41 pages • 1 hour read
De'Shawn Charles WinslowIn West Mills
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2019A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
Secrets
In the small town of West Mills, where everyone knows everyone else on their side of the canal, it can be hard to keep a secret. Yet various characters throughout the novel work hard to keep certain information hidden from others, including both minor details and potentially life-changing revelations. Noni lies to Otis Lee about Essie, just as Knot tries to prevent Fran and Eunice from discovering that she is their mother. Others, like Pep and Valley, also occasionally keep secrets but feel that it is best not to keep them for too long. Pep sees that Otis Lee is liberated as he learns more about Essie, and Knot enjoys a more intimate relationship with her daughters after they find out that she is their mother, even before she knows that they know.
Knot is also hurt, however, by her family’s discovery that she gave birth, as they proceed to shun her. Attempts to conceal information continue through the end of the novel, as Otis Lee hides his trip to New York from Pep, decides not to tell Pratt that Fran is his daughter, and tries to hide Valley’s critical condition from Knot. Knot, by contrast, unburdens herself by sharing her last few secrets with Pratt and Pep. Taken together, these incidents reveal the burdens that almost always accompany the keeping of secrets, both to the one who hides the information and the one from whom it is hidden.
Language as a Social Marker
Throughout the novel, varying registers and speech patterns are presented as social markers. Dinah is the main proponent of what she considers to be refined and proper language, and she pressures her children and family to speak as she does, with some success: When Knot returns home, she finds herself slipping into Dinah’s speech patterns involuntarily. Knot and her father, on the other hand, prefers to speak in the colloquial language they share with those who, like Otis Lee, have not had extensive education. Otis Lee’s great-grandchild, Malcolm, later ridicules him for pronouncing his name “Mackum” (229). When Knot hears her sisters speak as adults, she is reminded of Dinah, showing that they have adopted some of her attitudes and mannerisms.
Knot’s sisters are particularly offended when they hear that she called Dinah “the B-word,” as they put it. Significantly, when Mary becomes angry at Knot for using profanity, which Mary cannot use without abandoning the elevated tone she prefers, Mary imposes a different linguistic punishment: She temporary refuses to speak with Knot. When she resumes speaking with Knot a moment later, she pauses to take a deep breath first. This demonstrates that the kind of speech Dinah prefers carries with it a set of attitudes and behaviors, including the repression of strong feelings, whereas Knot’s speech tends towards the expression of such feelings. Knot later feels the sting of such language when Eunice calls her the same thing that she called Dinah.
British Literature
Knot is an avid reader, particularly of British literature, and literary references are sprinkled throughout the text. She grows up listening to her father read Charles Dickens’s The Old Curiosity Shop, and Dickens becomes her favorite author. Valley gifts her a copy of Bleak House, another Dickens novel, and she is also familiar with Great Expectations: After Otis Lee and Knot get into an argument over the situation between Fran, Eunice, and Breezy, she calls him Mr. Jaggers, a rude, morally ambiguous lawyer from the novel. Beyond these references, there are also similarities between Dickens’s novels and In West Mills itself, as many of Dickens’s works deal with secrets and unknown parentage while showing an interest in local dialect and individuals belonging to lower classes. Knot also thinks of another author when she first hears that Fran and Eunice have both fallen for Breezy, comparing the development to the plot of a novel by Jane Austen.
