57 pages • 1 hour read
Lisa JewellWatching You: A Novel
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2018A 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
Photographs
Photographs symbolize the various, unreliable perspectives of the characters as they try to understand one another. They capture specific viewpoints and moments in time. Without their proper context, they mislead people.
Photography particularly connects the characters of Frances and Freddie as they spy on the neighborhood and each other’s families. Frances takes pictures on her phone, trying to document the gang stalking behavior that she imagines surrounds her. Her surveillance is in response to her delusion, but the pictures are no more or less reliable for that. Her picture of Rebecca is a key piece of evidence leading to Rebecca’s arrest. Freddie uses an expensive camera with powerful zoom in his quest to document and understand the people around him. When Rebecca hacks into his family’s computer, she believes the pictures, often featuring teenage girls, belong to Tom, evidence of ongoing predatory behavior.
On the other hand, Freddie’s pictures help him to appreciate the humanity of his subject and the violation of his voyeurism. He takes a picture of Romola and photoshops her head onto a naked woman. He starts to masturbate but then sees “something in the eyes of the disembodied head [...] He saw a human being looking at him. He saw a skinny girl in a new town and a new school [...] oblivious to the strange boy loitering outside” (99). Despite his distortion of the image, he perceives Romola as an independent subject potentially injured by his spying. Thereafter, his spying tapers off, and he begins to engage with other people in more mutual interactions.
Clothing Details
Bits of clothing serve as key pieces of evidence and a motif throughout the book. Characters read each other’s outfits for clues to the person beneath, and tiny details prove vital to the identification of the murderer. Freddie uses the tassel from Joey’s shoe to frame her, and Detective Pelham identifies the subject of Frances’s photograph by the way the button on Rebecca’s coat catches the light. Much like the photographs, detached garments can either mislead characters or provide sudden insight.
Part of the novel’s investigation into identity is the difficulty characters face in determining what belongs to whom. Freddie purchases Romola a skirt and then a dress. When he sees her wearing it, he comments, “You’re wearing my dress,” and Romola corrects him: “This is not your dress. It’s my dress” (264). Freddie attempts to establish a connection to Romola by claiming ownership, but she reminds him that gifts transfer ownership. Theft does not. In the final scene, Freddie discovers Viva’s hair, which his mother cut off when murdering the girl. He treats it as the same type of evidence as Joey’s tassel, which he stole in the knowledge that it would point back to Joey. He asks his father, “Whose hair is it?” and the novel ends with the implication that it belongs to Viva (324).
Melville Heights
The wealthy Bristol neighborhood of Melville Heights is a key setting in the novel and a symbol of status and fantasy. Many of the characters speak of its “iconic” Victorian houses with excitement and longing. To Joey, the “parade of houses” seems “like a row of children’s building blocks” (8). The brightly colored houses are the showy substance of her childhood fantasies. She always wanted to live there and is delighted when she and Alfie have the opportunity to move into one with Jack and Rebecca. However, the fantasy of living in Melville Heights soon turns sour for Joey. She feels like a tolerated guest, and she gradually discovers that its residents don’t have the perfect life she envisions. She fantasizes about Tom Fitzwilliam and idealizes his life, but she discovers the inside of the house is “shabby” and “dark.” The Fitzwilliams’ marriage is violent and a source of pain for all three of the residents inside.
Joey’s struggle to belong and feel comfortable in the house reflects her journey of personal growth and self-determination. She initially feels like a guest in the house, avoiding its public rooms, and keeping to the attic. Living in her brother’s high-status house reinforces her insecurities, and she feels trapped in the small, borrowed room she shares with Alfie, enhancing their marital difficulties. At the end of the novel, she and Jack live in the house together, taking care of Rebecca and his daughter. While Jack goes off to work during the day, it is “just her and Eloise in this big house that had once felt like a slightly unwelcoming hotel and now feels simply like the place where she lives with Jack and Eloise” (313). Joey no longer looks for a fantasy to fulfill her and solve all her problems. When she stops treating the house as a symbol from her childhood, she can inhabit it fully. It is “simply” a place.
Related Titles
By Lisa Jewell
