46 pages • 1 hour read
Susan CrandallWhistling Past the Graveyard
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2013A 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
Baking
Content Warning: This section mentions racist violence.
Eula loves baking, and Crandall uses baking as a multilayered symbol, representing love, safety, and family. Eula tells Starla, “[S]he loved them babies too much. She said that was the reason she changed to baking, too; too much baby love” (233). Eula gives her pies and goods the devotion she would have given to babies. Eula makes a variety of pies—from green tomato pies to pumpkin pies—and the process consumes her. Instead of dedicating herself to a baby, she projects her love onto the pies. The pies give Eula another outlet for her love. Additionally, baking symbolizes the increasingly loving relationship between Eula and Starla. They bond while baking, and Starla’s “favorite time of day” is when she and Eula can talk in the kitchen with “the timer ticking” in the background (233).
Baking also symbolizes safety because it’s a way for Eula to work without leaving the house. Cyrena brings up the idea of baking after the Jenkins boys try to assault Eula. She explains to Eula that if she works in Cyrena’s kitchen, she “won’t be exposed at all” (225). Thus, baking also represents a secure activity one does in the privacy of a home, safe from outside conflicts.
Though Eula is the baker, the process involves other people. Through baking, Eula develops a kind of family. As Starla becomes her assistant, she becomes a member of her family. Since Cyrena provides the kitchen and helps with deliveries and sales, she, too, joins the family. Later, when Eula lives with Porter and Starla, Porter lets Eula bake in the kitchen, representing his newfound membership in the family.
Nashville
Nashville is Tennessee’s biggest city, and it’s synonymous with famous country singers. When Starla arrives in Nashville, she spots the tour bus for Loretta Lynn, a renowned real-life country singer, and, trying to find her mother, she goes to the Grand Ole Opry—a legendary venue for country music artists. Since Lulu didn’t become a famous singer and she doesn’t live up to Starla’s expectations, Nashville symbolizes a fantasy.
Starla dreams of reuniting with her mother and living with her mother and father in a nice house in Nashville. For most of the book, she constructs an elaborate, flattering narrative for her mother, but when she finally meets her, reality takes over. Lulu doesn’t want Starla in her life, nor does she want to get back together with Porter. Lulu lives in a messy, tiny apartment, and she is married to a man named Earl.
Eula describes Lulu as “a disappointed and selfish woman” (388). Lulu’s fantasy collapsed, and her unrealized dreams have made her an unpleasant person. Porter takes Starla and Eula away from Nashville and back to Mississippi, where they can start a true family based on love and devotion and not wishful thinking.
Bears
The motif of bears supports the theme of the impact of race on people and communities. Starla develops relationships with Black people like Eula and Cyrena and becomes a part of Black communities. Instead of thinking of herself as white and Black people as Black, she becomes a “polar bear mixed in with regular bears” (238). For Thanksgiving, Starla returns to the idea of bears, stating, “Mrs. White insisted all five of us, polar bears and regular bears together, eat in her dining room off her good china” (492). The bear motif brings Starla comfort, helping her to more easily understand race. Starla thus reveals the fallacy of judging a person by their skin color. A polar bear is not objectively better or worse than a regular bear. They’re all bears—they’re members of the same species.
The bear motif also upends typical racial dynamics. By referring to herself—the white person—as a polar bear and Black people as “regular bears,” she makes Black the default race and turns whiteness into the “other” or the outsider. Like the theme, the motif reveals the malleability of race. Racist norms present skin color as a defining trait, but the meaning of race depends on the context and countless other variables.
