Order vs. Disruption Theme Analysis

Shaker Heights, Ohio, the real town in which Little Fires Everywhere takes place, was one of the very first planned communities in the United States. When the plans for its development were created in the early 1900s, they were laid out with a motto in mind: “Most communities just happen; the best are planned.” Planning completely rules the world of Little Fires Everywhere, since order, as Celeste Ng describes it, allows one to “avoid the unseemly, the unpleasant, and the disastrous.” Though Ng’s narration delivers this statement in a tongue-in-cheek manner, many of the characters in Little Fires Everywhere sincerely do believe it, clinging to an ideal of regulation and discipline that ultimately fails them. Over the course of the novel, Ng shows that every person, family, and community must sometimes confront disorder in life, and this fact makes the need for order a liability rather than a strength. The relationship between order and chaos, then, is one of give and take, and the characters who achieve order in every aspect of their lives are no happier than the characters whose lives are in disarray. Additionally, as the novel progresses, characters who seemed to have it all together begin to fall apart, and those who’d started out in shambles make clear progress towards plans, order, and rule-making.

Shaker Heights is a largely affluent community, and the area is governed by rules that attempt to give every aspect of “Shaker,” as the residents call it, the appearance of wealth, security, and order. Trash cans are not permitted to be left at the curb; garages must be built at the back of houses so as not to interrupt the landscape and the pristine look of each street; the grass on any Shaker Heights lawn must be mowed before it reaches six inches in height. Mrs. Richardson is the character who most embodies this micro-managerial commitment to order and regulation. She was born and raised in Shaker, she has been told all her life that there is tremendous value in following rules and sticking to the status quo, and she describes her life as following a pre-determined pattern. Her family, too, is immersed in her rules and values and subject to her attempts at total control. In addition to working to control her own children, Mrs. Richardson attempts control Pearl, Mia, Mia’s parents, her friend Elizabeth (who works at the women’s clinic), and her tenants—current and former—at the rental house she and her husband own. Mrs. Richardson takes great pleasure in controlling who gets to rent the space and how they occupy it, and she loves to check in on her tenants to ensure that they are following the rules of the building and the community. Yet as Mrs. Richardson loses her ability to control the people around her and the circumstances of her life, her children’s lives, and the lives of her friends the McCulloughs, she slips further and further into personal disarray, culminating in a massive fight with Mia—a fight during which Mia accuses Mrs. Richardson of taking out her misery over having spent her life obsessed with plans, order, and regulations on everyone around her. When Izzy runs away at the novel’s end, Mrs. Richardson experiences only the second loss of control she’s ever had—the first being Izzy’s premature birth. Mrs. Richardson finally realizes that her allegiance to order has ultimately failed both her and her children, and left all their lives in disarray. Her plan to search for Izzy “for as long as it takes” to find her, then, is both an attempt to make up for the pain she has caused and, true to her unchangeable nature, a last-ditch attempt to assert her control over an uncontrollable situation and return her life—and her family’s lives—to the normal, orderly way they once were.

Despite having grown up in an orderly community and within a strict family, the Richardson children—inadvertently or deliberately—invite disorder into their lives, embodying a blend of the order with which they grew up and the rule-breaking to which they’re drawn. Lexie, who takes after her mother, is the most orderly of the children; she plans to go to Yale and dreams of marrying her Princeton-bound boyfriend. She subverts the status quo, though, when she accidentally becomes pregnant, suggesting that even an earnest commitment to order does not keep disorder at bay. While Lexie seeks to restore order by getting an abortion, her brother Trip justifies his womanizing through heavily regulating his “bad” behavior. When he and Pearl begin sleeping together, Trip arranges their meetings on a careful schedule to avoid being caught. Though humorous, his allegiance to order—even when breaking the rules—paints order and regulation as psychological defenses, rather than meaningful bulwarks against disorder. While Lexie and Trip try to appear orderly, their sister Izzy openly invites disorder, since she finds the regulations of her family and community to be harmful and hypocritical. Her rebellion ranges from the purely symbolic (refusing to participate in the dance recital) to the outright destructive, when she sets the house on fire after discovering her family’s many slights against Mia and Pearl. This complex mingling of order and disorder is also embodied in the siblings’ daily routine of watching the Jerry Springer Show together. They are fascinated by the disruption of order and authority that they see on the show, which demonstrates that—despite (or perhaps because of) their upbringings—they are attracted to chaos.

While the Richardson children flirt with disorder, the Warren family—whose life has always been chaotic and nomadic—aspires to the orderly life of Shaker Heights. After so many years of living a transient lifestyle, Mia and Pearl—a “struggling artist” and her free-spirited daughter—adjust their behavior to fit in with the Shaker Heights norms in hopes of being accepted into the community. For Pearl, who longs to fit in somewhere, the clear rules and norms of Shaker Heights seem to offer her a roadmap to the life she wants, and through her following of the Richardsons’ “rules” and her adoption of some of their behaviors, she finds herself on what she believes is the road to earning their total acceptance. Mia is more reluctant to embed herself in the community, and into the Richardson family, but it is she who is perhaps the most devastated when her and Pearl’s life in Shaker is disrupted and the two of them are ostracized and expelled by Mrs. Richardson for not following the “rules.” After having taken two jobs in order to support her and her daughter’s lifestyle and assure that they’re seen as a part of the community, Mia is crushed to have it all brought down by Mrs. Richardson—the one person who had most symbolized, to both Mia and her daughter, the possibility of achieving control over one’s circumstances and deriving happiness from order.

Despite the fact that Mia and Pearl largely succeed, for a while at least, in integrating into the community, they maintain their eccentricities and values, which influence the values and behavior of other community members. Mia’s influence is central to Bebe Chow’s decision to fight the McCullough family for custody of her daughter. Bebe’s aggressive and impassioned disruption of the McCulloughs’ adoption process then shakes the general sense of calm in Shaker Heights, forcing the community to confront new questions about transracial adoption, what makes a parent, and whether the community is really as stable and orderly as it seems to be. The media circus that overtakes Shaker Heights at the height of Bebe’s custody battle against the state—and, by proxy, the McCulloughs—disrupts the public’s view of both parties at alternating turns. Mia also influences Izzy Richardson’s decision to burn down the Richardson family’s house. Izzy, who is inspired by Mia’s comfort with disorder and endorsement of pranks, burns down the house after taking Mia’s metaphor about starting her life over like soil after a prairie fire literally.

At the novel’s end, some characters have become casualties of the need for order and found themselves plunged into chaos, such as the McCulloughs and Mrs. Richardson; while others, such as Izzy and Bebe, have cemented their status as disruptors. Others still, such as Lexie, Pearl, and Mia, have found a way to live with the give-and-take nature of order and disruption, and have paved a path for themselves that, while not orderly by Shaker Heights standards, nonetheless makes sense for them and allows them to remain in control of their lives and circumstances.