Loss, Memory, and Inheritance Theme Analysis

The Vanishing Half is a novel about loss and how people respond to it. For some of the characters, the thing they’ve lost is straightforward and obvious—Desiree, for example, loses her twin sister (and closest companion) when Stella runs away to pass as white. Both twins also lost their father when a group of racist white men murdered him. In both cases, Desiree and Stella simply tried to move on and focus on the present instead of dwelling on the past. For instance, Desiree ends up moving away from New Orleans because everywhere she goes reminds her of the year she spent in the city with Stella before Stella disappeared. Stella, for her part, cuts all ties with her previous life once she starts passing as white, and she tries to never think about how much she misses Desiree. But other characters’ losses are less tangible and more complicated to address. For example, when Stella’s daughter, Kennedy, learns that her mother is actually Black (meaning that she, too, is partially Black), she feels cut off from her own family history and lineage. Her mother has passed as a white woman and, in doing so, has given Kennedy the many privileges of being white—but Stella also prevented Kennedy from inheriting her Black culture. In contrast, Desiree’s daughter, Jude, has dark skin and knows her family’s history, but she desperately wants to know about her aunt Stella’s life, which is why she tracks her down in Los Angeles. Unlike their mothers, both Jude and Kennedy actively seek out the things they’ve lost, whether that’s a sense of cultural identity or family history. By spotlighting the different ways in which the characters respond to loss, the novel implies that loss impacts everyone differently, and that there’s no one right way to cope with it.

Through Desiree and Stella’s experiences, the novel shows that one possible coping strategy for loss is to focus on the simple fact that life goes on. Desiree and Stella become acquainted with tragedy and loss early in their lives, since they’re only little girls when a racist mob breaks into their house, drags their father outside, and tries to beat him to death before eventually shooting him in the head while he’s in the hospital. The memory of such a traumatic event obviously stays with them, but they have no choice but to keep living their lives. Their resilience in the face of their father’s murder is perhaps why they’re both capable of easing into new existences when they later lose each other. As twins, they’re used to doing everything together, so it’s undoubtedly jarring when Stella leaves Desiree behind to pass as a white woman—suddenly, they feel like they have been “cleaved in half,” as if they haven’t just lost a sister but an actual part of themselves. Stella was the one to leave, but even she feels the acute loss of her sister’s daily presence. In order to survive, though, she focuses on the present, throwing her energy into building a new life for herself as a white woman. Similarly, Desiree leaves New Orleans because it reminds her of Stella. Her decision to start over in Washington, D.C. illustrates her understanding that she can’t just let her life screech to a halt in the aftermath of Stella’s disappearance—instead, she makes a point of moving on.

Yet through Kennedy and Jude, the novel also illustrates that people can experience loss in a secondhand way, which they may cope with differently than someone who has experienced loss firsthand. Whereas their mothers face very straightforward, tangible forms of loss, the things Kennedy and Jude miss out on are a bit more abstract—and this is perhaps why both girls find it difficult to move on. For instance, Jude inherits her mother’s feelings of loss because she knows that Stella ran away and, as a result, thinks constantly about her estranged aunt. The idea of Stella looms large in Jude’s life, but she doesn’t meet her until she tracks Stella down in Los Angeles as an adult. Her fixation on finding Stella suggests that Jude has been significantly impacted by Stella’s disappearance and the effect of this loss on Desiree, showing that it’s possible for children to take on somebody else’s sense of loss.

Kennedy also experiences a vicarious kind of loss, since Stella raises her as a white person and doesn’t tell her about her roots in Mallard or in Black culture. Therefore, Kennedy doesn’t get to make a conscious decision about her own identity—she doesn’t know she’s part Black, so she’s cut off from the possibility of embracing a Black or multiracial identity. This is a complicated kind of loss, since Kennedy was previously unaware that she’d been estranged from her own Blackness. When she does find out that she’s part Black, she isn’t content to simply move on like Stella did when she first left behind her Black identity. Instead, Kennedy is hurt that her mother kept the truth from her for so long, feeling as if she has been deprived of an important aspect of her own cultural and familial inheritance.

By outlining both the direct and indirect ways that people experience loss, The Vanishing Half suggests that loss of any kind is an unavoidable part of life, and that how a person responds to it is individualized. Nothing illustrates this better than the predicament Kennedy finds herself in when she learns the truth. Although Stella’s decision to lie about her past causes Kennedy to lose out on her own Blackness, the truth brings on a different kind of loss. After all, when Kennedy finds out that she’s Black, she effectively stands to lose the identity she has already cultivated as a white woman. There is, then, no way for her to avoid some form of loss, which the novel implies is an inherent part of life. The question, then, becomes how people respond to loss—something that the novel suggests depends on the person, the nature of the loss, and the surrounding circumstances.