Appearances vs. Reality Theme Analysis

In An American Marriage, Jones contrasts the reality of life with the appearances people choose to project. Throughout the novel it is possible to identify the ways in which characters shape the narratives of their lives to be more palatable to others. The novel suggests that this gap between appearances and reality can harm to the very thing a public image is supposed to represent.

Celestial’s dolls—or poupées, as Roy suggests she call them—emblematize the gap between real life and its representation in art. While Celestial had found some success in the art world with her dolls before Roy goes to prison, it is only after he is incarcerated that she makes a doll with Roy’s face wearing a prison uniform; it is this doll that is awarded a great deal of attention and praise. While doing an interview about her incarceration-focused art, however, Celestial fails to point out that her husband has been wrongfully imprisoned and that this situation was the inspiration for the doll. Roy feels betrayed by this narrative elision, believing that Celestial mentioning his case might have brought it attention that could help overturn his conviction. Celestial, meanwhile, fears the stigma associated with having a husband in prison and fails to prioritize Roy’s situation over her own career. Her refusal to publicly acknowledge Roy’s wrongful conviction reveals how, in her art, she omits negative details about her personal life while enjoying the benefits of associating herself with a buzz-worthy political cause. This kind of picking and choosing is a privilege not available to Roy in his concrete cell.

Celestial continues to embrace the media attention she receives and spends time focusing on growing her career, even at the cost of visiting her husband in prison. In this way she turns away from the cause she supposedly supports in favor of embracing the ways she can personally benefit from aligning herself with that cause. Roy notices that Celestial slowly begins to withdraw from him—first by visiting and writing less, and eventually by ceasing to communicate with him at all—and angrily tells his wife in a letter that her dolls do nothing to actually fight the cause of incarceration. Celestial uses her art to benefit from the appearance of being an activist against mass incarceration even as she abandons her personal responsibilities to her husband—the source of her inspiration to become involved in the first place.

When Roy returns home, Celestial continues to try to hide the very real effects of Roy’s incarceration, instead of allowing the messy truth to be out in the open. When Roy begins attacking Celestial’s car to try to get her to answer his question of whether or not she still loves him, she would rather repeatedly bury the intensity of his attack by silencing the car’s alarm than give him an answer she knows will be difficult for him to hear. Her concern about keeping up appearances with the neighbors proves ineffective, though, when the neighbors call the police to break up the fight between Andre and Roy. In this way, the book shows the dire consequences that can occur if one refuses to face the truth and attempts to maintain a façade.

The distance between Celestial’s true situation and the public image she projects serves as a comment on the hypocritical actions that people sometimes take to preserve their self-interests. While Celestial was able to keep her real life and the life she preferred to present separate for much of the novel, this separation breaks down when Roy is released from jail and Celestial is forced to face the double life she’s been living. If Celestial had allowed herself to integrate the two parts of her life from the beginning, she might have experienced greater success in both her marriage and her career, though this would have required a risk that she wasn’t willing to take. Because Celestial wanted to present a clean image to the world, only her career succeeded, at the cost of her marriage.