured by the house and Dover as a whole. The Kosovan refugees are targeted because war-related hatred persists. Tijana and her friends chase the Silvers’ car as it heads to a symbol of this hatred—the Silver House.

At the end of Chapter 4, Miranda meets her doppelgänger, a copy who often means harm to its mirror reflection. This copy appears before her, with jagged teeth and devoid of blood and color, and eats part of her dinner. In doing so, it steals sustenance from Miranda, and the latter inches closer to her fate. In a vision, Miranda encounters a dead body on the coast, wearing green. The vision ends when Luc wakes Miranda up, and Sade, who wears green and orange, soon joins them at the Silver House.

Miranda’s vision foreshadows the house’s harassment of Sade and further manifestations of hatred (including self-hatred) regarding the refugees in Dover and the Silver family. According to Miranda, emotions imbue objects with power, a point she makes when she fashions talismans for Azwer and Ezma’s children, Deme and Suryaz. The juju (the bad or good luck) of the house animates spirits and reflections, much like those in the psychomanteum’s mirror. Photographs of the Silver women, like mirror reflections, gain life and cause death.