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Chapter 23
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Yellowface, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Critique of the Publishing Industry
Identity, Power, and Privilege
Social Media and Cancel Culture
Ambition, Success, and Notoriety
Loss, Grief, and Guilt
Revenge and Retribution
Summary
Analysis
June suffers a broken clavicle and ankle but gets discharged after a relatively brief (albeit expensive) hospital stay. By then, Candice has already gone public with a splashy article in the New York Times. June reads the article on her Uber ride home. She’s impressed by Candice’s moxie: she “retconned” herself from an editor’s assistant into an editor in her account, and even Adele Sparks-Sato couldn’t get her anti-June screeds published in the Times.
Readers watched June finessing her public persona throughout the course of the book and, through her eyes, saw how Athena did the same in the past. Candice does it too. There’s nothing particularly wrong with choosing the face one presents to the world in and of itself; the novel suggests it only becomes problematic when people start to use those public personas in ways that are antisocial or harmful. Candice has certainly painted herself successfully as a victim in a way that gives her social clout June could only dream of.
Themes
June makes it through the first two weeks of her recovery thanks to some heavy-hitting painkillers, but she has to face reality once those run out. She’s finished and utterly alone. She’s toxic in the publishing industry and she’s unwilling to tell her mother or Rory what happened. She wonders what other authors who’ve been canceled (unlike her, for legitimate reasons) do with themselves afterwards. She briefly considers suicide.
It’s interesting that June isn’t willing to tell her family what happened, and there are a few possible interpretations of this choice. One, it could be indicative of the way she’s generally kept them at arms’ length since her father died (and thus is representative of her unexamined grief). Two, it could hint at some shame over the choices she has made. In this way, online notoriety may be easier to handle, because it’s easier for June to discount anonymous detractors. Readers should also note, however, that whatever guilt she feels is small and kept firmly in place. She is unwilling to admit, for example, that her cancelling is legitimate even though her plagiarism confession is now public knowledge. She feels that consequences are for other, worse people.
Themes
Ironically, it’s the announcement that Candice has sold her memoir to Penguin for seven figures that breaks June out of her funk. Because there are two sides to every story. Candice has all the attention now, but to proving her allegations means showing the tapes. Doing so will place her there the night June got grievously injured, not to mention implicate her in a months-long campaign of stalking and psychological torment. All of this makes her vulnerable to a counterattack. And June is confident she can earn sympathy by positioning herself as the victim of cancel culture run amok.
June’s story ends where it started, with her willing to do anything to achieve (or in this case, reclaim) fame and attention for her work as a writer. She’s as desperate to wrest narrative control from Candice now as she was to have the last word on her relationship with Athena and Athena’s character as she was in Chapter 1. She hasn’t learned anything, in part, the book boldly declares, because the publishing industry rewards notoriety as well (or nearly as well) as it rewards justified fame. What’s more, along the way, sales figures and the fawning attention of White readers and conservative influencers has convinced June to jettison the interest she feigned in political correctness as the author of The Last Front and to fully lean into the social and economic privilege she has as a White person in a society rife with systemic and interpersonal racism. Readers might have learned lessons about privilege, hard work, and success, but June has not.
Themes
June starts drafting a proposal for Brett. It will be juicy enough to lure him back in even if he’s decided to drop her as a client. The first draft will take her two months, max, after which she’s confident the book will go to auction. Everyone will want to cash in on the profits to be had from the ongoing controversy. June knows the initial coverage will be suspicious. But it only takes one sympathetic review—genuine or clickbait, it doesn’t matter—to start shifting the needle. And when the dust settles, no one will know who was right and who was wrong.
June may or may not actually be a good writer. She certainly isn’t a good person. But she is very, very good at playing the publishing industry’s game. She is, after all, a creature of its making—and of the economy of attention that exists in the social media sphere. Having failed to achieve fame, she’ll willingly settle for notoriety, and she’s willing to flood the zone with however many words and however many rounds of debate are necessary to wrest control of her public persona back from Candice, online commentators, and anyone else who dares challenge her.
Themes
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