The Woman in White (The Enemy) (R’lyeh) Character Analysis

“But seriously, thanks for helping me. You hear all kinds of stuff about how rude New Yorkers are, but . . . thanks.”

“Eh, we’re only assholes to people who are assholes first,” she says, but she smiles as she says it.

“Heard they were calling in emergency personnel from the whole, what do you call it? Tri-state area? for this mess. God, I can’t wait to see which entire ethnic group they’re going to scapegoat in the wake of this one.”

“Maybe it’s a white guy. Again.”

“A ‘lone wolf’ with mental health issues, right!”

So when she’d seen this man step out of the crumbling entryway of an old building shell, with a smirk on his lips and his hand prominently resting on the handle of his gun, she’d felt like she does now, fiftyish years later in an art center bathroom. She’d felt bigger. Beyond fear or anger. She’d gone to the doorway, of course. Then she grabbed its sides to brace herself, and kicked in his knee. He’d spent three months in traction, claiming he’d slipped on a brick, and never messed with her again. Six years later, having bought her own pair of steel-toed boots, Bronca had done the same thing to a police informant at Stonewall—another time she’d been part of something bigger.

Bigger. As big as the whole goddamn borough.

That was what had made the paint-figures so creepy, really. To know that the things she was seeing weren’t just mindless, swirl-faced monsters, but things with minds and feelings? Minds as incomprehensibly alien as Lovecraft once imagined his fellow human beings to be.

“I keep thinking about how, at the park, she kept switching between ‘we’ and ‘I’ like the pronouns were interchangeable. Like she couldn’t keep the words straight, and they didn’t really matter anyway.”

“Maybe this isn’t her first language.”

That’s partly it. But Manny suspects the problem is less linguistic than contextual. She doesn’t get English because English draws a distinction between the individual self and the collective plural, and wherever she comes from, whatever she is, that difference doesn’t mean the same thing. If there’s a difference at all.

I’m his, he thinks suddenly, wildly. I want to be . . . oh, God, I want to be his. I live for him and will die for him if he requires it, and oh yes, I’ll kill for him, too, he needs that, and so for him and him alone I will be again the monster that I am—

[T]he modified brownstone has been shorn of the stoop that once connected it to the neighborhood. This amputation is a still-healing wound that makes the building even more susceptible to attack by foreign organisms.

“Nothing human beings do is set in stone—and even stone changes, anyway. We can change, too, anything about ourselves that we want to. We just have to want to.” She shrugs. “People who say change is impossible are usually pretty happy with things just as they are.”

“The Better New York Foundation—”

“Jesus, really?”

“Yes. Very well resourced, very private, and very dedicated to raising the city from its gritty image to the heights of prosperity and progress.”

Bronca actually pulls the receiver from her ear to glare at it for a moment. “I have never smelled a pile of bigger horseshit. That’s—” She shakes her head. “It’s gentrifier logic. Settler logic. They want the city without the ‘gritty’ people who make it what it is!”

“I know it I know it I know . . . made me for this, but am I not a good creation?” Gasp. Sob. Now the voice hitches. “I . . . I know. I see h-h-how hideous I am. But it isn’t my fault. The particles of this universe are perverse—” There’s a long pause this time. Bronca has almost reached the ground level when the voice chokes out, now thick with bitterness, “I am only what you made me.”

Aislyn loves her father; of course she does, but Conall is right on one level: her whole life, Aislyn has had to scrape and struggle to maintain her own emotional real estate. If she doesn’t leave this house soon, her father will snatch it all up and double the rent on anything he doesn’t want her to feel.

Conall is very, very wrong, however, about something important. He thinks that the meek, shy girl that her father has described, and whom he is currently terrorizing, is all there is to Aislyn. It isn’t.

The rest of her? Is as big as a city.

Everything that happens everywhere else happens on Staten Island, too, but here people try not to see the indecencies, the domestic violence, the drug use. And then, having denied what’s right in front of their eyes, they tell themselves that at least they’re living in a good place full of good people. At least it’s not the city.

[…]

Evil comes from elsewhere, Matthew Houlihan believes. Evil is other people. She will leave him this illusion, mostly because she envies his ability to keep finding comfort in simple, black-and-white views of the world. Aislyn’s ability to do the same is rapidly eroding.

There is an instant in which Aislyn’s mind tries to signal an alarm, doom, existential threat, all the usual fight-or-flight signals that are the job of the lizard brain. And if the gush of substance had been different somehow—something hideous, maybe—she would have started screaming.

Three things stop her. The first and most atavistic is that everything in her life has programmed her to associate evil with specific, easily definable things. Dark skin. Ugly people with scars or eyepatches or wheelchairs. Men. The Woman in White is the visual opposite of everything Aislyn has been taught to fear, and so . . . Even though intellectually Aislyn now has proof that what she’s seeing is just a guise, and the Woman in White’s true form could be anyone or anything . . .

. . . Aislyn also thinks, Well, she looks all right.

“I know an apology don’t make up for it […] I know it don’t, okay? I damn sure got called a dyke enough myself just for stepping into a ring that dude rappers thought was theirs by default. Motherfuckers tried to rape me, all because I didn’t fit into what they thought a woman should be—and I passed that shit on. I know I did. But I got better. I had some friends slap some sense into me, and I listened when they did. And I figured out that the dudes were fucked in the head, so maybe it wasn’t the best idea to imitate them.”

[Aislyn] can see [Hong’s] filthy, foreign foot planted square on the dill.

The anger comes on faster than Aislyn’s ever gotten angry in her life. It is as if Conall has broken a dam within her, and now every bit of fury she has ever suppressed over thirty years just needs the barest hair trigger to explode forth.

“Living cities aren’t defined by politics,” he says. It’s almost a shout, so urgently does he speak. “Not by city limits or county lines. They’re made of whatever the people who live in and around them believe.”

“But seriously, thanks for helping me. You hear all kinds of stuff about how rude New Yorkers are, but . . . thanks.”

“Eh, we’re only assholes to people who are assholes first,” she says, but she smiles as she says it.

“Heard they were calling in emergency personnel from the whole, what do you call it? Tri-state area? for this mess. God, I can’t wait to see which entire ethnic group they’re going to scapegoat in the wake of this one.”

“Maybe it’s a white guy. Again.”

“A ‘lone wolf’ with mental health issues, right!”

So when she’d seen this man step out of the crumbling entryway of an old building shell, with a smirk on his lips and his hand prominently resting on the handle of his gun, she’d felt like she does now, fiftyish years later in an art center bathroom. She’d felt bigger. Beyond fear or anger. She’d gone to the doorway, of course. Then she grabbed its sides to brace herself, and kicked in his knee. He’d spent three months in traction, claiming he’d slipped on a brick, and never messed with her again. Six years later, having bought her own pair of steel-toed boots, Bronca had done the same thing to a police informant at Stonewall—another time she’d been part of something bigger.

Bigger. As big as the whole goddamn borough.

That was what had made the paint-figures so creepy, really. To know that the things she was seeing weren’t just mindless, swirl-faced monsters, but things with minds and feelings? Minds as incomprehensibly alien as Lovecraft once imagined his fellow human beings to be.

“I keep thinking about how, at the park, she kept switching between ‘we’ and ‘I’ like the pronouns were interchangeable. Like she couldn’t keep the words straight, and they didn’t really matter anyway.”

“Maybe this isn’t her first language.”

That’s partly it. But Manny suspects the problem is less linguistic than contextual. She doesn’t get English because English draws a distinction between the individual self and the collective plural, and wherever she comes from, whatever she is, that difference doesn’t mean the same thing. If there’s a difference at all.

I’m his, he thinks suddenly, wildly. I want to be . . . oh, God, I want to be his. I live for him and will die for him if he requires it, and oh yes, I’ll kill for him, too, he needs that, and so for him and him alone I will be again the monster that I am—

[T]he modified brownstone has been shorn of the stoop that once connected it to the neighborhood. This amputation is a still-healing wound that makes the building even more susceptible to attack by foreign organisms.

“Nothing human beings do is set in stone—and even stone changes, anyway. We can change, too, anything about ourselves that we want to. We just have to want to.” She shrugs. “People who say change is impossible are usually pretty happy with things just as they are.”

“The Better New York Foundation—”

“Jesus, really?”

“Yes. Very well resourced, very private, and very dedicated to raising the city from its gritty image to the heights of prosperity and progress.”

Bronca actually pulls the receiver from her ear to glare at it for a moment. “I have never smelled a pile of bigger horseshit. That’s—” She shakes her head. “It’s gentrifier logic. Settler logic. They want the city without the ‘gritty’ people who make it what it is!”

“I know it I know it I know . . . made me for this, but am I not a good creation?” Gasp. Sob. Now the voice hitches. “I . . . I know. I see h-h-how hideous I am. But it isn’t my fault. The particles of this universe are perverse—” There’s a long pause this time. Bronca has almost reached the ground level when the voice chokes out, now thick with bitterness, “I am only what you made me.”

Aislyn loves her father; of course she does, but Conall is right on one level: her whole life, Aislyn has had to scrape and struggle to maintain her own emotional real estate. If she doesn’t leave this house soon, her father will snatch it all up and double the rent on anything he doesn’t want her to feel.

Conall is very, very wrong, however, about something important. He thinks that the meek, shy girl that her father has described, and whom he is currently terrorizing, is all there is to Aislyn. It isn’t.

The rest of her? Is as big as a city.

Everything that happens everywhere else happens on Staten Island, too, but here people try not to see the indecencies, the domestic violence, the drug use. And then, having denied what’s right in front of their eyes, they tell themselves that at least they’re living in a good place full of good people. At least it’s not the city.

[…]

Evil comes from elsewhere, Matthew Houlihan believes. Evil is other people. She will leave him this illusion, mostly because she envies his ability to keep finding comfort in simple, black-and-white views of the world. Aislyn’s ability to do the same is rapidly eroding.

There is an instant in which Aislyn’s mind tries to signal an alarm, doom, existential threat, all the usual fight-or-flight signals that are the job of the lizard brain. And if the gush of substance had been different somehow—something hideous, maybe—she would have started screaming.

Three things stop her. The first and most atavistic is that everything in her life has programmed her to associate evil with specific, easily definable things. Dark skin. Ugly people with scars or eyepatches or wheelchairs. Men. The Woman in White is the visual opposite of everything Aislyn has been taught to fear, and so . . . Even though intellectually Aislyn now has proof that what she’s seeing is just a guise, and the Woman in White’s true form could be anyone or anything . . .

. . . Aislyn also thinks, Well, she looks all right.

“I know an apology don’t make up for it […] I know it don’t, okay? I damn sure got called a dyke enough myself just for stepping into a ring that dude rappers thought was theirs by default. Motherfuckers tried to rape me, all because I didn’t fit into what they thought a woman should be—and I passed that shit on. I know I did. But I got better. I had some friends slap some sense into me, and I listened when they did. And I figured out that the dudes were fucked in the head, so maybe it wasn’t the best idea to imitate them.”

[Aislyn] can see [Hong’s] filthy, foreign foot planted square on the dill.

The anger comes on faster than Aislyn’s ever gotten angry in her life. It is as if Conall has broken a dam within her, and now every bit of fury she has ever suppressed over thirty years just needs the barest hair trigger to explode forth.

“Living cities aren’t defined by politics,” he says. It’s almost a shout, so urgently does he speak. “Not by city limits or county lines. They’re made of whatever the people who live in and around them believe.”